The Bengals lost long snapper Clark Harris to an injury in Sunday’s game against the Steelers and his absence loomed large in the 23-20 overtime loss.
Tight end Mitchell Wilcox stepped in for Harris and snapping issues contributed to Evan McPherson missing an extra point at the end of regulation and a field goal in overtime. Head coach Zac Taylor called those miscues “disheartening” and said they also led the Bengals to snap the ball with 13 seconds left on the play clock on a punt with just over a minute to go in overtime.
“New operation,” Taylor said. “We snapped there with 13 seconds, I understand that, trust me, we’d rather do something different. But just trying to make sure the operation ran smoothly, it turned out that we sacrificed some seconds just to make sure that we were all on the same page there.”
The Steelers were able to drive 45 yards in 56 seconds for Chris Boswell’s game-winning field goal. The Bengals can’t know if draining more time would have led to a different outcome, but it has to be hard for them to imagine that the result would have been the same with Harris on hand.