That was the alarming part for Chicago. A defense that finished 29th in total yardage last season, even with a league-leading takeaway total to paper over it, got steadily marched on by a backup quarterback in Josh Johnson before settling in enough for Odeyingbo to force a third-down incompletion and end the bleeding. Cincinnati, for its part, held Joe Burrow and most of its usual starters out entirely, content to let the likes of Johnson and a rotating cast of camp bodies carry the game — a decision that looked smart by the time the final whistle blew.
By half it was 17-9 Bengals, and Chicago never found another gear. Evan McPherson capped it with a 58-yard field goal that pushed the margin to 27-9, and Cincinnati's fringe-roster pieces just kept making plays while Chicago's did not. With roster cutdowns bearing down, this was supposed to be a proving ground for names like Salvon Ahmed and D'Andre Swift jockeying for backfield reps behind the injured Kyle Monangai — instead the headline is a defense that got exposed and a quarterback situation that still isn't settled behind Williams, with Tyson Bagent unavailable and dealing with a hamstring issue.
Neither team was walking in on a hot streak so much as a split one — Chicago had alternated wins and losses across its last handful of outings before finally stringing this one up as a loss, while Cincinnati had done the same in the other direction. What separated them Saturday wasn't season-long form, since neither club has played a regular-season snap yet — it was which sideline's second and third string actually executed, and on that count it wasn't particularly close.
Chicago is still nursing a fairly long questionable list — Tyrique Stevenson, Xavier Woods, Nephi Sewell, Ruben Hyppolite II and Luther Burden III among them — while Cincinnati's absences were mostly by design, with Burrow, Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins all held out and only a shorter questionable list (Myles Murphy, Dax Hill, Bryan Cook) actually banged up. That gap in who was even trying to win this game is a big part of why it went the way it did.