Burrow's 462 yards and three picks leave Bengals -10 three short in OT

Cincinnati won and we still lost, which is the worst kind of ten. Joe Burrow went 38 of 48 for 462 yards with five touchdowns and three interceptions, all three to Amani Hooker, then ran in the winner from nine yards out in overtime. We flagged Tony Pollard as Tennessee's only path and he took it for 117 yards and two scores. Forty-three to 36 is a seven-point win, three shy of the number. Laying double digits on a team that cannot run was the error.

Cincinnati wins up front without needing to send anybody, and that's the game. The Bengals blitz on 16.7% of dropbacks, dead last in the league, and still own the slate's best three-game sack rate at 11.6%, with Dexter Lawrence II and Jonathan Allen working the interior against a Tennessee line that's 29th in pass-block win rate. Cam Ward sits last among qualified quarterbacks at minus 0.15 EPA per dropback on a 40.3% success rate, and the help is gone: Carnell Tate, the team's leading receiver at 413 yards, didn't practice with a shoulder, Calvin Ridley was limited and has 10 targets in six games, and Tyjae Spears didn't practice. Joe Burrow has thrown four touchdowns and no interceptions in each of his last two games and completes 71.7% of his passes, the best rate in football, into a Tennessee zone that allows 69.2% completions and has given up 24 completions of 20-plus yards. We make it Bengals -11.5; the market says -10.5. Tennessee's one real path is Tony Pollard, who ran for 129 yards and three touchdowns last week, against a Cincinnati front that has the league's best stuff rate at 27.1% and still concedes 4.7 a carry with seven runs of 20-plus. The reason we're not laying more is that Cincinnati can't run at all, with no carry longer than 15 yards all season, so there's no mechanism to bleed a lead in the fourth quarter. We took Tennessee last week and we're against them now on the matchup, not the result.