Cincinnati Bengals Matched With Draft Fit To Fix Key Defensive Issue

CINCINNATI — The Bengals had plenty of issues on the defensive side of the ball this past season, arguably the biggest was their inability to stop the run.

Pro Football Focus writer Ryan Smith thinks they should try to fix things there through the 2026 NFL Draft by selecting Clemson defensive tackle Peter Woods with Pick 10.

Cincinnati ranked 30th in rushing EPA/play allowed last campaign and 26th in success rate allowed.

"The Bengals have some major concerns in the trenches, but particularly on defense," Smith wrote. "They were gashed all year on the ground, with opposing teams averaging nearly 150 rushing yards per game, which resulted in a 45.3 PFF run-defense grade (30th in the NFL).

"While his production dipped in 2025 (72.2 PFF overall grade), Peter Woods has the potential to be a difference-maker from day one. The standout defensive tackle out of Clemson earned PFF overall grades of 83.7 in 2024 and 87.6 in 2023, defending the run and rushing the passer at a high level from the interior."

Woods has been a popular pick for the Bengals in mock drafts, but no clear interest right from the team can be gleaned until we hit combine interviews and draft visits in the coming months.

The Mock Draft Database consensus big board has Woods ranked 14th overall and first among defensive tackles in this class. Historically, this would be a major outlier pick for the Bengals, a team that hasn't selected a first-round defensive tackle since Ohio State's Dan Wilkinson in 1994.

There should be plenty of great prospects available when director of player personnel Duke Tobin and the Bengals go on the clock in late April.

"The one thing we really need is we need those guys or somebody else to take on a leadership role and demand the accountability and demand the execution," Tobin said to the media earlier this month about the defense. "We need more leadership. We have tons of leadership on the offensive side of the ball. We need somebody, multiple people, to step up and lead that group from within our team.

"And it could come from the outside, and it could come from the inside. We can get improvement from both of those areas. We can get improvement and play from the inside, which I see happening, and we can get improvement from the outside, be it the draft or free agency or however we want to attack it."

Check out the full list from Smith here.

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