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Film Shows Why Caleb Downs Is Exactly What the Bengals Are Missing on Defense

The Bengals need to target the Ohio State star with the 10th overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft.
Max Toscano|
Dec 31, 2025; Arlington, TX, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes safety Caleb Downs (2) gets into position during the 2025 Cotton Bowl and quarterfinal game of the College Football Playoff at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images
Dec 31, 2025; Arlington, TX, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes safety Caleb Downs (2) gets into position during the 2025 Cotton Bowl and quarterfinal game of the College Football Playoff at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images | Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

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Cincinnati Bengals

The human mind knows no sensation like being hunted. Everyone reading this has a fear, something their gut screams at them to avoid at all costs. It may be spiders, public speaking, heights, or snakes.

No matter how much your fear of those may send your nervous system into overdrive, it cannot compare to the primal dread of being prey. There is something in the shadows. You have no clue where it is, where it will come from, when it will strike, and how it will feel when it all happens, but you know it's there. It's everywhere. It's behind every blade of grass, every tree, and every rock, and you know that no matter what, you will be taken. While nature's (and Hollywood's) predators are known for brutality, some of them are artists.

A mountain lion may stalk an elk for days, across mountain ranges and deep into valleys, waiting for the perfect moment. They always know the perfect position, their leaps and bounds honed to a science, and their deadly bites placed precisely around the neck.

It's all surgical, but the victim dies all the same. Bengal tigers, the actual ones, are known to sneak into villages and kill as many as hundreds of people over multiple years with a ruthless, silent inevitability that was such that, in some cases, locals became convinced of a real demonic presence. There's something about beings like those, and of course, Predator himself, that terrorize us more than loud agents of crude brutality. Just always in the right place, at the right time, no matter where you think they'll be, executing their evolutionary purpose to perfection that can only be honed by millions of years.

Now that's all pretty dramatic; football is a game, but it is how Caleb Downs plays that game, and I imagine it's how offensive coordinators, wide receivers, and ballcarriers feel about him during the week.

He's not Kam Chancellor or Brian Dawkins, for whom violence was trade. Schematically speaking, this makes guys like the Ohio State legend almost defensive stem cells. They can be injected nearly anywhere on the unit to solve whatever is troubling that area. He can fill in a multitude of roles depending on the fires they need to put out in a given week or season. That's what the best safeties do. Safety value in the eyes of general managers and the public has taken a nosedive over the past 15 years, but for the life of me, I can't understand why.

I don't need to make that case to Bengal fans. You all know what the loss of Jessie Bates did to this franchise, and how hard it has been to replace him. Bates' departure killed this unit, which began its collapse into oblivion in 2023 when he went to Atlanta. This long, waking nightmare has happened in large part because the entire spine of the defense was broken.

When the Bengals couldn't tackle to save their lives, Bates became their best tackler.

When the Bengals were vulnerable in the middle of the field, Bates closed that area.

The Bengals can't cover tight ends. Usually a safety is given that assignment. If Downs is available at No. 10 overall, this is their chance to not only fix what shattered when Bates left in free agency, but upgrade it by a significant margin.

Bates is a star, Downs is a future Hall of Famer. Whether in the box, in the post, in the slot, in coverage, or in run defense, Downs is elite at everything under the sun of the safety position, which has a bigger sun than any other position on D.

Don't just take my word for it all. Nick Saban praises Downs as much or more than he's praised any player ever. In fact, the only other guy I remember him talking about in a similar light was Minkah Fitzpatrick.

“This guy is one of the most complete people I’ve ever had the opportunity to coach. He’s a great person. He’s a great student. He’s a phenomenal football player,” Nick Saban said in 2024. “Great competitive—his competitive IQ, how he responds on the field and reacts instinctively, It’s in the top tier of all players of all time.”

In Coverage

Reminiscent of Luke Kuechly in makeup, he is the rare combination of S-tier athlete and genius-level football IQ. There are two things that will keep jumping off the screen for you when you watch Downs in coverage: His feel for route distributions, and his fluidity/efficiency to landmarks. He can hover, stop, start, flip, pedal, and drift like a helicopter, and in conjunction with his awareness, maximizes what he can take away in zone coverage. It's all on display above. He builds up enough speed that Mendoza hesitates to throw the sideline, which makes him late to the bender by the slot. In that time, Downs has flipped his hips back and followed Fernando Mendoza's eyes to the post, which he has taken the perfect angle to cut off. If range+awareness+efficiency=zone coverage, nobody's taking away more.

When Wisconsin gets into these 2x2, evenly spaced out looks, they're often trying to send 4 vertical. As a result, Downs plays his technique differently. He isn't hunting the sideline, but getting quickly to the post and working hash to hash to cap the seams.

Staying here in Cover-1, he's not limited to the post. This time he's down over the tight end in man coverage, as one of the safeties usually is. He plays his "divider" perfectly, funneling the route to the post S while trailing in the hip pocket of stud Wisconsin tight end Lance Mason. It's an effortless athletic and technical match for him.

As a quarters safety, Downs is looking to be as aggressive as possible so that he's not giving anything up underneath him. He knows that he has the speed to recover over the top, but he's not taking the kinds of risks that would necessitate it. Downs has a level of awareness that is, in every sense of the word, generational. He seems to know not just what's happening in his area of concern, but the layout of the entire route distribution, almost instantly.

Because of that, he will cheat down or even outright abandon his landmarks when he knows there won't be anything to defend there. Sometimes that is baked into coverage assignments so defenders aren't wasted, but Downs will do it even when it is not. You'll never get to punish him for it either. For the Bengals, this would be huge, as there is SO MUCH air in the middle of the field regardless of coverage. Downs would immediately cover up a lot of weakness inside and immediately ease their issues defending between the numbers.

Playing deep quarter here in Cover-6 (quarters to one side, Cover-2 to the other), Downs first sees the number 3 head underneath and knows he won't have to cap him vertically. At that point, his eyes go to number 2, and with him still under 5 yards after some time, he knows he's not heading vertically either and robs his choice route from the inside. Normally against quarters or Cover-6, this is a great way for the offense to isolate a matchup on the nickel underneath with a 2-way go. Downs can clean it up outside of structure because he's figured out where everyone is going.

Downs can also double as your Fred Warner. His robotic hips and auto-fit feel for where routes are going to run into makes him the best friend of a team with poor coverage linebackers. Because dagger concepts (vertical + dig) are such a great way to beat Tampa-2, teams will sometimes instruct the deep middle runner to drop their routes and look to cut off an in-breaker, as you see Downs do in the first clip.

He starts lower down in the second clip, but once he sees the number 3 head underneath, he's going to mirror number 2 from the inside. He never heads deep, so he just drifts right into his route and ruins the play. It's not just Tampa-2 that his 2nd-level ability has utility. It can be in Cover-3 and some Cover-2 configurations as a buzzer to the hook, and Cover-1 (and 2-"steal") as a pure robber. This kind of player is a need for teams with poor linebacker play, and if you have one, you often won't even notice that the linebackers can't squeeze the hook areas, especially the more you play quarters and 2. The Seahawks, for example, have terrible cover linebackers. It just never shows up because of how much they use their safeties to cover up the intermediate. And Downs is 10 times better than any of Seattle's safeties.

It's no surprise that Downs handles their communication. Despite being a freak athlete and precisely coordinated, Downs' superpower is his brain. He has played three years in three different systems. As a freshman, he started as a centerpiece in the notoriously complicated Saban system. As a sophomore, the vastly different 3-high world of Jim Knowles (again as the centerpiece). Then, he learned the complex Bill Belichick system under Matt Patricia. He's led these units in communication. If the defensive coordinator is a commander, Downs leads the Vanguard. This combo of physical talent and professional intangible is rare. He's the Luke Kuechly of Safeties.

Against the Run

This is where he becomes a hunter. A big complaint I've seen in draft discourse circles is that "all of Downs' highlights seem to come near the line of scrimmage." The childish stupidity of evaluating talent in such a way aside, we've already seen what he does in coverage. He's flawless. What does it tell you, with what we've established, that Downs is constantly blowing things up around the line?

He has the pop to take on and destroy blocks when necessary, consistently taking them with the proper leverage. He is a nightmare assignment for a power slot or flex tight end.

He's a value-add to the box when you want to load it. Here he is playing the backside "lever" of a classic "lever-spill-lever" gap-scheme fit. In this framework, which is used when you have 3 defenders on the 2nd level inside the box, is designed to deny the outside by engaging the pullers on their outside shoulders and force the ball all the way back inside to the free body to clean up. He reads the pullers quickly and slides into his new gap to finish off the ballcarrier.

In the modern game, however, you do not want to load the box. Unless you have an entire secondary of elite man defenders AND an elite pass rush (really only Houston and Cleveland), you will get torched for big efficiency in the pass game, and the opponent won't even need a real quarterback to do it.

In a heavy-box world, you're going to try to force the running back back inside, but in a light box world, you want to clog the more direct gaps and force them wide because more second level guys are in space and deep. Because of that, you need a safety who can come down and tackle in space. The Bengals' most crippling issue, besides the inability to tighten the middle of the field, is their tackling. It's impossibly bad and devastating to the unit. Downs does the opposite. He puts out fires instead of setting them. He hunts down and kills the ball instead of springing it for a touchdown.

The Silver Bullet

Al Golden
Cincinnati Bengals defensive coordinator Al Golden looks on from the sideline in the second quarter of the NFL Week 1 game between the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals at Huntington Bank Field in Cleveland on Sunday, Sept. 7, 2025. | Sam Greene/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The Bengals have to find a way to get Downs. There is nobody in this draft, or honestly most drafts, that would move the needle for a defense that needs *everything* up the spine on the second and third levels. He won't make the Bengals great on defense, but he get them to a competent level by himself. If the Bengals defense goes from bad to fine, they will be the best team in the NFL. It's that simple.

Downs is designed precisely for what the Bengals need. He's not just a fit for those needs; he's an all-time talent. He is perfect. He is elite at everything, cleanly projected in any system, the consummate pro, and plays a position of dire need that you won't ever have to pay in a way that matches their impact.

Downs is a predator perfectly evolved to hunt and kill offense, and the entire reality of this franchise could change in an instant if he puts on stripes come draft night.

Published
Max Toscano
MAX TOSCANO

Max Toscano breaks down football strategy. Prior to joining Bengals On SI, he interned with the coaching staff at the University of Connecticut, assisting the defensive staff in opponent scouting as well as assisting the Head Coach and GM with analytics on gameday. Max's areas of specific expertise include Quarterbacks and Tight Ends, including also hosting a publication dedicated to the tight end position. He also writes for "And The Valley Shook" on SB Nation.

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