Pro Football Rumors
Duke Tobin has served as the Bengals‘ director of player personnel and de facto general manager since 2002. Despite his lengthy tenure, Tobin’s job security may be in doubt.
Per Mike Jones of The Athletic (subscription required), league insiders are questioning whether team owner Mike Brown will keep his top lieutenant in the fold. After all, the 3-7 Bengals are just two losses away from clinching a losing season and, barring a miraculous turn of events, will miss the playoffs for a third straight year.
Of course, Cincinnati’s difficulties since the club advanced to the AFC Championship Game at the end of the 2022 campaign can largely be attributed to quarterback Joe Burrow’s health concerns. The star passer played in just 10 games in 2023 and has appeared in just two contests this year, and any team that loses its QB1 for long stretches of time – especially a player of Burrow’s caliber – is going to struggle.
But Burrow played a full complement of games last year, and the Bengals still failed to qualify for the postseason (Burrow finished fourth in MVP voting and may have fared better in that regard if Cincy had cracked the playoff field). The culprit for 2024’s failures was not Burrow’s health, it was the defense, which surrendered the eighth-most yards and the eighth-most points per game.
This year, the defense has performed even more poorly. The Bengals are dead last in total defense and scoring defense, so although 40-year-old quarterback Joe Flacco has kept the offense in decent shape after Jake Browning faltered in relief of Burrow – Cincy is averaging 28.6 points per game and 385.6 yards per game during Flacco’s five games at the controls – the team has just one win since Burrow went down.
Earlier this year, Tobin conceded he tried to keep the defensive core of the roster that advanced to Super Bowl LVI intact for a bit too long, which he believed was a factor in the unit’s 2024 struggles. In order to address last season’s deficiencies, Tobin devoted three of his first four picks in the 2025 draft to the defensive side of the ball, including first-round selection Shemar Stewart and second-rounder Demetrius Knight.
Unfortunately, Stewart has appeared in only five games due to injury, and he generally has failed to impress when he has been on the field (Knight has also failed to live up to expectations in his rookie season). The team’s handling of Stewart’s and Trey Hendrickson’s contract situations have invited outside scrutiny, though Brown surely had a hand in those matters and may not hold them against Tobin.
What will work against the 55-year-old exec is his recent inability to hit on defensive players in the draft. Those shortcomings have undermined DC Al Golden’s efforts in his first year in charge of the Bengals’ defense and have made the decision to fire Lou Anarumo in favor of Golden look like a poor one.
On the other hand, some rival executives believe...
