The Icy Hot Bowl might have provided the NFL with its game of the year.
In a game of veteran quarterbacks, it was the 40-year-old Joe Flacco who outdueled the 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers to lead the Bengals to a 33-31 thriller in “Thursday Night Football” in Cincinnati.
Flacco threw for a season-high 342 yards and three touchdowns to get his first win since his trade to Cincinnati from the Browns.
Rodgers, for his part, threw for 249 yards and four touchdowns with two interceptions.
Flacco was particularly good in the clutch, throwing for 163 passing yards and two scores when trailing in the game, according to Pro Football Focus. His 108.6 overall passer rating was the highest since an Oct. 6 game last season, when he had a 121.3 rating against the Jaguars.
The quarterback made clear after the game that he was thankful for his star wideouts.
“After last week’s game I was on the phone with my dad and my brothers and we were just laughing at how absurd [Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins] are,” Flacco said on the Prime Video postgame show. I think, for me, it was the simple things that you don’t even realize are super impressive. They caught some balls that a lot of guys would go to the ground for and catch it with their chest, and they were just plucking it out of midair.”
Things got wild in a fourth quarter that saw the teams combine for 27 points, and it appeared the Steelers were in prime position to win when Rodgers connected with tight end Pat Freiermuth on a 68-yard touchdown, helping Pittsburgh leapfrog into the lead by a point.
But 2:21 remained on the clock, which proved to be plenty of time for the Bengals, especially when Flacco hooked up with Higgins on a 28-yard completion that went down to the Pittsburgh 7-yard line with under two minutes left and the Steelers out of timeouts.
Higgins alertly decided to slide down to the turf and not continue on toward the end zone, allowing the Bengals to kill more time off the board.
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They did just that with three straight kneel downs before kicker Evan McPherson knocked in the go-ahead field goal with seven seconds left.
Rodgers had one more chance, completing one pass and then heaving up a Hail Mary with no time on the clock, though it was batted down in the end zone to conclude the thriller.
“This is a huge win. We needed it,” Bengals head coach Zac Taylor told reporters.
According to Next Gen Stats, the 69.8 air yards the ball traveled marked the longest pass attempt by Rodgers since 2017.
All told, the two quarterbacks combined for 591 passing yards and six touchdowns.
