The Bengals collectively talked plenty of trash before taking on the Chiefs in last week’s AFC Championship Game.
Based on their postgame reactions, Kansas City’s players were absolutely aware of it all.
Defensive end Frank Clark in particular had some strong comments immediately after his team beat Cincinnati 23-20. Clark was asked on Thursday if he thought all of the Bengals trash talk made him or his teammates play better.
“I feel like, to a certain extent, certain players did, probably. You know me, man, I kind of play the same type of way usually around this time,” Clark said in his press conference. “It’s like one of those things, you’ve just gotta know who you’re playing with. You’ve got a team that’s speaking on certain things, and they’re speaking on running the AFC or different things like that to that extent, it’s just one of those classic examples [of], you talk your trash after the game. You know what I mean? That’s kind of what we did. Kind of let them have it.
“They deserved it, though. When you beat a team three times in a row, you do it decisively, you take the game away after we were up three scores in the first half, whatever you want to call it — you have the right to say those different things. And it’s a game at the end of the day, you want to have fun with it. … It’s slowly become one of our rivals in the season. And fortunately, that’s not the team we’re talking about no more. They’ve got a whole ‘nother year to wait. They’ve got to watch us play some football now, man. So, it’s about the Chiefs and the Eagles right about now.”
As the saying goes, to the victors go the spoils. We’ll see when the Bengals and Chiefs meet during next year’s regular season how much trash each side talks before and after the matchup.