Bengals

After a 2-0 start, the Bengals hit a roadblock in Week 3 against the division-rival Steelers. It was a setback, but star DT Dexter Lawrence was taking a broader perspective afterward. 

“I think it’s a reminder to show y’all that we’re not going to go undefeated,” Lawrence said via SI.com’s Jay Morrison. “No year is gonna be perfect. … Our goal wasn’t to go undefeated. So we’ll own this one. We’ll come back next week and go out there and play.”

Lawrence himself played fairly well with two sacks, but as a whole the Bengals had too many lapses to come out on top. 

“We know we can’t allow that; however it comes, however they try to do it,” Lawrence added. “We made a lot of mistakes, and that’s what kept the game close and then ultimately helped them win.

“A lot of what was going on was self-inflicted. … You watched the game. You know what happened. I don’t think it was anything special that they had going on. We just didn’t do well on our end.” 

Bengals

The Bengals made a few costly self-inflicted mistakes late in Week 3’s loss to the Steelers, preventing them from their first 3-0 start in seven years. Cincinnati QB Joe Burrow and HC Zac Taylor both feel they had plenty of chances to knock off the Steelers but ended up beating themselves.

“Like last week with the penalties, we just can’t shoot ourselves in the foot like that,” Burrow said, via ESPN’s Ben Baby. “You can’t win in this league when you do that. It’s really hard. It’s really hard. We could have overcome it, but it’s hard to win like that.”

“We just didn’t close it out,” Taylor said. “That’s all there is to it. We had opportunities in all three phases in the fourth quarter. We didn’t get it done.”

Steelers

• Steelers HC Mike McCarthy wanted the team to score 31 points on Sunday in order to overcome the Bengals in a division matchup: “I wrote down 31 in my notes going in as far as the target. And that’s the last time I’m going to say something like that because I was stupid for that to come out of my mouth. But I just knew that I felt that we needed to score points.” (Pryor)
• Steelers QB Aaron Rodgers on RB Jaylen Warren: “Jaylen’s so slippery back there. First guy rarely brings him down. He actually brings himself down more than the first guy.” (Pryor)
• Steelers LB Payton Wilson was fined $8,480 for unnecessary roughness.