Bengals Player Germaine Pratt Was Yelling, Blaming Joseph Ossai For That End Of The Game Penalty

Tough scene in Cincinnati, man. That 15 yard unnecessary roughness penalty on Joseph Ossai was a very bad penalty for him to take, no doubt. Does one bad penalty cost a team the game? No, not at all. Everything builds to that and it absolutely cannot happen but Cincy lost tonight for more than just that reason (including Germaine Pratt missing a tackle on that final drive).

It's a bad look for Pratt to be yelling like that before he gets into the locker room. You gotta know there are cameras everywhere and it'll look terrible on you. You can be rational and say hey look, this is a 6'3, 250 pound man full of adrenaline who puts his body on the line every week to win football games, of course he is going to be fired up. I'm stunned shit like this doesn't happen more. They work so hard and know the chances to make the Super Bowl are so few, it must be hard to contain your emotions after a devastating loss, especially when the penalty is something you learn not to do when you're 8 years old. You just have to hold it in though.

From the outside looking in Pratt comes off terrible here, but I give the benefit of the doubt because of the situation. I'm sure Ossai feels awful too. I can't imagine how tough it is to pull up on a play when you're running your god damn hardest and fastest to try and make a play. We see it every single week in the NFL, it's not like this flag was super rare. But again, with the Super Bowl on the line it just makes it a million times worse.

Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and the two of them will align against the real problem, Eli Apple.