Cincinatti Bengals: An In-Depth Review By 2nd And Wrong

CINCINNATI BENGALS

By: Frank White

So to start I'd like to highlight some interesting stats from the 2008 Cincinnati team, with postseason stats omitted:

A sack for vs. 3 sacks against per game. Drive-killers.

Ryan Fitzpatrick accounting for all 44 team passing yards in a late season victory.

The last two decent teams they faced had back to back 30+ point victories.

Last in the league in points scored.

Almost last in the league in a bevy of offensive categories.

Middle of the pack on defense.

Top two rushers combined for 4 touchdowns with 3.5 and 2.6 per carry averages.

More field goals than touchdowns.

A 50% margin for 4th down conversions.

The most important 2 stats of the year really are:

0-8, as in their record in the first half of the season and

2 injuries, to Carson Palmer and Keith Rivers that would take the wind out of anyone's sails.

(Fuck you, from Benjamin)

An 0-8 start to go with extremely important injuries, especially for this team, really renders these stats meaningless. Some people only chart "competitive stats" for games because a garbage time TD a game is 16 TD's a year, but that's not what you'd like to call production. Then again, considering how early garbage time might have been in many of these games (not from margin of the lead, but from offensive incapability once Palmer went down) you might hope for some beefier meaningless stats but it would just be window dressing. During those 8 losses in extremely vague terms you can see the deterioration of the team into a frustrated mess.

The last game Carson and Keith played fully was a 26-23 overtime loss to the Giants in New York that the Giants had to come from behind to win. During the game that Rivers got gankedand the game right after, Cincinnati gaveup 38 and 35 points. I imagine at halftime Marvin Lewis made a habit of asking his players what the point was anymore, going so far as to take straw polls about whether getting out of bed and taking off the sweatpants on game days was worth it. They did show up 16 times though, which is commendable. Good job boys.

Because of this uselessness, and the presumption that the stars will be back this year, it's pretty easy to set the stage. Every team preaches that it's a new season and last year's no longer matters. It's easy to see that this is actually true for Cincinnati when predicting how they'll do. The dominos just fell badly to corner them on the field and they regressed. There are serious pieces in place for next year, but a way to start that conversation is to review their draft. The meat market had fed the team very well last year, and this year was even better.

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