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Unfortunately for Dick LeBeau, three quarterbacks are not better than one

By Peter King

By spreading the field with three-receiver sets, the Bengals hope to keep Dillon from getting tattooed. Bill Frakes Enemy Lines An opposing team's scout sizes up the Bengals "As usual, the Bengals spent a lot of money in free agency on players way past their prime: Richmond Webb , Kevin Henry , Lorenzo Neal , Jon Kitna . Well, I'm not sure Kitna ever had a prime.... Big problem at quarterback. When your coach enters camp saying it's an open competition among three guys, that means he knows he doesn't have a quarterback. Akili Smith is too inaccurate to play in the NFL, pure and simple. Scott Mitchell has had 100 chances and blown them all. So I guess Kitna deserves it, though he turns the ball over too much.... The Bengals' hope is in the hands of one guy: Corey Dillon . He's one of the most devastating forces in the league: He'll run over you, run around you and juke you. What he's accomplished behind a patchwork line is astonishing. No back in the league could do more on Cincinnati's team.... If Darnay Scott comes back from his broken leg, he and Peter Warrick will be formidable. They both separate well, and even though Warrick dropped too many last year, he's got good hands.... I wouldn't want any of their offensive linemen to start on my team. Instead of taking Justin Smith first in the draft, they should have traded down and stolen the best tackle in the draft, Kenyatta Walker .... Takeo Spikes makes a lot of plays. He's got a Seau -like knack for being around the ball.... No pass rush. Awful cover guys at corner. Cincinnati should be 31st in the league against the pass." In the Year 2000 Record: 4-12 (fifth in AFC Central) NFL rank (rush/pass/total) Offense: 2/31/29 Defense: 24/23/22 2001 Strength of Schedule NFL Rank: 16 (tie) Opponents' 2000 winning percentage: .496 Games against playoff teams: 5

Every year they fly into Cincinnati excited to be Bengals, thinking they'll be the ones to turn around this Titanic of a franchise. After quarterback Akili Smith was drafted in 1999, he talked of leading Cincinnati to the Super Bowl in his hometown, San Diego, in 2003. There were similar Super thoughts last year from bright-eyed receiver-return man Peter Warrick. "I'm going to be part of the solution here, not part of the problem," Warrick said. "I'm going to get this thing turned around."

What inevitably follows is the crush of reality, which hits as the bottom quickly falls out. (The Bengals haven't had a winning season since 1990.) Last year that crush hit Warrick as Cincinnati fell to an 0-6 start, including shutout losses to the Jaguars, the Ravens and the Steelers. "I'd go home after games and cry," says Warrick, who lost the on-field support of fellow wideout Darnay Scott (broken leg) at the start of camp last summer. "I'd never lost in youth leagues, high school or college, and then I came here. It was just ... unbelievable."

This season? "Well," Warrick says, "we can't get no worse." Don't bet on it. The Bengals are an NFL-worst 11-37 over the past three years, and who among the players imported over the off-season can possibly keep Cincinnati out of the AFC Central basement? This season's candidate is turnover-prone former Seahawk Jon Kitna, the league's 23rd-rated quarterback in 2000. He won the starting job in a dubious three-man race in the preseason. Kitna's fanfareless signing -- to a modest four-year deal worth $7-12 million based on playing time, when no other team in the NFL was offering him even a remote shot at a starting job -- left the door slightly open for Smith and 12-year veteran Scott Mitchell. But Smith was hampered in camp by tendinitis in his throwing shoulder and finished a distant third, in part because the Bengals are intrigued with Kitna, in part because they've tired of Smith's erratic arm and in part because Mitchell at least showed some spark, leading the offense to 17 points in two quarters of Cincinnati's second preseason game, at Detroit. The Bengals do at least have the league's two best players at something: Last year Kitna led the NFL in fumbles with 17; Smith was second with 15.

The book on Kitna is that he's a gutsy leader who's well liked by everyone in the locker room. Problem is, that goes for both locker rooms. He frequently makes glaring mistakes at critical times. During Cincinnati's first intrasquad scrimmage this summer, on second-and-goal from the six, he rolled right and threw a misdirection floater to the left flat, aiming for tight end Tony McGee; the interception was easy pickings for cornerback Artrell Hawkins. "We'll have a lot more practices and a lot more sharpness in the future," Kitna vowed after the scrimmage. But against the Lions in the preseason, with no Bengal within catching distance, Kitna threw the ball right into the breadbasket of linebacker Barrett Green. Two weeks later against Buffalo, Kitna fumbled twice and was sacked three times in two quarters. Moral of the story: When Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren picked Matt Hasselbeck, Brock Huard and Trent Dilfer over Kitna this off-season, he knew what he was doing.

Even with prolific running back Corey Dillon (4,894 yards in four seasons), the offense is impotent. Last year Cincinnati broke the team record for fewest points in a season, scoring 185 in 16 games. "We proved we could run the ball as well as anyone in the league," says Ken Anderson, who was demoted from offensive coordinator to quarterbacks coach after the debacle. "But when Darnay Scott went down, we lost our speed at receiver, and we couldn't play consistently at quarterback." Actually, the quarterbacks played horrendously, completing 45.6% of their passes -- a number right out of the 1950s. There's no reason to believe that Smith will ever pay dividends on the staggering $10.8 million bonus he received for being the third pick in the '99 draft.

The Bengals made a smart move in hiring former Seahawks and Steelers assistant Bob Bratkowski as offensive coordinator. He plans to use three wideouts on at least half the plays to spread the field and prevent defenses from loading eight men near the line to stop Dillon. Bratkowski will also use different combinations of receivers from among Scott (who looked good in camp), Warrick, second-round pick Chad Johnson and second-year man Ron Dugans. Any innovations will help, considering 10 of the Bengals' 16 games are against teams that had defenses ranked among the top dozen in the NFL last year.

"In this offense," Warrick says, "the throwers have to throw and the catchers have to catch. We know what we have in Corey." Unfortunately for the Bengals, they also know what they have under center.

Issue date: September 3, 2001