Punch line

Hear about the Bengals? Yeah, they're still losing

I go back to the third game of the 1992 season. To me, that's when the Cincinnati Bengals became ... well, you know. The Bengals.

It was sunny that day in Green Bay, a delightful September afternoon at Lambeau Field. The Bengals were winning, as they sometimes did back then. In fact, they were seconds away from going 3-0 under their new head coach, Dave Shula.

But then something happened -- a sunspot, maybe, or a cosmic speck in a cornerback's eye or the mighty hand of Pete Rozelle himself intervening on that fateful day -- and a backup quarterback for the Packers threw a 35-yard touchdown pass with 13 seconds left. The Bengals, surprisingly on that day, lost. It's been all downhill ever since.

Frickin' Brett Favre.

It gets old, really old, everybody ripping the Bengals all the time. Yeah, no one's lost more over the past decade-plus than the Bengals. Yeah, they show no signs of ever getting any better. Yeah, they're big jokes, all right.

Hey, did you hear that the Bengals' quarterback couldn't get into his house last night after the game? Someone painted an end zone on his driveway!

We got a million of 'em.

The Bengals are the NFL's punch line, and everyone wants to know why. Why have the Bengals been so bad for so long? What's their problem?

The funny thing is, it's really not such a mystery. The Bengals, when you get right down to it, are the perfect example of how to lose, in any sport.

They have an owner -- in this case, Mike Brown -- who is strong willed and over-involved. They have a head coach -- Dick LeBeau -- who is overmatched. They have players who, for the most part, are either 1) not good enough, which is the franchise's fault for picking them in the first place; or 2) good enough but not playing well, which is the franchise's fault for not getting the most out of them.

They have a history of poor front-office decisions, including how they run their front office. And to be bend-over backwards fair, they have had a great deal of misfortune, too. The years and years of losing are hard to break.

When you have all that working together ... well, you have the Bengals. They are 53-125 since they last made the playoffs, in 1990, the last time they had a winning record. This team is awfully good at being awful.

What's the difference between the Bengals and a dollar bill? You can get four quarters out of a dollar bill!

Back in the early '90s, the Bengals were just figuring out how to be good at this losing thing. They had been to two Super Bowls in the '80s, as Brown was fond of pointing out. They knew what they were doing.

But as 1990 slipped into '91 and '92 and '93 and beyond, we found out the Bengals didn't know that much. They lost players to free agency. The good players who had carried them through the '80s, players like quarterback Boomer Esiason, tackle Anthony Munoz, safety David Fulcher and defensive lineman Tim Krumrie either moved on or retired. Others were hurt. Others just grew old. No one was there to replace them. No one knew how to stop the avalanche of losses.

After winning nine games in '90, this is how it has gone: 3, 5, 3, 3, 7, 8, 7, 3, 4, 4 and, last year, 6. That's wins. They started 0-8 in 1991, 0-10 in '93, 0-8 again in '94.

The Bengals would lose in the worst of ways. Interceptions. Sacks. Blown coverages. Dropped balls. Mental mistakes. Oh, my goodness, the mental mistakes.

They'd field punts on the 5-yard line. They perfected the illegal motion penalty. One time, they took back-to-back delay of game penalties. On purpose.

And then, as many are fond of pointing out, there were the front-office screwups. The Bengals' tiny scouting department leans heavily on its assistant coaches. In the early to mid '90s, they drafted as their No. 1 picks David Klingler (a Brown choice in '92 to replace Esiason), John Copeland, Dan Wilkinson and Ki-Jana Carter.

Many franchises would have made the same picks, especially with Wilkinson and Carter, both No. 1s overall. But they all flopped.

As the losing continued, it got bad off the field, too. Receiver Carl Pickens complained his way out of town, prompting the Bengals to put a "loyalty clause" in their contracts, which keeps players from publicly ripping the team. Their fine running back, Corey Dillon, once said he'd rather flip burgers than play for the Bengals.

There was the time former head coach Sam Wyche paraded around bare-chested with a towel around his waist, railing against women reporters in the locker room. There was the time Klingler felt so alienated from the team he ate his lunch in his truck.

Has anything changed? The Bengals were widely ripped for reaching for an offensive lineman, Arizona State's Levi Jones, with the No. 10 overall pick this year. Their starting quarterback is NFL castoff Gus Frerotte, who replaced castoff Jon Kitna, who came in for the immortal Scott Mitchell, who had to take over for high draft pick Akili Smith, who has been a bust.

In the opener against the San Diego Chargers, the Bengals were flagged for delay of game -- before their first offensive snap of the year.

"We don't even give ourselves a chance," one nameless veteran told the team's Web site last weekend.

Management got sacked on a 95-degree opening day, too, when it was discovered that some vendors in Paul Brown Stadium were charging $3 for a cup of tap water.

The grass, if you can call it that, at PBS is a league-wide joke.

And, of course, the Bengals are 0-2.

Ten years ago, on Sept. 20, 1992, Favre hooked up with Kittrick Taylor and sent the Bengals headlong into this pit of losing. They had just come off a 3-13 season, but with a new head coach and a 2-0 start, everything was looking good for Cincinnati. Until Don Majkowski went down and Favre flung his magic into the Green Bay sky.

A guy and a dog walk into a bar. The dog's wearing a Bengals jersey. "Hey! No pets in here," the bartender booms. "You'll have to leave." The guy begs him, "The game's been blacked out. You guys have satellite. Please let us watch! We'll be good." The bartender finally says OK. The game starts, the Bengals get the ball, they drive down the field and, lo and behold, kick a field goal. Suddenly, the dog is up on the bar giving high-fives to everyone. "That's awesome," says the barkeep. "What's he do when the Bengals score a touchdown?" Says the guy, "I dunno. I've only had him for a couple of years!"

Yeah, they're a joke, all right. Kind of sad, isn't it?

John Donovan, who covered the Bengals from 1990-95 for the Cincinnati Post, is a senior writer for CNNSI.com.

Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.

 

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