Sunday, December 26, 1999
Bengals went from awesome to awful
Team distinguished itself by going from near-champs to dregs in a hurry
BY JOHN ERARDI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
There have been NFL teams with worse winning percentages for a decade than the Cincinnati Bengals. However, none has plummeted quite so quickly after a championship game and — by the time this season ends — none has lost as many games in a decade.
Experts say the Bengals are stuck in time.
“It's a team that hasn't adjusted to a new era of football,” said Peter King, Sports Illustrated's respected football guru. “It's a franchise which, when players are assigned to it and can't move and don't have any leverage, will have a chance to make a good run (as it did in the 1980s).
“Today, when so much depends on how much you turn over your players and how well you keep your good players, they've not been able to keep up. It's gotten to the point that (free agents) view them (the Bengals) as a team of last resort. They don't want to go there unless nobody else wants them.”
All the Bengals have to do to achieve the dubious distinction of losing more games in one decade than any team in football history is to lose either of their final two games of the season. They play at Baltimore today and then travel to Jacksonville on Jan. 2.
The oddsmakers predict they will lose both.
The last three weeks — victories all — have brought the Bengals a bit of a respite from the national laughingstock circuit. But history will judge them over the long haul. That's a wins-and-losses standard, by which the Bengals are clearly the team of the 1990s ... if you look at the standings upside down.
By reputation, rather than record, however, the Bengals come off a bit better than that. Some NFL observers do not view the Bengals as quite as inept as, say, the New Orleans Saints and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, two other teams that have decades all to themselves.
“I was going to do a piece a few weeks ago on how bad they (the Bengals) were, but I watched them play Baltimore and I found myself rooting for them because they were playing well,” said Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman, another of SI's football gurus.
“Then I watched them play against Cleveland, and they played well again.... They mystify me to a large extent.”
Mr. King thinks he knows why the Bengals don't come off as quite as hapless as the Saints and Buccaneers.
“They (the Bengals) have almost always been able to maintain a pretty good offense,” he said. “They've got a good offensive coaching staff for the most part. And Corey Dillon was a great draft choice. When you're able to play pretty well with some consistency on one side of the ball, you're going to win some games. That's why they're 4-10. If they were truly horrible, they'd be 1-13.”
What truly sets the Bengals apart, however, is that they were 34 seconds from being on top of the football world in 1989. That was how much time was left when Joe Montana rallied the 49ers in Super Bowl XXIII to edge the Bengals.
Then, after one pretty good season (9-7 in 1990), the Bengals went straight to football hell in a hand basket — winning 43 and losing 99 — that was as delicately woven as anything carried by the Saints in the 1970s and the Bucs in the 1980s.
And those teams weren't coming off Super Bowls.
On the contrary.
Consider this:
• The Saints were 42-98-4 (.300 winning percentage) in the 1970s. They were never any good and hadn't been any good since being awarded an expansion franchise for the 1967 season. They were 3-11 their first season, 4-9-1 their second, and 5-9 in 1969 before downhill-racing their way through the 1970s.
• The Buccaneers were 45-106-1 (a .298 winning percentage) in the 1980s. They went 0-14 in their inaugural season of 1976, 2-12 in 1977, 5-11 in 1978 and 10-6 (good enough for a division title) in 1979. But it turned out to be fool's gold, as the Bucs fashioned the 1980s into their own personal dunce cap.
And, lest three weeks of Bengals' victories camouflage how bad this team has been for most of this season, consider: Six of the Bengals' losses this season have been blowouts, 17 points or more.
How bad were the Bengals in the 1990s? Let us count the ways.
They had four 3-13 seasons:
• 1991: After franchise founder Paul Brown died in August, the team lost its way. The season opener was a debacle — a 45-14 defeat at Denver — and coach Sam Wyche never got a grip on the team.
• 1993: Hard to believe, but this team got off to an even worst start than the '99 squad. With Dave Shula as head coach and David Klingler at quarterback, the team roared out of the gate — in reverse — and lost its first 10 games. The Bengals had the worst offense in their franchise history, averaging just over 10 points a game.
• 1994: Another atrocious start — eight straight losses. Jeff Blake, the third-string quarterback, rescued the franchise, leading the Bengals to its three wins.
• 1998: Every victory was a miracle — Corey Sawyer's TD in overtime on an interception in overtime in Detroit; a 25-yard fade-route TD catch by Carl Pickens that beat the Steelers with 20 seconds left at Cinergy Field, and a one-point upset of the Steelers in Pittsburgh. The Bengals' 452 points allowed last season were the most in team history.
How the Bengals got so bad so quickly since the Super Bowl in 1989 has been pretty well chronicled: Players got old, the franchise failed to respond quickly to the new world of free agency, and there was bad luck associated with the first-round draft choices.
Mr. King said could make great strides over the course of this off-season and take a much better team into Paul Brown Stadium in 2000.
“The Bengals are going into the (free-agent season) $19.16 million under the cap,” he said. “That's not the most — there are some teams in the 20s — but the Bengals are in great shape to capitalize on the future. There are 11 teams (projected to be) over the cap” who won't be able to add expensive free-agent talent.
“So the Bengals have an awful lot of money to spend. The problem is, by the time they get around to spending it, they are going to get the relative dregs of the free agents,” Mr. King said. “They aren't going to get the top guys, because they don't want to go there.”
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