Sunday, November 04, 2001
Parity looks pretty good to Bengals
.500 season could earn playoff berth
The NFL's big, fat center stretches from San Diego to Foxboro. Its middle class is bigger than Sharonville's. The league calls this “parity,” and the 4-3 Bengals are finally included. They're only a decade late. So? Around here, so is everything else.
Parity was as familiar
here as a buffet table in a Moscow bread line. It was a nice little rumor, even if no one actually believed it. Elvis lives. Parity helps Bengals.
But here they are. The Bengals are ninth in this week's New York Times computer rankings, only eight spots behind the legendary ... Chicago Bears.
“The Bears?” asked Oliver Gibson. “Based on what? I'm from Chicago. I never thought the Bears would do anything.”
The Bengals' defensive tackle is as amazed as the rest of us. He'll watch the Bears play Cleveland today. “The best game of the week,” he calls it. He can barely believe his own ears. “This is the messiest year I've ever seen,” Gibson says.
There is opportunity in the mess. The Bengals' 4-3 is as good as anyone else's 4-3. The Bengals are, in fact, as good as almost anyone else. (And, it should be noted, as bad.) It's a photo finish, halfway down the backstretch. It is exactly what the NFL wants. The league's memorial commissioner ought to be Karl Marx. To misquote JFK, “Ask not what you can do for parity. Ask what parity can do for you.”
“I'm not pleased with 4-3,” Gibson said. “We're 4-3 (and) we didn't show up for two weeks. Tony McGee and Darnay (Scott) said this is their best start. I said, "You've got to be kidding.'”
No joke. Neither is this: If they can learn to handle good fortune, the Bengals will make a playoff run.
The NFL is not an Any Given Sunday league. It's an Any Given Quarter league. Dynasties are microwaveable. They're launched every week, by whoever plays a great second half.
Who is very good? St. Louis, this week, maybe, unless you think a very good team should not blow an 18-point lead at home, or have eight turnovers, as the Rams did last Sunday.
Pittsburgh, today, possibly. “Pittsburgh has a lot of momentum,” Gibson allowed. But also Kordell Stewart.
Oakland is very good, perhaps, until Monday, when the Raiders play Denver, the best team in their division they can't beat.
What all this confusion means is: (1) Betting on NFL games is as lucrative as making paper airplanes from $20 bills and launching them from the Carew Tower and (2) the Bengals are a playoff team until they're officially not.
In August, you could go down the Bengals schedule and find two months of automatic L's. Now you look and say: “They can beat beat-up Jacksonville twice. The Titans look as embalmed as Eddie George's knees. The Bengals already stole one from the cocky Ravens and they get the Steelers at home.”
The playoffs? Why not?
“The next hurdle here is believing we can win four or five in a row,” quarterback Jon Kitna says.
Here on the backstretch, the Bengals have stability at QB, a much-improved pass rush, good-enough blocking and the sort of veteran uplift that keeps them believing.
And parity. Parity is finally here. Anything can happen, especially if anything means the Bengals playing after Week 17.
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
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DAUGHERTY: Parity looks pretty good to Bengals
