The Bengals Are the Worst Team in Football

Going in to this season, the New England Patriots were considered by many to be the worst team in football. They have maybe the worst offensive line in the game.  Their coach publicly said that their rookie QB, Drake May, was better than Jacoby Brissett, but that he was playing Brissett anyway, presumably because he figured that their offensive line couldn’t protect their valuable rookie asset. In addition, aside from their running back, Rhamondre Stevenson, they have basically no offensive weapons. And while their defense was good last year, that was when they were coached by Bill Belichick, maybe the best defensive mind of all time. But after last year’s 4-13 campaign, they fired Belichick and replaced him with Jerrod Mayo, who is an unknown quantity. 

By contrast, the Bengals came in to the season with Super Bowl aspirations, having the fifth best odds in the NFL of winning the thing. Moreover, this was the first season where Joe Burrow actually had a healthy training camp. And, although their WR2, Tee Higgens, was injured and couldn’t play in today’s game, Ja’Marr Chase decided, at the last minute, to join the team, despite the fact that he was having a somewhat acrimonious contract dispute with the notoriously penny-pinching Bengals ownership. Finally, the game was taking place at Paycor Stadium. The good guys had home field advantage. 

So I was quite confident in the Bengals going in to today’s game. And I wasn’t the only one: Las Vegas favored the Bengals by 7.5 points, the highest spread of any week one matchup. And although it’s true that the Bengals have historically started slow, it’s also true that each of those years Burrow entered the season at less than 100%. 

In other words, everything was perfectly arranged for an enjoyable romp in Cincinnati. So imagine my surprise when the Bengals lost 16-10, in a score that made the game seem closer than it was. 

The Bengals’ first three drives—that is, the drives that they spend the most time studying and working through—each ended in three-and-outs. At the end of the first half, the Bengals were down 10-0. In the second half they did better, because the Bengals really are good at making second-half adjustments. But obviously, they weren’t good enough. Moreover, when they were down 16-10 with 2:45 left in the fourth quarter, they decided to punt on 4th down with 5 yards instead of going for it, despite having no timeouts left. 

Now don’t get me wrong, normally going on 4th and 5 is dumb, especially when you’re close to your own endzone, but when your run-defense has been porous all day, you don’t want to rely on your run defense to stop the Patriots from marching the ball down the field. May as well try to inspire your troops by telling them to go for it (even though the offense hadn’t been good all day either). 

The defense, of course, didn’t stop New England, and after a couple of first downs, they simply ran out the clock, because the Bengals were out of timeouts. Even though the end result is the same, being slowly strangled to death feels more frustrating than getting a shotgun blast to the trachea. Maybe I’m just a romantic. 

Rational optimism can be a double-edged sword. I had so many reasons to think that the Bengals would win, and so few to think they would lose. The fact that Burrow was healthy made me think that the Bengals’ characteristically slow starts were a thing of the past. But now, the Bengals lost, at home, to what was expected to be the worst team in football, who were playing their second-string quarterback, and with a healthy Joe Burrow. 

In the past, there were always excuses for the Bengals’ slow starts. Now there aren’t. If the Bengals not only lost to the worst team, but lost to the worst team when they had several things going for them to boot, well, doesn’t that make them the worst team? 

I mean, probably not. Yet that’s how it feels. 

The fact that the NFL season is only seventeen games makes each game incredibly important. Ironically, the games show how flimsy the off-season projections were, yet once the games happen, I’ve been finding myself involuntarily projecting out from a sample size of one to all seventeen. I’m confident that the Bengals will lose every game left and that the Patriots will win the next sixteen, which is completely insane. I try to draft iron laws of football from diaphanous spaghetti strands. 

The fact is, a lot of this is luck. If the Bengals played Patriots 100 times, the Patriots would not win 100 times. Honestly, I’d be shocked if they won more than ninety-eight. I am, however, subject to creeping determinism, the idea that, before something happens, it looks like it could go one of many ways, but that after it happens, it seems like there was no possibility other than what happened. 

Really, truly, the Bengals could have won. Most of the time, they would have won. But they didn’t win, and I’m trying to find reasons why, while avoiding the likeliest explanation, which is simply that footballs bounce weirdly.