I grew up in Cincinnati and almost all of my family members are big Bengals fans. Some of my earliest memories are listening to the Bengals on the radio with my dad in his car. One would think that these would be happy memories, but they aren’t. This is because I am a Bengals fan. This is a team that has been letting down its fans for my entire life and the entire life of the franchise itself. Let’s start in the beginning.
The first season that the Bengals played was 1968, they went 3-11. Not terribly surprising because it was their first season, but it gets worse. Two years later the Bengals make it to the playoffs. Awesome, right? Wrong, they lost in the first round. They got shut out by the Baltimore Colts. Both of the following years they were at the bottom of their division. But then, guess what. They made it to the playoffs! But what did they do? They lost in the first round again. Two years later they make the playoffs again. They once again do what the Bengals do and lose in the first round. You guys get where this is going so I am going to skip forward to the point where I am alive and a Bengals fan (just to note, I am skipping two Super Bowl loses and two more playoff loses).
Okay, so. Fast forward to the year 2005. I am seven years old and the Bengals are en route to their first winning season since 1990. Quarterback Carson Palmer is having a fantastic year and the Bengals are poised to play the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Wild Card game. On the first passing play that the Bengals run, Kimo von Oelhoffen rolls over Carson Palmer’s knee, taking out his ACL and MCL and knocking him out of the game. The Bengals would go on to lose the game. Now this is not the fault of the Bengals choking or being inadequate, this is just the Bengals being the Bengals. Over the next ten years, the Bengals would go on to lose in the Wild Card round six more times. Never notching a single win in the playoffs.
That all made me sad. Now let’s talk about what makes me angry. The Bengals’ recent seasons. After the firing of Marvin Lewis and hiring of Zac Taylor, there was hope. It looked like the franchise was turning a new leaf.
WRONG
WRONG
WRONG
The Bengals are 3-19-1 in the past two years and have not instilled a whole lot of confidence. The Bengals owner and general manager, Mike Brown, refuses to pay money for good players to help the team. For example, we drafted Joe Burrow, who is supposed to be our new franchise quarterback, and we would not sign any solid offensive line players to protect him. This leads to things like this happening.
Any general manager worth having would be able to tell that this is a problem that needs fixing. We cannot have our franchise quarterback getting hit like that. And now the Bengals, with their supposed savior (Joe Burrow, although none of this is his fault) are 1-5-1 and at the bottom of their division. The air has been let out of the balloon. Until we have a new general manager, we will be bottom dwellers.
After writing that part, I noticed that I switched from saying “they” when referring to the Bengals to saying “we”. I think this was a subconscious change because sadness comes with sports, no team is going to win all the time. But, the anger that is felt by Cincinnati Bengals fans at the ineptitude of the franchise is personal.
I am now both sad and angry, but I remain a Bengals fan.