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"I'm going to go to the playoffs, but thanks for letting me start our bye week early!" (AP Photo/Tom Uhlman)

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It's Wednesday of bye week. How exciting!

• Vote for your favorite Bengals to go to the Pro Bowl!
• ESPN Power Rankings have the Bengals at #6, 2nd best of the 5-2s behind New England and ahead of the Stealers. Here's how the panel voted. Here's James Walker's understanding of the rankings. Also, James Walker talked about Carson Palmer being awesome on Blogger Blitz. Apparently, Palmer's mechanics (with his feet) have improved this year. He's been more athletic, or something.
  
• As Chris mentioned, Chad OchoCinco has a big week ahead of him. First, he talked to Yahoo! Sports about how he's going to revolutionize sports news. He'll be all over ESPN on Thursday, and cap the night off with Letterman. Fox Sports also talked to Chad about OCNN and about what has generally caused Bengal success this year.
  
• NFL films dun' good picking the Bengals for Hard Knocks, says Joe Reedy.
• MJD of Shutdown Corner says - Carson Palmer is the MVP of Sunday. In some quasi-power ranking sort of thing on Y! Sports, Michael Silver says the Bengals are #6.
• Poor Tank Johnson. 2 days after the victory over the Bears, he somberly testified in the trial against the man accused of shooting Johnson's best friend to death.
• Football Outsiders says Carson Palmer was the best quarterback in week 7. Yep. The advance statistics football analysts say "DYAR chooses Palmer as the top player of the week, and he sits right alongside Brees, Peyton Manning, and Elvis Dumervil as an early MVP candidate. For him to accrue these totals in only 24 attempts is taggering. Sixteen of his attempts resulted in either a first down or a touchdown."
• Dennis Dillon of SportingNews.com says the Bengals are a bunch of cast-offs finding success. Is Mike Brown's career ressurection tactic paying off, or is Mike Zimmer awesome? What is going on?!
• More advance stats that I still haven't quite wrapped my head around. DVOA ratings have the Bengals moving up this week. These ratings don't look upon Cincinnati favorably due to our early season habit of last-second wins, and emphasis on yards. Still, it's interesting to see if football is going in baseball's direction of finding new stats that more strongly correlate with wins.
• More unamity in power ratings. Pete Prisco from CBS says Bengals are... 6!