Bengals say "to hell with trends"; make a player-for-player trade acquiring Brian Leonard

Earlier this morning I received McAfee's quarterly threat assessment. Some interesting things to note here. There is an expected resurgence of spam gearing up after rebounding from McColo (ISP) going offline in November 2008. We've seen a 20% reduction in spam in 2009, and 30% drop since the third quarter in 2008. Spam. What's for dinner. Then there's Zombie PCs, scam sites and the rise of malware distributions and attacks on content servers. Conficker took up some of the report, but mostly reiterating what most of us in the profession had already disseminated for ourselves; it's dramatically blown out of proportion. Blah. Blah. Blah. Bengals blog. Not tech blog. Right.

Still, trends are being buckled. In some cases, status quo is returning; in other cases, new trends are surfacing. Not in the world of digital warfare either. Apparently the Bengals are bucking trends too (like that segue?).

As loyal readers and friends to the blog step up the plate, words were written that hadn't been written since Trojans were classified as a people. "Bengals trade for RB". What? Oh, like a Ryan Fitzpatrick for seventh-round pick trade? The Bengals "picked up their potential backup running back in exchange for backup defensive lineman Orien Harris on Thursday." What? Straight player for player trade?

Brian Leonard.

Leonard had five career games in which recorded 10 rushes or more -- his best output was a 102-yard performance against the Arizona Cardinals in 2007. He's yet to score a touchdown.

Honestly, we hardly knew Orien Harris. The sample size was just too limited. Always seemed like a good-fill-in-the-blank type of player when depth became a problem. However now with Domata Peko, Pat Sims, Tank Johnson, Jason Shirley and lest we not forget Central State's Pernell Phillips, there just isn't room for Harris.

John Clayton wrote ten sentences on the matter; one of which was "he is considered a good character player". I guess we were lucky enough for one trend to be broken, but other trends take more time.