Not that I hope you’re wrong, but I can’t get behind this kind of optimism. The guys we had last year will be better, and the rookies are instant upgrades. That’s just foolishness. Every team has guys returning with more experience, and every team has hotshot rookies. That doesn’t make the Bengals special.

d-line: I like Peko, but he needs to be a LOT more consistent, especially considering the huge contract he got. Between Tank & Sims, someone needs to step up and be the huge run stopper the Bengals haven’t had since..? Geathers needs to prove the 10 sacks he had a few years ago wasn’t a fluke. Odom hasn’t shown much of anything as a Bengal, which obviously needs to change.

linebackers: Rivers coming back should help, but honestly he wasn’t exactly a major force on the defense before he got hurt. He was pretty good, but for a top 10 pick you hope we haven’t seen the tip of the iceberg yet. I have high hopes for Rey, but we don’t know anything about him until he plays in a few games. Dhani is pretty solid, but hardly among the top MLBs in the league.

corners: Hall and Joseph have been fairly good, but inconsistent. Joseph swatted away a lot of passes his rookie year, but it’d be nice to see him catch a few. He seemed to have a real knack for putting himself in the perfect position for picks, then drop them. I’d be ok with him not getting a lot of picks as long as he can consistently swat passes away. Hall also needs to be more consistent, but it’s hard to knock his effort so far considering the pass rush the Bengals haven’t had.

safeties: Ndukwe is coming along nicely, hopefully he keeps getting better. White hasn’t impressed me. Roy Williams is a misplaced linebacker, but in certain situations that’s not a bad thing.

all in all the Bengals have a young defense with lots of potential. Whether that translates into a decent unit remains to be seen. Padding their stats in meaningless games against nobody opponents in the last few weeks of the year last season doesn’t put them in the upper echelon. It’s a great counterpoint to the pathetic last few weeks of the 2005 season when they just gave games away, but lets see some real game results before we start crowing about their ranking.

but those are some pretty interesting stats as well. I really wonder why they would be worse on 3rd downs. Maybe after being on the field for 75% of the game (a stat that I just made up) they were wearing down. Who knows, maybe they just need some fresh blood.

The last 8 games of the season were pretty mixed. We gave up 19 to Jacksonville, 13 to Philly, 27 to Pit, 34 to Baltimore, 35 to Indy and then 13, 0 and 6 to the Skins, the Browns and the Chiefs respectively. We have to do better against our division rivals and we have to do better against the top tier offenses like Indy. I was proud how we handled the Skins, and the Eagles but the Browns and the Chiefs were both teams that were falling apart last year.

I am optimistic though. I think our returning players are going to mix well with the new ones and I think we’ll be able to do some things defensively that we weren’t able to do last year. We’ll especially be improved at D-End with Odom, MJ and Tank hopefully being able to put some pressure on opposing QB’s. I’d also like us to be more aggressive in mixing up blitz packages with our linebackers. We struggled against teams that had some throwing capacity (Houston and Indy being the most notable), and in order to do well against passing teams, you have to get to the QB.

A capable offense will certainly help, but it’s not a solution. Just ask the Saints.

I hated seeing Steinbach go, but the money Cleveland threw at him was ridiculous.

Keeping Levi was obviously a huge mistake… but only after the fact. At the time nobody expected him to get injured like that, and before then it was still the wrong move, but it wasn’t such an OBVIOUSLY wrong move. Steinbach would have been a better choice, but it wasn’t truly obvious at the time.

But keeping Willie wasn’t a mistake at all, it was letting him go last year that was the mistake. I mean, did you watch how utterly horrid Andrews was last year? Good riddance to him, I don’t care how screwed up our line depth is as a result. I mean, can you imagine what would have happened had Brown had the sense before last year to franchise Stacy, negotiate for about two weeks, and when they couldn’t reach a deal trade him instead? The guy signed his tender fast enough that they could probably have done it and we’d have gotten an extra first rounder (one who might have signed in a reasonable time-frame to boot) out of it if we were lucky or at least another 2nd rounder. Maybe we could have ended up with that high-rated center everybody wanted after all. Or maybe a second tackle option. Plus last year we’d have had something other than a O-line that couldn’t block a wet paper bag, at least. We might still well have failed to crack six wins, especially if Palmer still got hurt because butterfingers Perry couldn’t pick up a blitzer to save his own life much less Palmer’s arm or nose or… but at least we’d have been a tiny bit less horrid early on in the season. Who knows, maybe, just maybe, that would have let us be 1-7 going in the JAX game instead.

Oh well.