Safety Marlon McCree to visit Cincinnati

...to hear names like McCree and Odom and (per Hobson's latest) TE Ben Utecht as visitors and/or possible visitors. But the whole Rogers affair has been so deflating to me as a fan, I'm just numb.

It's not really about Rogers though, is it JC? It's another chapter of the Bengals front office.. though it would have been nice to have Rogers too.

...I'd be on my usual warpath. No one loves a good Mikey-whacking more than me. But it's far from clear that the Rogers mess involved any incompetence on the part of the Bengals at all. In a column posted just a bit ago, Hobson takes a not-so-veiled shot at the league front office, saying they stepped in on an "obscure technicality" to nix the deal. That strikes me as just a little too convenient, especially when Cleveland is suddenly there holding a new deal.

I think if anyone's FO was screwing around, it was Detroit's. All the talk about the deal was coming out of Motown, from both the Detroit News, Free Press and the Lions' own spokesperson. Reminds me a lot of the usual games players and agents play with the Bengals: let out word that they are going to sign -- really, no kidding, the pen is moving closer to the paper as we speak -- with Cincy, at which point some other team ponies up a bullcrap 7th year with a billion-dollar salary and the guy is gone.

Maybe Matt Millen isn't as stupid as we all think. Rogers' trade value was pretty low thanks to all the DTs on the block, but he sucessfully used the Bengals to get the best possible deal elsewhere.