Things have been a bit slow, lately. An understatement, for sure. Well, I suppose there's only so much one can talk about when the team is lifting and conditioning. Sure, we could talk about Chad Johnson not being in camp, but what's the story there? What about Xavier's awesome win over West Virginia in the waning seconds of overtime when B.J. Raymond dropped two 3's? Reds opening day is days, not weeks or months, away from the first pitch. Days.
What about T.J. Houshmandzadeh not being in camp? I have zero problem with him not being in camp. As far as we know, he's not protesting anything. And last year, after skipping camp for the services of a personal trainer, he had the best season in his career. One of the best single seasons in franchise history. The news of him staying away from Paul Brown Stadium didn't submit his nomination for the best timing awards. It just appears worse than it really is with multiple sources grouping T.J. with Chad Johnson in their disgruntled wide receivers off-season story line.
There's another aspect to that. Houshmandzadeh is entering the final season under his four-year contract. Sports Illustrated's Bucky Brooks says the Bengals should be "concerned". And if there's an issue in T.J.'s mind, then he'll keep it private. Houshmandzadeh isn't Chad Johnson and that's a primary reason I don't think Housh is missing camp. But we'll see. It could get interesting and it could be a non-story written by off-season football writers.
We could talk about league meetings and how it appears that the league continues to make rules simply for the sake of an illusioned idea towards progression. Like the length of one's hair. Like giving Wild Card teams home games if they earned a superior record to the third and fourth seeded teams -- conference champions. Like removing five-yard face mask penalties and making them all 15-yard penalties. The sport was just fine without these additional rule proposals. I'm not sure if the league is better off with these rules, but they do seem like rules proposed to give the idea that the competition committee is needed.