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In Peter King's latest Monday Morning QB, a weekly feature in which he discuses the weekend's games, his thoughts on certain teams and whatever else is worth writing about, he lists his top-15 teams in the NFL, and whaddya know, the Bengals are on his list.
At No. 15. At least we're on it though, right?
King listed three of the four AFC North teams on the list, placing the Ravens in second place behind the Packers and the Steelers just three spots ahead of the Bengals at No. 12.
King credited the defense with the Bengals success and after listing the Bengals at No. 15, he had this to say:
At some point we have to stop calling this a fluke. Cincinnati's D has held foes under 300 yards in four of five games.
The Bengals defense held on to their No. 1 ranking after only giving up only 296 offensive yards in a 30-20 win over the Jaguars in Jacksonville. The Week before that they held the Bills, who had the No. 3 offense in the league to just 273 net offensive yards. They held the 4-1 San Francisco 49ers, who just defeated the Buccaneers 48-3 this weekend, to 226 net offensive yards and they held the Browns to 285 offensive yards in week one. The only team that they've given up more than 300 yards to was the Denver Broncos, who beat the Bengals in week two by a score of 24-22, and in that game the Bengals only gave up 318 yards. So far this season, the Bengals have only given up an average of 279.6 yards per game.
It would be tough to keep up that pace through an entire season, but who's to say they can't do it? If the defense, led by one of the deepest defensive lines in the league, can continue to hold offenses out of the end zone like they are now, the 2011 Bengals could be surprisingly good. The offense is just going to continue to improve.
Though I doubt many analysts are jumping on the Bengals playoff bandwagon just yet, and I'm not either, it's nice to see them get a little national attention for their achievements through the first five weeks of the season. Next week the Bengals play a very beatable Indianapolis Colts team at home and if they can go into their bye week with a 4-2 record, I wonder where they'll be on syndicated sports writers' lists then.