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Bengals players unnecessarily defending themselves after bandwagon comments

Two Cincinnati Bengals players offered honest responses to questions about bandwagon fans. Unfortunately, a minority took their answers too personal and are defending themselves now. Someone should answer for the inappropriate question that led to this.

By Josh Kirkendall

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Not a bandwagon fan... just a cool picture of a fan.
Not a bandwagon fan... just a cool picture of a fan.
Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports

Bengals safety George Iloka is taking heat for his comments about bandwagon fans. A day after Cincinnati's 43-17 loss to the New England Patriots, Iloka was asked about bandwagon fans:

"Let 'em jump off," said Iloka via the Cincinnati Enquirer. "I mean we start winning, they can jump back on or not. I'm not worried about the people who jump off. We don't want them as fans anyway, so we just look to the Patriots, how they came out and lost on Monday night in prime time, all their fair-weather fans jumped off the bandwagon and they're probably back on after they beat us. So we look to them and see how they came out and we hope to do the same things on Sunday and beat the Panthers."

Now he has to deal with assholes like this:

We're shocked... SHOCKED that people would take a quote completely out of context to find a way to make it personal.

Paul Dehner Jr. wrote on Thursday:

I don't understand at all. If somebody asks you if you care if people are dropping off the bandwagon after one game and essentially say they can go, I'm sure they'll be back, I don't know what you want him to say?

Again... not the point.

His comments, as was Andrew Whitworth's comments, are dead-on and honest.

The question that should be asked, what we've asked all week, is why THAT question was asked in the first place. Has anyone taken ownership? We'd go so far as to say that asking a player, less than 24 hours after a loss, a question about bandwagon fans is trolling. Now, players are defending themselves from fans who took the question WAY too personally (and completely out of context).

Andrew Whitworth actually went to twitter to clarify his remarks in an effort to smooth the waters... something that he should NOT have been forced into.

And people wonder why Whitworth is my favorite player.

Either way, someone should answer for this -- or at the very least, apologize to both players for creating an unnecessary distraction.

On to Carolina...

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