COB

If they tag him, he might have to play a few games then that hamstring comes along. He may have conveyed that to them in some way, shape, or form. They would do well to either sign him or trade him. Some guys, you just don’t tag.

2021 draft, our 7th round pick was Wyatt Hubert, a DE. He retired before the ‘22 season due to injuries. He just announced he’s un-retiring. I assume we still have his rights, we may still have him under his rookie deal. edit- just looked it up, he missed his whole rookie year with a torn pectoral muscle. That’s a classic PED injury. We’ll see what kind of shape he’s in after 6 months of “retirement”, aka 6 months of no testing whatsoever.

Did you hear about the boardinghouse that exploded? Roomers were flying. specifically, rumors that the falcons cut Mariota to open the starting job for none other than Lamar Jackson. Putting him in the NFC South - good. Balt getting a shitload of high picks we’ll have to deal with - bad.

They need to hurry up and sign Burrow, that’ll let them plan for free agency and the draft with clarity and certainty. Now how does one go about compensating the Swallower of Planets?

Has entered the phase of his career where he gets injured every season.

I’ve got Wagner fever.

Bobby Wagner is a free agent, wants to play for a contender. The Rams are shedding salary due to their very non Mike Brown way of assembling that SB team that beat us. Wagner is a model citizen, a leader, a tackling robot from hell. He’s an inside linebacker, would help in the physical world of the AFC North. Doubtful the Bengals see his position as a spot in need to the extent that they’d pay this dude. I’d love to see it though. Woody said you win with people. That’s what Wagner would bring. We kind of need to find the Bobby Wagner of offensive tackles, if such a player is out there.

Also, Vance Joseph hired as the Broncos DC, and I don’t pay close attention but it seems like he gets hired as someone’s DC like every year.

Or our QB likes to hang onto the ball longer than most.

Jonah basically says if I’m getting beaten, I’m getting beaten badly.

Just read an article on the Athletic ranking the linebacker units on all 42 teams for both how good they are and how stable. I was surprised to see Cincinnati ranked 9th out of 32 teams. They talked about Wilson being good, though extension not likely until after next year. They blamed Pratt’s probable departure on his desire to be a 3 down back, and said based on that the bengals are unlikely to match any offer he might get.

Ok if we’re being honest with what they’ll do, it to me looks obvious that they’ll re-sign Von Bell and Hayden Hurst, and Jessie Bates and Pratt are gone. I think that means we can stop thinking about the Notre Dame tight end.

It’s not the coaching. It’s the players. We just don’t have very good o linemen. There is plenty of evidence that our o linemen are just not good enough. All year. There is no evidence that repeated reps in pre season will transform our mid-level players into top level players. It won’t. Not to pick on him, but as an example, I watched Jonah Williams all year and it was infuriating. Dude got bull rushed right into the pocket repeatedly. Good pass rushing ends beat him all season. If putting him through Bear Bryant tough guy camp would make him better, I’d be all for it. It won’t. He’ll be fully healthy this fall so if he still has his job we’ll find out how much difference that made. I know no one here is saying all Jonah needs is to play in pre season games and he’ll suddenly be all pro. But man, seeing him at the end of the year when the tank was empty was not a pretty sight. Throw 2 or 3 more games on him and forget it.

True but I’m going for a G rating so it can be an after school special, this thing is meant for like 3rd and 4th graders, I don’t want to mess up their heads by involving sex.

As some of you know, my son is a freshman at Michigan State. He wasn't near the student union or Berkey hall where those shootings took place, luckily. Also, according to him, any school shooter better get him with the first shot, or it's on. Ok Mr. bulletproof. Anyway, since school and campus shootings have replaced baseball as our new national pastime, I'm looking for help to get an after school special made. I know most of you guys work in muffler shops or whatever, but on the off chance that one of the 7 guys in here happens to be a big Hollywood producer, here goes. Our story begins at a typical midwestern high school. The usual groups are there. The jocks laugh and don't pay attention in class. The nerds wear pocket protectors and talk about video games. The cheerleaders and mean girls alienate and body shame every girl who doesn't have the guts to have a full blown eating disorder. But our movie focuses on a group of disaffected loners. They get stuffed in lockers or cyber bullied or whatever cruel shit kids do these days. They sort of band together out of necessity. So most of the movie is them getting kicked in the nuts, getting humiliated at lunch when some neanderthal dumps their lunch on some kid's head, all that standard movie stuff. Worst of all, one of the disaffected loners getting picked on is this learning disabled kid. He can't figure shit out, so the outcast kids kind of take him on as a mascot. He hangs out with them. His struggles sort of become the focus of the movie as the audience roots for him not to get wedgie'd too hard when he walks past the wrestling room or whatever. So adolescent inhumanity is the theme of the movie. Then the end of the year arrives. The final scene begins in the lunch room. Just a regular day. Then WHAM! School shooting, baby. Ripped from today's headlines. The disaffected loners have eaten shit long enough. They show up and just start blasting. Their parents felt sorry for them, so it turns out they all decided it would be a good idea to buy their disaffected loner kids AR-15 rifles and get them involved in the "shooting sports." It's a gory mess in the lunch room as the cruel jocks get their comeuppance in the form of a bullet in the head, all the other kids have their phones out simultaneously trying to avoid getting shot and record the whole thing. So anyway this goes on for a while. It'll have to be super gory, sorry but by the time this airs, most of the kids watching this after school special will have already been through a real school shooting, so there's no fooling them. The school shooting goes on for a while. Then one of the school shooters notices the learning disabled kid off to the side. He's looking kind of forlorn. He can't take part in the school shooting because he's too disabled. Then something amazing happens. This one disaffected loner goes, here Corky, take my AR-15. The whole lunchroom sees what's happening. The learning disabled kid takes the rifle. The kids who were running for their lives (but still recording on their phones) take notice. They kind of act like they're trying to get away but they're moving real slow and making sure they are a real large and easy target for the kid. No one thinks he can do anything. But to everyone's amazement, this kid makes like a 60 yard offhand shot on the school principle who's all the way across the lunchroom. The crowd goes wild, cheering for this kid. Everyone thought he was just like this incapable societal reject, but it turns out he's an amazingly accurate school shooter. So the kid just keeps shooting. Every incredible long range shot is met with ever louder and raucous cheering. He finally gets done killing like half the cool kids and his rifle is out of ammo. The rest of the school rushes the kid in celebration. It's an incredibly heart-warming scene as this learning disabled disaffected loner is hoisted on the shoulders of his surviving schoolmates. Unfortunately the scene ends right then as the school is blown to pieces by a HIMARS from the area School Shooting HIMARS Response Center. By the time this movie gets made the government is tired of getting cops killed in those school shootings, so they've deployed a whole series of Response Centers. Every school's coordinates are programmed into a HIMARS center, and once a school shooting is confirmed, the government just blasts it with a HIMARS. Its not perfect, but the 2nd amendment is the most important thing, and everyone knows that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a HIMARS. The next day on The Today Show they start off with Savanah Guthrie going, "A very touching story out of Grim Post-Industrial Hellscape, Illinois. A learning-challenged boy surprises the whole school with his incredible skill!" Then they show all the security camera footage of this kid wasting half his school. They cut back to Savanah and she's got a tear in her eye. The End.

Who has a “tough” camp? The Ravens! They’re tough. They own the record for pre season wins. This last season their starting running back JK Dobbins, tore his ACL in the final pre season game, the game that most teams won’t play a starter in (too soft). Harbaugh’s quote afterwards- “There are other teams that don't play their guys at all. They don't play their starters for one snap. We are probably as close to that as we've... I know we're farther down that road than we've ever been. We played our guys so little this offseason. It's just been how we've done it. But anytime a guy gets hurt, you ask yourself those questions." So with even John Harbaugh bailing, where do I have to go to find someone who will be a real man and begin the process of breaking down his players’ bodies weeks before everyone else? Probably have to find someone with mirror aviators and a stupid look on his face.

I wonder how many sacks we gave up in the first couple games these last two years? JK, I see the wall of TWENTY THREE SACKS posts in here. What I don’t see is any evidence of cause and effect. I also don’t see any evidence to support the use of either the word “soft”, or “camp”. There is no camp. It’s over. The league has evolved, moved on. Yes, once upon a time players went and played themselves into shape. Coaches overdid it because it made guys “tough.” They also deprived them of water because that made them “tough” as well. Shit’s over. Guys are ready to practice now. Practice just starts. Soft? Where is the evidence that anything the Bengals do is “soft” compared to the rest of the league? Where are the stats showing how many blows to the head our tackle took versus another team’s tackle? There is no evidence. So the “soft” label comes from where? It comes from media visitors, guys who show up for a day as they tour various NFL practices. What is our team doing the day they show up? Who knows, and it doesn’t matter, because the Bengals will always be labeled “soft.” And “cheap.” Reality doesn’t matter. Paul Brown created the west coast offense. It was denigrated as somehow being soft. He loved the forward pass. That was denigrated as being soft. We were at the forefront of the hurry up offense, that was criticized as being soft. All of those Bengals innovations were met with the idea that “real men line up and play smash mouth football, Paul Brown and the Bengals are too soft and are pussies for finding another way.” Fuck that. Paul Brown was just smarter. Zac Taylor fits right in the Paul Brown mode. As the game is evolving, he’s right there driving it. Go back to the toughen ‘em up camp days? No thanks. In fact one of the very last proponents of super physical pre-season practices, John Harbaugh, recently said he’s moving away from that philosophy. It just isn’t necessary and comes with an unjustifiable cost.

It is not realistic to expect Zac to adjust his pre season practices based on who we play weeks one and two. He is extremely confident in his approach, and he has results to back it up. He’ll keep running “training camp” the way he’s been running it. I’m being a little glib with those quotation marks. There is no more training camp. Guys don’t show up and run sprints all day to get in shape. It’s obviously a year round job now, guys are ready and practice, at least official practice, just starts. Guys like Zac are stripping away the last vestiges of training camp as it existed years ago. It’s kind of ironic too, because Paul Brown really created camp as an institution in football. Now the coach of his team is ending it.

That defensive holding call on the last drive was bullshit. That exact kind of jostling occurs on about every route. I’m shocked they called that.

Bring back Up With People.

I hear you Army. I’m sticking around for Rihanna.

Pete Davidson in a mayonnaise ad. Gruesome.

That girl from Clueless is adorable.

Carlos Dunlap on the tackle!

Ok Dr. J was just in an ad. Still the coolest human on this planet.