So the Bengals rolled into Indianapolis Oct. 6 and put up three touchdowns. What have we learned? That a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while? That a broken clock is right twice a day?
If we don't exult about improvement after the Bengals' offense scored three touchdowns in one game following one in the previous four, it isn't only because they still lost, 28-21. When you're talking about the Bengals, after all, progress is just another word for regress.
It's way too easy to say the Bengals just don't know what they're doing. Unfortunately, they've given us almost no evidence they do. Their handling of the quarterback situation, beginning with the selection of Akili Smith with the third overall pick in 1999, has left almost nothing to the cynical imagination.
We'd like to say the Bengals made improvement with their performance in Indianapolis. But improvement ought to write a promissory note for a better future, and if the Bengals can promise anything, it's more of this maddening indecision and an endless procession of mediocre quarterbacks because they just don't have the stomach to develop young talent at the position.
Nothing against Jon Kitna, who started at Indianapolis and has hung in there as an NFL quarterback for several years, but he is what he is, which doesn't make him a quarterback around whom to build a winning football team. He would be a good backup for a good football team, but he's not a good starter for even a bad football team.
A bad team, after all, ought to be trying to become a good team. The Bengals can't make that transition with Kitna, who doesn't light up the deep ball and is otherwise too error prone for the caretaker role that's characterized the past two Super Bowl winning quarterbacks.
The Bengals haven't drafted and developed a quarterback of any achievement since they selected Boomer Esiason from Maryland in 1984. Esiason later took over for a Hall of Fame quality quarterback, Ken Anderson, beating out another good prospect, Turk Schonert. The Bengals protected Esiason with a top-flight offensive line, they stocked the full complement of skills among their running backs and their wide receivers were among the NFL's best. They didn't expect Esiason to do it himself.
We should have known the Bengals were in big trouble when they benched Jeff Blake after a lackluster start in 1997, Esiason took them to four wins in their last five games, then they encouraged Esiason to retire and started talking about how they really just needed a quarterback. So they drafted Smith from Oregon in 1999 and figured they'd solved the problem.
A lesson is to be learned here about decision making. A decision, in and of itself, is never the right decision. A decision needs to be made right by daily renewal and commitment to that decision. Especially when the decision involves young talent, allowances need to be made for performances that are over-reaching and erratic.
The Bengals drafted Smith virtually without willingness to live with his early blunders and failures so he could grow through them. It's as if they've forever held it against him that he held out and missed his first training camp, despite the team's historic failure at signing its top picks on time. They started him in 2000, after one training camp, he struggled, and that was that.
The Bengals are a bad football team. Young quarterbacks on bad football teams will struggle, even when the team and the quarterback ultimately become good. It happened that way with Terry Bradshaw in Pittsburgh and with Bart Starr in Green Bay. Dan Marino succeeded immediately in Miami because he broke in with a good team. Likewise, Kurt Warner succeeded from the beginning in St. Louis, which had put together all the other pieces of a productive offense. The Bengals haven't done that.
Rather than develop quarterbacks, the Bengals just waste young quarterbacks as a distraction from all the organization's other failures. They destroyed David Klingler by their negligence in building an offensive line and they're destroying Smith by sitting him on the bench. The new way is more humane, but it's no more conducive to building a playoff contender.
In the main, the Bengals are delusional. After running Smith on the scout team for most of the year, they finally started him against Tampa Bay, which is an extremely demanding assignment for an inexperienced quarterback because Warren Sapp and Simeon Rice might be the best sack tandem in the NFL. Smith completed only 12 of 33 passes. Truth be told, those 21 incomplete passes were a small price to pay for coming through that pass rush with only three sacks and one interception.
If the Bengals were serious and realistic, they would have put Smith back in there against an Indianapolis defense that's been notoriously weak for years. Instead they turned to Kitna and actually gave as a reason their belief that they still have a chance to salvage this season, as poorly as they've played. They aren't fooling anyone.
Whatever has happened behind the scenes between the Bengals and Smith, we've seen no more than a half-hearted attempt to develop him. What must they be thinking to have paid him about $12 million to this point, only to give him one season after one training camp, then deep freeze him for a year and yank him out for one start against one of the league's fastest defensive fronts before dropping him back into the cooler? Meanwhile, they've wasted countless snaps on mediocre veteran quarterbacks who've already been lopped off by other struggling teams.
We don't know that Smith would have been the answer for the Bengals. That's a problem: We don't know.
We know that Smith has played poorly under circumstances in which we would expect a young quarterback to play poorly. Beyond that, we just don't know. The Bengals think they know. But we don't trust their judgment.
The Bengals' ineptitude with young quarterbacks will seriously test the loyalties of Cincinnati football fans in the next couple years, when Gino Guidugli enters the draft. Guidugli is a local high school star who has brought new profile to the University of Cincinnati. Would you want the Bengals to draft him?
If you're pulling for Guidugli, you're praying he goes elsewhere. If you're pulling for the Bengals, it doesn't matter. He can't help them because they can't help him.
Between now and the next draft, the Bengals will make all the changes we'd expect them to make. They'll change coaches, which never changes anything. They'll draft another quarterback and waste him.
Terry Bradshaw tossed out a flicker of hope on FOX's studio show Sunday afternoon, saying the Bengals were after Chicago Bears coach Dick Jauron as coach and general manager. The rumor didn't make a lot of sense, and Bengals General Manager Mike Brown denied it.
Though the rumor didn't make a lot of sense, the thought behind the rumor made all the sense in the world. Brown's operation simply doesn't know what it takes to win in the NFL, even when the league spots him all the advantages that accrue to losing teams. The Bengals need the one change they haven't made -- the change at the top. People have been saying it for years.
The high school graduating class of 2003 has never, in its school days, seen the Bengals turn out a winning season. We should hope the Bengals make the appropriate management changes so the class of 2015 doesn't sit through the same ineptitude.
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