Bengals primed and ready for a huge win streak

[*Nately120*]

(10-27-2016, 11:46 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Hate when people start doing things like that to rationalize. Everyone has missing people.

The Patriots were missing Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski.
The Steelers were missing Le'Veon Bell and Martavis Bryant (and now Ben Roethlisberger).
The Cowboys were missing Tony Romo and Dez Bryant.
The Browns were missing their first 4 (then 5) QBs and Joe Hayden.
The Dolphins were missing Arian Foster and Mike Pouncey.

You can't just say "If they had these people healthy/available, they would have a better record!" because then every other team can say that too.

Agreed.  The Bengals are fresh off another "We woulda won if we had our starting QB" season and now we HAVE our starting QB and we are coming up with reasons we "woulda won" this year.  It's the way it goes.  If your whole team drops dead the rest of the NFL isn't going to just stop playing and put a giant asterisk by everything.

Honestly, if we're going to complain about our injuries we may as well not complain when people start saying the only reason the Bengals made the playoffs this year is because Pig Ben got hurt, etc.

(10-29-2016, 11:46 AM)Beaker Wrote: We've always gone into the playoffs with higher expectations. Maybe going in with "no hope" and the team playing with the "us against the world" under dog mentality is what allows them to "surprise" and break the streak. 

Meh, if hopelessness and no one believing in you made you play better the Browns would be an unstoppable force.  I think the winners are usually the teams that people actually tend to believe in, go figure. The Bengals have threatened to be playoff-relevant 0 times in a quarter of a century, so I'm not sure where the notion that we are failing because we are expect to succeed comes into play. This group has lost 5 in a row, so I'm not expecting us to be SB favorites unless something drastic happens in the second half of the season.