Bengals - Civil War

[Nicomo Cosca]

(10-28-2021, 03:32 PM)KillerGoose Wrote: Most of this is fair, though 2015 Dalton was very good. Burrow is better this season, but not by a huge margin. Trey Hendrickson isn’t playing better than 2015 Dunlap. He finished with 55 total tackles, 16 TFL, 13.5 sacks and 34 QB hits (probably around 45-50 pressures would be my guess). Also, 2015 Reggie Nelson finished with 8 interceptions, he led the league. I wouldn’t say Bates is playing better than him, either.

That 2015 team was really, really good. I’m surprised so many believe that this team would just blow them out.

A couple of them were really tough. I wouldn’t argue too much with changing Nelson to beating this year’s version of Bates, but I just thought it was close enough overall to call a draw. Bates still has 10 games to start putting up some better numbers, too. Same with Hendrickson and Dunlap. Even if you change those 2 I’m still going with 2021 though. The team’s are close enough across the board (elite WR, great defense, etc) that I’m going with the one with the better QB. I just don’t see Burrow completely laying an egg like Dalton did so many times.

I’m not saying it isn’t close, or “forgetting” how good that 2015 squad was, I just like this year’s team slightly better. We used to hear a lot about how almost no one outside of maybe a few guys (Burfict, Marvin Jones, etc) ever stepped up in the playoffs during that era. Well, this current team is made up of a lot of players that came from teams that actually did win some postseason games (Reader, Bell, Spain, Reiff, Waynes, Awuzie, etc).