Were the pre-Joe Bengals as bad as most think?

[Shake n Blake]

(02-01-2023, 12:33 AM)Nately120 Wrote: I mean, I think we lucked into Burrow because even teams that are rebuilding have a hard time going 2-14.  As underwhelming as we had been during the tail end of the Marvin era, going 2-14 was unreasonably bad for us.  We needed to match our worst season in history and we managed to do it in a year where the first pick got us Burrow, not Mayfield, or Goff, or Kyler Murray etc.  Getting Chase was another bit of luck given the odds against us being bad enough to get the 4th pick with Burrow under center, but he wasn't under center, so we got it.  I wouldn't call it regular ol' luck since it involved injury, but again...we defied the odds and got a great player for it when the odds were against us having that chance.

But as I said before, when you get lucky you need to make the most of that luck and build upon it and we have, so alls well that ends well and so on.

Oh no doubt. Luck is usually involved when it comes to getting a clear cut guy like that, but if I don't call the Colts lucky for getting Peyton and a guy literally named Luck, why would I shade my own team by boiling it all down to luck?

Also, Burrow and Chase may be like a young Tom and Randy, but even those guys wouldn't win like this without a good cast around them. The FO and staff did a good job of getting the right pieces around Joe and Chase. Injured o-line aside.

Let's just hope we take a couple more linemen in the draft. Jonah and La'el haven't proven to be very durable, and Joe was heavily neutered on what he could do in the AFCC game due to how bad the blocking was.