How the Bengals used dirty play to tie the Redskins and stay alive in 2016

[GMDino]

This was posted in Jungle Noise but since Smack Talk has been kind of dead lately let's stir the pot a bit:

http://www.foxsports.com/nfl/story/how-the-bengals-used-dirty-play-to-tie-the-redskins-and-stay-alive-in-2016-103016

Quote:As far as NFL ties go, you could do a lot worse than the 27-all draw between the Redskins and Bengals at Wembley Stadium on Sunday morning. (And we have: It was last Sunday night's Cardinals-Seahawks 6-6 slog.) There was good offensive play, defensive tests passed, the requisite missed kicks almost invariably needed for a football game to end in a stalemate and a wild, controversial final minute that saw the Redskins recover an Andy Dalton fumble, appear to get in field-goal position (again) on the next play, only to have it called back by a tickey-tack pass interference call that resulted in the Redskins inexplicably playing for a Hail Mary that was about as unsightly as that huge ferris wheel in London. And when it was over, both teams had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to give Brits the same thing they see every Premiere League weekend. The ol' sister kisser.

Both teams played to their strengths (and weakness) -- Kirk Cousins threw the ball a lot for a ton of yards. The Redskins failed to take advantage of early domination though. The Bengals used their efficient offense to score four times in four trips to the red zone, Dalton was mistake free (until that fumble) and the dirty D leveraged its legendary unsporting play to affect officiating in a way that was beneficial to Cincinnati's cause. Allow me to lay out my case:

When it comes to on-field antics, the Bengals are the dirtiest team in football. Hands down. They're cheap, they're malicious, they have little regard for the safety of opponents. If there were Nobel Prizes in football hostility, Cincinnati would be joining Bob Dylan in Stockholm, cheekily requesting that the presenter put on a helmet to keep with the theme of the award and then having Vontaze Burfict leap out from behind the curtain to apply a helmet-to-helmet hit while Pacman Jones looks for another official to plead his case to.

(Getty Images)

But this year, with more eyes on Cincinnati than ever after last year's playoff debacle (featuring the aforementioned Misters Burfict and Jones), the dirtiness may be helping. I may be right. I may be crazy. But it just might be the football lunatics who are running the asylum. Hear me out.

1. You could pick any game the Bengals have played this year and say the same things, but since we're all about the London tie, let's look at a few things that happened during that bizarre 75 minutes of football. The following is a list of things Bengals players did at various points in the game:

Trying to rip off the helmets of runners. Late hits on the quarterback. Late hits on ballcarriers. Unnecessary hits on players without the ball. Helmet-to-helmet hits. All sorts of in-pile shenanigans. Blatant holding. Light head slapping at the start of pass routes. A barely restrained desire to go all XFL on a punt returner who'd already called fair catch. Trying to sweep the arm, reverse "Karate Kid" style. Shoving guys who were going out of bounds with the power you apply to a tackling dummy on the first day of camp. Mugging offensive players after clearly holding them. Diving on a quarterback who was kneeling in the center of the field. 

(Getty Images)

And those are just the ones I saw while I wasn't looking for any. Had I been actively searching, there surely would have been more. Some of these moves are legal. Some are not. Some are smart. (If you've already committed defensive holding, make sure that guy doesn't catch the ball.) Some are silly. (Avoiding someone who's called fair catch is just about the easiest thing to do on a football field.) But they all build to the same cause, which has a two-pronged effect:

a.) By setting a tone of "mean" football, Cincinnati makes it very difficult for officials to call their games correctly. It's like LeBron James and traveling. When you break the rule so much, the rule loses all meaning. Refs know more about football than you or I ever will. But they're also humans who know about keeping up appearances. You can't call the Bengals for everything or else it will look like you're singling out the Bengals. So, you call the big stuff. The Burfict late hits. Rolling into a quarterback at the knees. Throwing down an opponent after a play by grabbing his legs and making him look like a cartoon character who hit a patch of ice. (This is like LeBron taking five steps. You have call it sometimes.) But that leaves a lot of other penalties uncalled. There were at least a dozen examples from Sunday (and probably more than a hundred this season), but the play pictured at the top of this post, where Shawn Williams almost Poltergeisted Jamison Crowder's head with a facemark at the goal line, went uncalled.

I don't think it's a conscious decision by an official to see a penalty and not call the foul, mind you. The official in the screenshot above had about three other things to look at, too. It's just that when things become routine, you're more apt to let it go. You talk yourself out of it. "Was that a late hit? Nah, it looked like he might have still been in bounds." Serving as a sort of confirmation: Cincinnati ranks in the middle of the NFL in unnecessary roughness penalties and only has one unsportsmanlike conduct call (the latter can include celebration penalties, so it's not necessarily the best gauge). There's no way there are 10 teams that more unnecessarily rough than the Bengals. There's not even one.

(Getty Images)

b.) Anyway, all this drives opponents crazy. CRAZY. And if you're a highly combustible player prone to outbursts, then you, Josh Norman, play right into Cincinnati's hands. The All-Pro corner was flagged for five illegal hands to the face penalties on Sunday, most against A.J. Green, both because Green was burning him and because, I believe, Norman's chippiness increased as his opponent's did. But his looked more out of place on a defense more prone to fouls of the stupid, not dirty, nature. (Any by "opponent's" I mean the Bengals defense. Another beautiful part of this "plan" is that Dalton and Green are crystal clean players who become even more righteous by comparison.)

This is not a conspiracy theory. I have no dog in the fight. Frankly, I thought the Bengals-Redskins game was one of the most fun this year and that the infamous playoff game against the Steelers back in January was the most memorable wild-card game of the decade. As long as no one is getting hurt, I don't mind that Pacman is going to take advantage of a helmet-to-helmet situation that he knows is (or gets lucky because it is) legal.

The real reason this is no conspiracy: The Bengals are a team on a 16-year playoff victory drought. Though they've had recent success under Marvin Lewis and Dalton, I'm not ready to assign this diabolical scheme to any sort of planning or intentional act. They're not good enough to come up with this themselves. It's solely, but helpfully, coincidental. In other words, Cincinnati is no New England. But the Pats wouldn't need to do this. Dirty play is the last recourse of a desperate team.