Quarterly Report Card

A month ago I made six predictions about the Bengals season. Thought I'd give a quarter of the way check to see how my predictions were coming along.

Prediction 1: The Bengals will go 5-11 this season.
After four games, the Bengals are 0-4. That puts them on a pace to go 0-16 for the season. I vastly underestimated how poorly they would play.

Analysis of My Prediction: So far I am WAY off!

Prediction 2: Chad Johnson will miss 5 games due to injury. There will be plenty of speculation that he's not really injured.
Johnson (or I guess, to be correct, I should call him "Ocho Cinco") has not missed any games, but he certainly has been a non-factor. In four games he's caught 11 passes for less than 100 yards and only one touchdown. I doubt now he'll get injured at all because he isn't really trying. I think he's playing poorly intentionally in hopes that the Bengals will get frustrated and trade him.

Analysis of My Prediction: So far I am WAY off!

Prediction 3: Chris Henry will get suspended for some off the field misdemeanor sometime about week 11 and will be given a lifetime suspension.
It's too soon to tell on this one, but Henry has rejoined the team and may play this weekend. That gives him another 7 weeks or so to get into trouble. Plenty of time!

Analysis of My Prediction: The jury is still out.

Prediction 4: Carson Palmer will have career highs in sacks and interceptions, and will miss a total of three games due to injury.
I've been right on with this one. So far Palmer has three interceptions and has been sacked 9 times. That puts him on pace for 12 interceptions and 36 sacks for the year. The 12 interceptions would be less than the 20 he had in 2007, which was a career high. Keep in mind, though, that he missed one of the four games played so far, so it makes sense that he'd be a little off pace at this point. The 36 sacks would be a record by far.

Palmer has also missed one of the four games due to injury, putting him right on pace to meet my prediction.

Analysis of My Prediction: I nailed it!

Prediction 5: The defense will be the worst ranked defense in the NFL. Some of that ranking will be unfair and really be the fault of the offense as the offense will have been on the field for such a short amount of time that the defense just found itself exhausted by the end of the game.
Currently, the Bengals are ranked 19th out of 32 teams, close to the middle of the pack. It would seem, then, that my prediction was way off, but I think the season as a whole will be like a game. When the offense is ineffective, the defense, no matter how good it is, wears down. I think the Bengals will find that as the season wears on the defense will get worse and worse.

And the second part of my prediction, that the defense would be better than its stats and would be affected by the weak offense, is certainly bearing fruit. If you look at the defensive stats, in fact, that are affected by the offense, you get a very bad opinion of the Bengals defense. Specifically, I'm talking about the number of plays the defense has per game (The Bengals are 29th out of 32), the number of yards per game (19th) and the time of possession (29th). If the offense has a whole bunch of three and outs (which the Bengals lead the NFL in by far this year) then it would be expected that your defense would suffer in these categories.

If, however, you pick three stats that have NOTHING to do with the offense, you get a different story about the Bengals. In yards per play (not game) the Bengals are 10th in the league at 4.9 yards. In penalty yards the Bengals are 17th, which isn't bad considering how much longer they're on the field than the average defense. And the Bengals lead the league in fourth down percentage: Their defense has faced an offense running a play on them on fourth down on four different occasions, and they've stopped the other team every time. No other team with that many attempts against them can make that claim.

So while my prediction about where the Bengals will fall in defensive ranking was wrong, the idea that the defense is suffering because of the offense was dead on. Still, despite that, I have to score this as follows:

Analysis of My Prediction: So far I am WAY off!

Prediction 6: This will be Marvin Lewis's last season with the Bengals. He will not be fired. He and Mike Brown will decide together that it is time for Lewis to leave, and he'll be glad as hell to get out of town.
It's too early to tell about this one, too. But I have a friend who is somehow in the know regarding the Bengals, and he says Mike Brown is going to fire Marvin Lewis before the middle of the season. We'll see.

Analysis of My Prediction: Too soon to Tell

So I only got one prediction right so far. This doesn't bother me, though, for a couple of reasons: 1) Because there is a lot of the season left, and my predictions may yet be proven true. And 2) because it doesn't really matter whether my predictions were perfectly correct. The gist of what I was saying about the Bengals is true. This is a case of where the total of the prediction exceeds the sum of its parts. Because while Palmer hasn't thrown a ton of interceptions yet, and while the defense hasn't fallen to the cellar in the stats columns yet, the main point of my previous blog entry is 100% true: The Bengals are terrible, and it's going to be a long season.