It's a 'Hard Knock' Life, But This Year's Bengals Can Take It

CINCINNATI -- As losses go, this one was a stinker. Flying high off yet another last-minute intra-divisional win, the Bengals showed up for a home game Sunday against the Texans and had just about everything go wrong. They lost, 28-17, most important, and they also saw key defensive lineman Antwan Odom and Domata Peko go down with injuries. Odom's is a torn Achilles' tendon, which means they've lost him for the season. Bad, bad loss.

But the message Bengals coach Marvin Lewis delivered to his team in the wake of this bad loss was the same, simple two-word mantra he delivered on the first night of the season, after a goofy last-minute bounce cost the Bengals a game against the Denver Broncos:

"Don't flinch."

"That's a word we always use," Lewis told me last week. "Don't flinch. Just keep playing. Something bad happens, don't flinch. Don't worry about it. Let's just go make something good happen."

It's been a while since much good happened for the Cincinnati Bengals. With one winning season since 1990, this is a franchise that has established itself as one that can do no right. Not only do they annually find themselves among the NFL's bottom-feeders, they've also built a reputation as something of an asylum for the league's questionable characters.

But this year's group swears it's out to change all of that.

"Back in minicamp, I think we all knew something was different about this group, something was special," quarterback Carson Palmer told me last week. "Just a different team, a different attitude. A little more professionalism, a more mature team."

Which is why, when they lost that season opener on that fluke bounce, it wasn't hard for the guys in the locker room to avoid sinking into that "Same Old Bengals" malaise.

"No, because we really felt, physically, like we won the football game," left tackle Andrew Whitworth said. "We felt like we were very physical the entire day and a fluke play there at the end lost us the game. Guys really felt like, 'Next week, we've got to go on the road, and Green Bay's got to pay for this.' That was the attitude we had going into the next game."

That hasn't always been what it means to be a Bengal. At least not to those who look at the organization from the outside and have come to associate it with loudmouths, louts and losing.

"That may be what it looks like from the outside," said running backs coach Jim Anderson, who's been on the Bengal coaching staff for 26 years and has seen only four winning seasons in that time. "But when you see it from the inside, you know what it means to be a Bengal. What we know here is that, in football, you're only inches away from being successful."

To Anderson, what it means to be a Bengal is not losing as much as striving. Sure, they've seen their share of hard times here. But what Anderson seemed to be saying is that being a Bengal means understanding that life in the NFL isn't easy and figuring out what to do once you've established that.

Which brings us to 2009, the year in which the Bengals found themselves featured in front of a worldwide audience on HBO's "Hard Knocks" reality show. Cable subscribers everywhere got a look at what it means to be a Bengal, and the players on the other end of the camera felt the impact of the number of eyes that were on them.

"I think it had an effect, sure," Whitworth said. "Maybe not anything anybody noticed, but if you look back, I think the idea that we were being watched maybe sort of got everybody's attention. I don't want to say it made everybody more serious, but I think it put everybody on their best behavior."

Which would be a major departure from what it's meant to be a Bengal in years past. But these days, when you ask what it means to be a Bengal, you have to factor in how hard the 2009 group is working to change the answer.

What does it mean to be a Bengal? It used to mean drama -- and nothing but the bad kind. Arrests, DUIs, general rowdiness and discontent. In 2006 alone, 10 different Bengals players were arrested in 11 separate incidents. And even when there weren't off-the-field issues, the Bengals made bad headlines. As recently as this past off-season, controversial receiver and attention magnet Chad Ochocinco was asking for a trade out of town.

But this year's Bengal story is about redemption. Players like Tank Johnson and Cedric Benson, who have flamed out elsewhere, have found homes (and peace) here. A receiver like Chris Henry, who flamed out here, is back, humbled and re-dedicated. Ochocinco has made peace with his team and his city. He's a big part of the reason Sunday's game wasn't blacked out in the home market, as he and team sponsor Motorola bought about 1,200 tickets in advance of the deadline and distributed them free to Bengals fans who lined up outside Paul Brown Stadium on Saturday. He still speaks (and tweets, and ustreams) his mind, but Ochocinco seems more than ever like one of the guys.

The only drama around here this year has been the good kind. Prior to Sunday, all five of the Bengals' games this season had been decided in the final minute. And the last four had been comeback wins.

"I do think what helps is the sense of 'team,'" Lewis said. "The sense that, regardless of whether it be offense, defense or special teams, whatever phase is out there at that particular time, the other groups are confident that they can make a play to put us in position to win a game. And then you don't have that tendency of trying to do too much."

What does it mean to be a Bengal? It used to mean accepting losing. The Bengals just lost, and that's the way it was. 8-8 was a good season, 7-9 about par for the course. But last January, when they finished a brutal season at 4-12, a couple of players, led by Whitworth, went into Lewis' office and asked, basically, if he'd make the off-season workout program tougher.

"As I met with the guys in their exit meetings, a lot of them wanted to make sure, in the off-season program, that we would ratchet it up and take a different approach," Lewis said. "That they would really have a program that addressed, by position, what they do -- that the lifting and the running and the conditioning be more tailored to them by position. And also that it be competitive within the groups, so that each day was more than just 'Blah, blah, blah, ho-hum."

So Lewis and his staff altered the off-season program to make it more intense, detailed and competitive. Lewis said it was something he and his strength coaches had been working on phasing in anyway -- tailoring specific practice and workout routines to the specific position groups (since receivers need different muscles than offensive linemen need, etc) and creating competition among the groups during practices. But when the players approached him about doing it, he saw a real opportunity.

"I think when the membership thinks it's happening that way and it's benefiting them, then that's a good thing," Lewis said. "Because you have everybody pulling their end of the rope."

What does it mean to be a Bengal? For much of this decade, it meant you couldn't stop anybody. Cincinnati's defense ranked 28th, 30th and 27th in the NFL in yards allowed from 2005-07 -- a sore spot for a coach like Lewis, who made his reputation by building a Super Bowl champion defense in Baltimore. For the problem, Lewis blames the Bengals' 2005 draft, in which they used their first two picks on linebackers David Pollack and Odell Thurman. Pollack suffered a career-ending neck injury in September of 2006, and Thurman's career drowned in a sea of drug suspensions and other legal problems.

"When you lose a first-round pick and a second-round pick, that's difficult," Lewis said. "You have to start from scratch again. It takes some time to recover."

But in 2009, being a Bengal means taking pride in your defense. Last season, Mike Zimmer's first as defensive coordinator, the defense jumped to 12th in the NFL. Through the first five games this year they ranked 17th and were feeling pretty good about themselves.

"When you thought about Cincinnati in the past, you always thought about Carson and Ocho -- the offense," defensive tackle Domata Peko said last week. "But now we're building a name for ourselves, too. Everyone on our defense has just been building chemistry since last year, learning Zimmer's schemes and just buying into it. You know the person next to you is going to be in their gap, doing their job. You learn to count on each other."

This was challenged quite severely Sunday, with the injuries to Peko and Odom. The Bengals made some good defensive plays to finish out the first half, but they collapsed in the second, when the team's offensive struggles kept the defense on the field for 22:06.

"That's our fault as an offense," Ochocinco said. "We need to do better. We need to keep our defense off the field. I've been saying all along, the way we've been playing the last four weeks is not going to last the entire season. At some point, we've got to put together four good quarters."

Being a Bengal in 2009 means not accepting losing. The group that lost Sunday's game had an angry, determined look about it as it dressed and left the building.

"This league is about bouncing back," defensive tackle Tank Johnson said. "We've got great leadership with our coaches and our players, and this is a time when I look forward to fighting back. Injuries are never good, but you've got to shake them off. Now I've got to know Peko's job. Now somebody's got to know Antwan's job. You take a minute and you figure it out and you keep on moving."

Really, that does kind of sum up what it means to be a Bengal. To be a Bengal, you have to be able to take a punch. The difference this year, these Bengals believe, is in what they do after they're punched. This was a downer of a day, but it was not, as losses always used to be around here, the end of the world. The Bengals are still in first place. They're still 3-0 against the AFC North. The baggage that always seemed to define this franchise feels banished into the past, and they all seem determined to keep it there.

"Guys are tired of losing around here," Peko said last week. "That's what's pushing a lot of us. I mean, we were horrible last year. Laughingstock of the league. And you never want to be that."

That's what it used to me mean to be a Bengal. This year's team is on a mission to change that.