Bengals rollercoaster goes only down

When the NFL burst back into life just a few days ago we were told to expect a rollercoaster ride in free agency as teams attempted to gobble up as many new players as they could.

That may have been the case in the rest of the league. But for us Bengals fans its felt more like being stuck on a never-ending Tower of Doom, forever plumetting toward the ground with no signs of ever actually hitting it.

Have we hit rock bottom? I’m not sure and I don’t think you can be before the season proper gets going.

What I do know is we’ve lost a multiple Pro Bowl receiver and a defensive lynchpin, while gaining a cornerback whose best days are long behind him and a linebacker who we apparently wanted to draft in 2006 but didn’t - and whose career hasn’t exactly been spectacular anyhow.

Ok, I’m not going to shed too many tears over Chad Ochocinco, as much as you have to respect what he achieved in the Queen City. Earlier this year I said it was best he left, though I am slightly aggrieved he went to a team as unlikeable as the Pats.

The loss of Jonathan Joseph is an entirely different matter altogether. Alongside Leon Hall, he made up one half of the best cornerback tandem in the league and bringing him back (it was ludicrous they allowed him to become UFA in the first place) was the Bengals top priority.

But in typical fashion, they blew it and one of our key players will instead be playing in Houston with the Texans.

Joseph said the Bengals offer had been “competetive” but the move down south was a “no brainer” - a pretty glaring indictment of the situation in Cincinnati.

However, the most interesting comments on the matter came from defensive co-ordinator Mike Zimmer, who in an article hastily taken down from the team’s official website just hours after it was posted - pretty much let rip.

Zimmer said: “I'm upset, disappointed, frustrated. It's disappointing.

“You get good guys off the field, they work hard in the weight room and on the practice field and you kind of mold them what you want them to look like and they get out of here.

“I was under the assumption in the conversations I've had since before the lockout that we were going to get him back. I was pretty much told we were going to get him back.”

So as you can guess, it’s a really happy camp.

Instead of Joseph, Zimmer will get to work with Nate Clements, who was not a bad player in his day. But when has replacing a player at his peak with a veteran on his last contract ever been a route to success?

We should be excited by the return of the football season, yet the Bengals never give us any reason to do so.

Other teams are making moves, we are bringing the likes of Manny Lawson who nobody else really wants.

It doesn’t matter that we may have drafted a star receiver in AJ Green, when we’ve no-one competent to throw him the ball.

As so often before, the Bengals are trying to make do and mend and are plugging gaps of their own creation. There is no grand plan here, no system. Jonathan Joseph is the type of player you build a defense round - Zimmer said that much himself. Now he is gone.

This already feels like it’s going to be a long, depressing season.

And we won’t even have Chad around to add the comedy.

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