there are two colors in my head

yeah, the bengals' loss tonight was pretty disappointing. obviously there were plenty of things we could have done better and need to improve upon. but i have the sneaking suspicion that come tomorrow, people are going to start with that "oh man, its the same old bungals" crap, which is just asinine. those "same old" bengals would have never gone 4-0 in the first place. they never would have led the league in defensive takeaways. people can call it a fluke all they want, but i don't know of many "flukes" that last a quarter of the way into the season.

don't get me wrong, we have a million things to fix after tonight. the run defense has more holes that a cheese grater. are guys still don't know how to wrap up and tackle someone with the ball. we still have way too many stupid, costly penalties. but let's not forget that winning a primetime game on the road is one of the hardest things to do in football. listen to how crazy the jacksonville crowd was tonight. that's nearly impossible to overcome. and yet when we were down by two scores, palmer and chris henry hooked up on two huge plays. that drive brought us within two scores. then we got the ball back and organized another impressive drive down the field, only that this time we were a victim of bad luck. that's right, all you gloom-and-doom, fair-weather, "same old bungles" fans, in the end all it came down to was a stroke of bad luck. no horrible mistake by the bengals. no forced pass that resulted in an interception. maybe some bad blocking, but that's it.

we still have a lot of improvements to be made if we want to make the playoffs. but i'm still happy with what we've done. i'm certainly not going to let one close loss change my whole attitude on the season. yes, we should have won and we didn't. yes, it was our own mistakes that cost us the game. but for some reason so many other bengals fans are never going to be satisfied until the bengals are perfect. i'm happy with them just being successful. right now we're still first in the AFC north, and in the end that's the only thing that matters...