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Ben Bergin

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The Truth About Lies

What Andy Dalton is getting paid, and what people are saying about it.

Week 11 Recap: Two-of-Three Phases

Presumably, Andy Dalton was starting the Browns defense in his fantasy league, because when his first underthrown pass to AJ Green was picked off by Joe Haden, that wasn’t enough for the misfiring Red Rifle. He fulfilled the definition of insanity by throwing exactly the same pass and this time, Haden took it to the house, putting the Browns up 13-0 before anybody even had time to order the first—and by then, much needed—round.

Week 10 Recap: The Good, the Bad, and the Hideously Ugly

Trying to weave the mostly disastrous—if occasionally glorious—monstrosity that was the Bengals-Ravens game into a cohesive narrative while still doing justice to the mind-blowing ineptitude of the offense, the jaw-dropping (dare I say bias?) inconsistency of the officiating, and the peculiarity of the games final minutes would be almost impossible. So I won’t. Instead, I’ll break it down into nice, edible, bite-size chunks.

Week 9 Recap: All Hallows’ Eve

Thursday was Hallowe’en. A Hallowe’en on which the Bengals had a football game. Despite the obvious warning signs, Peter King’s TheMMQB.com ran a piece that day on how awesome Geno Atkins is as a football player, teammate, boyfriend, and human. Despite the dangers, Bill Barnwell of Grantland.com wrote a piece about the sheer beauty of the Bengals defense and specifically it’s lynchpin, Geno Atkins. Despite the dire potential, this site’s Justin Williams did a piece for the magazine on, yep, Geno Atkins (plug, plug), which hit newsstands on, yes, Hallowe’en.

Week 8 Recap: Hardly a Battle

At halftime of the Bengals–Jets game, CBS inexplicably cut to a painting of some British troops being killed in the War of Independence/Revolutionary War. (Ok, technically ALL the troops in that war were British. It’s just that some of them were traitors. I’m just saying. Please keep reading). I still have no idea why, and frankly, I don’t care. If the biggest complaint I have about a game is the presence of some anti-English artwork during the interval, well, then that’s fine and dandy with me. Whatever was inflicted on the English during that picture can’t have been much worse than the agony currently being inflicted on England by the NFL, which has forced poor Brits in London to suffer through a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of hideously bad teams—Jaguars, Rams, Steelers, all of the worst ones.

Week 5 Recap: Regional Triumph

Of all the annoying things about the New England Patriots—their fans, Tom Brady’s insanely charmed existence, the plastic-y fake cheese that I assume their owner, Bob Kraft, invented—perhaps the most irritating is the presumptive way they include an entire geographic region as their home. As far as I can tell, nobody from Vermont has anything at all to do with this football team. People from Rhode Island are just grateful if you remember that the state exists, and Maine is too busy trying to remind people that it isn’t Canada to care about football. For all I know, it has a CFL team. Everybody from Connecticut pretends they are from New York so they can follow the Yankees and the Giants. So why not just call them the Boston (or the impossible to spell Massachussetes….Massachusettes…Mass…hell, let’s go with Boston) Patriots. Once somebody from Mass. tells you that Good Will Hunting is “literally the greatest movie evah” and then shotguns a lite beer, the first thing you always notice is the Red Sox hat and the Tom Brady obsession. So let’s stop pretending. There were, approximately, 45,000 Patriots fans around me as I watched the game on Sunday and I’m pretty certain that not one of them would spot that I forgot New Hampshire in my opening paragraph.

Week 4 Recap: Broken Promises

What the hell, Cleveland? We had a deal. WE HAD A DEAL. We got the division this year while you tanked in order to get Teddy Bridgewater in the draft. The two of us would then move forward as the AFC North’s big young guns while the Steelers and Ravens looked on in shock. We had a deal.

Week 3 Recap: DON’T TOUCH THAT QUARTERBACK!

I think I speak for Bengals fans everywhere when I say: QJLNDLNKJWN:ND:NLWNDNUIU!!#()@)@IIOHLNLKNFNNAJAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!?!?!??!??!?!

Week 2 Recap: Primetime

A moment of silence was held for the shootings in Washington D.C. before the sweet timbre of Cincinnati firefighter John Winfrey shook out a national anthem that was a gorgeous antithesis of every wobbly “8th-place finisher of American Idol 2008” version that usually accompanies these events. All in all, the opening to Monday Night Football was as emotional as a Jon Gruden-James Harrison interview.

Week 1 Recap: Numbers Game

I don’t know any Chicago Bears fans. Which is kind of weird. I’ve come across Bucs fans in New York bars, I’ve sat next to a Panthers fan in class, and frankly I can’t go five minutes without seeing a bloody Steelers supporter. A whole family of them was in front of us at Versailles, and frankly you began to see why those Frenchies were so into the guillotine.

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