Oh good god. It's week fucking 2. It's a new season FFS. If you expected us to go 16-0 that's your own damn fault. The Bengals as a whole do have enough talent top end to take a game from a team that is overall more talented. And to all the detractors, we are more talented than the Bengals. We probably win this game if CJ is healthy(so yes, CJ Mosley is a "difference maker"). And for those going "one player goes down, defense falls apart, unacceptable".. CJ IS THE QB OF THE DEFENSE. When Peyton Manning went down and the Colts sucked everyone understood. CJ is in charge of reading the offense, and adjusting when necessary. He's one of the best in the game when it comes to that. With Jimmy, it's pathetic and I agree, especially with the amount of talent we had. Everyone is going to give Tavon Young a hard time, but it's his second game back after a year of essentially no REAL(preseason doesn't count) playing time going against a top 5 WR in AJ Green. Notice, when we finally adjusted on the defense that matchup suddenly dissapeared. Losing Jimmy sucks but we look far and away better than we did last year without him. AJ Green is just a guy who take over a game no matter who is guarding him, he's that good. This was a loss, and one that sucks, but we have no choice but to put our heads down. Even though it was a loss, we look a HELL of a lot better than we did the past two seasons. I know that it doesn't matter for some of you, but the NFL is a marathon, not a sprint. Anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly never run distance before. There's a time and place to run faster, there's a time and place to pace yourself. It's early, pace ourselves.
The only real cause for concern right now is this oline. If the tape deems Skura is solid, then fine, I'm man enough to admit I was wrong unlike some people. That can be easily fixed. Start Brown at RT, move Hurst back to G and hope we can find a solution on the team that won't suck that we can later put at LG instead of Hurst. If this is as bad as it gets from Flacco this season, so be it. He still looked much better than last year, and he's going to have games where he does that. Problem is, we need to be able to lean on the run game far more often. He has the weapons now, and we have the talent for a running game, but this line needs to be fixed. We do that, we this division. Plain and simple