The Cincinnati Bengals were downright dreadful at this time two years ago.
They were the worst team in the NFL, coming off a 2-14 season with a first-year head coach and facing the franchise-shaping decision of who to take with the No. 1 overall pick in the draft.
Things worked out, well, super.
The Bengals have put those dark days far behind them. Led by coach Zac Taylor, quarterback Joe Burrow and a roster of promising young talent mixed with savvy veterans, the franchise — not-so-affectionately called the “Bungles” for decades — is playing in the Super Bowl for the first time in 33 years.
“I think if you would’ve told me coming into the league, when I got drafted, that we would be here this year, it would be a shock,” said Burrow, the top pick in 2020. “Now, I’m not surprised.”
Even if some outside the organization still are.
“We believed from the get-go,” Taylor said after the Bengals’ 27-24 overtime win at Kansas City in the AFC championship game. “Whether people believed in us or not, we did.”
In fairness to the skeptics, changing the narrative in the NFL comes through consistent results over time.
If you win Super Bowl titles or are regularly in position to play deep into the postseason, your franchise is viewed as successful. But if you’re often already looking to the draft and the next season by November, you’re labeled lowly losers.
The latter is the case for the New York Jets, who have the league’s longest active playoff drought at 11 seasons. And for the Jacksonville Jaguars, picking No. 1 overall for the second straight year. And teams such as the Giants, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans and Miami Dolphins — franchises in flux for much of the past few years.
But somewhere in the misery of all that losing, the Bengals provide hope and, more importantly, a model for how things can turn around quickly and what it takes to pull it off. It’s far from easy, though: Cincinnati is only the third team to go from the NFL’s worst record to the Super Bowl in a span of two years, joining the 2003 Carolina Panthers and 1981 San Francisco 49ers.
“There is a blueprint,” Jets coach Robert Saleh told reporters last week at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala. “When you develop within, you draft well, you select the right free agents and you build a culture that you believe in and you stay with continuity and you don’t fall into peer pressure with whatever Cincinnati has had to endure over the last couple of years, you end up reaping the benefits of your patience.”
The Bengals and their fans certainly are a case study in handling frustration.
“I am so happy for the city of Cincinnati,” Taylor said. “They have waited for this moment. They have supported us waiting for this moment.”
Cincinnati was mired in mediocrity for so long, the team’s previous trip to the Super Bowl in 1989 seemed like fairy tale stuff. Taylor, who’s 38 now, was in elementary school then. The Bengals’ most recent playoff win until this season came 31 years ago.
A whole new generation of fans was born, grew up and suffered plenty in that time.
