The Cincinnati Bengals — Ohio’s other pro football team — are one of the Browns’ big rivals.
But they’re also a feel-good story — maybe the ultimate feel-good story in the NFL this year — and it is really cool to see, even for Browns fans, whose team was the feel-good story in the league last season.
There’s another tentacle to this, though, and it comes in the form of a lesson — one for both the Browns and their fans.
It is something we talk about all the time here.
The teams in the NFL are a whole lot closer than what you may think. The gap from the very best teams to the ones at the bottom of the standings is not that wide at all. And as such these games — almost all of them, really, a huge majority of them — are very close and they come down to the end. They are decided in the fourth quarter, and, more specifically, the latter part of it. It comes down to just a few plays here and there at crucial times. It’s who makes those plays that decides who wins, and who loses.
The Bengals’ 26-19 victory over the Las Vegas Raiders on Saturday in the wild-card round of the playoffs is a prime example of that.
The Bengals were clinging to a seven-point lead at the end as the Raiders moved to a first-and-goal at the Cincinnati 10 in the final minute. The Bengals then made the plays to win it, forcing the Raiders to throw three incomplete passes and then getting an interception to seal the deal.
If the Browns want to start winning these types of games instead of losing them, as they did this year, then they have to be the ones making the plays at the end.
It is really, and truly, no more complicated than that.
By Steve King
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