It started off almost positive for the Tennessee Titans in Cincinnati. After receiving the opening kickoff, they converted a couple third downs and got down to field goal territory. Once Ryan Succop trotted onto the field, the game turned almost entirely negative. Succop put the 40 yard field goal wide right. The Bengals drove for a score. 3-0. The Titans went 4-and-out. The Bengals drove for a score, an Andy Dalton touchdown reception, no less, where Blidi Wreh-Wilson couldn’t manage a pick-6 or even a tackle. 10-0. Another Succop miss. A defensive stop, but a punt that included a safety. 12-0. Another stop, but then a ball dislodged by a defender off Delanie Walker becomes an interception followed by a TD. 19-0. A brief spark of life, when George Wilson intercepts a tipped screen pass. Nope, an awful Locker interception.
19-0 at the half, and it felt like worse. Despite CBS’s attempts to pump things up, it was all over but the shouting. Bishop Sankey gave the Titans some signs of life on the opening drive of the second half, but Cincinnati drove for a score after that drive sputtered. At 26-0, it was really all over. Shonn Greene would find the end zone in the fourth quarter to avoid the shutout, but the final two quarters never approached the semi-competitiveness last week’s Dallas game did.
What to say about this game? Jake Locker did not play well. When the Bengals blitzed, their blitzes worked. A number of his incompletions (he finished 17-34) were not close to catchable balls. That doesn’t mean the Titans didn’t drop any passes, though-they did. Delanie Walker, working the middle of the field, led the team with 54 receiving yards. I may have to write about Sankey, who finished 10-61 on the ground, to have something semi-positive to write about. Locker actually found Kendall Wright downfield, or at least the refs thought so and Marvin Lewis didn’t bother to second-guess them (right before the Greene run, it was 33-0 at the time). But, yeah, lipstick on a pig.
Defensively… they were okay at times, forcing the Bengals to punt thrice in the competitive portion of the game. That’s better than Atlanta did last week. Andy Dalton was neither sacked nor hit, not that he did much damage through the air. Really, the Bengals’ conventional statistics were not that impressive, they just did enough for a blowout win, as dumb as that sounds. Standing out in a bad way for the Titans was Blidi Wreh-Wilson, who struggled in coverage against A.J. Green, and was flagged for four total penalties, unless he got flagged again after I started paying close attention to more interesting games.
Back to the drawing board once again for Ken Whisenhunt, the coaching staff, and the players. Oh, and RIP Rob Bironas.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
