A frustrating season for Cincinnati Bengals fans has been underlined in red ink with former key members of the team shining elsewhere.
DJ Reader is merely the latest.
Reader, now a member of the elite Detroit Lions defense, left this past offseason and has mostly kept up his usual level of play for the Super Bowl hopeful.
With Detroit, Reader has three sacks and four tackles for loss, each number more than he had last year over 14 games with the Bengals.
Perhaps more notably, he’s outpacing his replacement, Sheldon Rankins, who has appeared in seven games with the Bengals and posted one sack and tackle for loss. Due to a viral illness, he missed the game before the bye last week and will miss Week 13 against Pittsburgh, at a minimum.
Granted, the Bengals were attempting to replace Reader via a platoon of rookies, plus Rankins. But none of those guys were pure nose tackles like Reader. And while he entered free agency after a torn quad, so letting him walk was somewhat understandable at the time, the general idea of how to replace him certainly wasn’t.
But that doesn’t make it sting less when Reader is just the latest in a long line of whiffs.
Joe Mixon has revived his career in Houston. Jessie Bates is an All-Pro and the current state of the Bengals defense speaks for itself. Even Kevin Zeitler is still playing elite ball and would have been a Ring of Honor candidate, had they kept him.
At some point, this is a brutal reflection of the Bengals’ front office and Duke Tobin in how they do business and select players. Now, the results of critical mistakes are showing up big on the field — in Cincinnati and elsewhere in the NFL.
