With the season finally here, we take a look at the Cincinnati Bengals rookies and determine how they’ll perform in 2018.
The Cincinnati Bengals are a franchise on the precipice of flux. Their head coach has been in place since before the Iraq War first started — only one current head coach (Bill Belichick) has a longer current tenure — but had it not been for a couple surprising wins to end the 2017 season, all signs were pointing towards him parting ways with his long-time employer.
Even with the supposed positives of continuity that keeping Lewis should in theory provide though, the team hasn’t exactly been a model for sustained high-end success at any point in his tenure.
The team has made the playoffs seven times under his leadership — including five-straight years from 2011-15 — but never won a postseason game. The past two years have seen the team fail to produce a winning record (6-9-1 in 2016; 7-9 in 2017), and their talent base has been somewhat depleted.
If this team is going to reverse their recent downward trend and return to competing for the playoffs, they will need major contributions from the new players they’ve added to the fold. Moreso for them than most teams, that means Cincinnati, as a team which almost never pulls out their wallet for a free agent they didn’t already have in-house, really needs their rookies to make an immediate impact to turn things around.
They’ve definitely given themselves plenty of chances in that regard: between draft picks and undrafted free agent pickups this offseason, this offseason saw the Bengals have as many as 25 rookies on their roster at points in the offseason. Of those rookies, we’ve ended up with 10 who have survived the final roster cuts (with plenty of others making the practice squad).
So then: for those still around, what will their respective impacts be? That’s what we’re here to figure out.