THE BROO VIEW with Ken Broo

I can’t go anywhere in the last week without someone asking me…how do you think the Bengals will do this year. If you bleed orange and black, you probably get it too. And what I’ve come to discover, it took me awhile but then again, I’m not the fastest horse in the barn….what I’ve come to discover is that predicting what a professional football team will do next week, let alone three months from now, is down right impossible.

Think about this. On Wednesday of this past week, was there any one in the greater Cincinnati area who would have predicted that the front office would release running back Kenny Irons? Second round draft pick last season, tore his knee up in an exhibition game last summer, didn’t play a down of football since. The team flat out gave up on him, second round pick. And given Marvin’s drafts since arriving here, it’s not like they have the luxury to give up on high draft picks these days. David Pollack, gone, Odell Thurman, gone, Chris Henry gone, Madieu Williams Keiwan Ratliff, gone and gone. So to release Irons, whatever his injury situation is, whatever his affect on the 80-man roster is, not something you’d predict would happen. Miss Cleo didn’t even weigh in on that one.

So to sit here today and say definitively what your Cincinnati Bengals may do this season is just a guess. Injuries, injuries to players on teams they’ll face, weather conditions, sub par performances, out of the box performances, there are a lot of variables that affect how a team does from September until January.

That’s why, one of my favorite things to do, and I know this is revealing the geek in me, is to save the pre-season magazines and on-line prediction columns and go back a year later and see how right the experts were. They seldom are.

Nobody picked Cleveland to have the season they had last year. The closest anyone came to saying the Browns would be better was ESPN’s Chris Mortonsen, who said they’d go 3-3 inside the the AFC North. He was right.

Nobody picked the Buccaneers to win the NFC South, that was New Orleans’ division to win. The Saints finished 7-9. NFC North, the Packers? What are you nuts?….Bears all the way. You get the point.

To say the Bengals will go 10-6, 9-7, 5-11 at this point is just beer talk. It’s the kind of stuff you talk about while having a beer with your buddies. The guy who says they’ll go 10-6 has no earthly idea if the Bengals will be able to run the ball late in the year at Cleveland. Or handle Hines Ward in Pittsburgh before Thanksgiving, or go to Dallas and deal with TO in early October. If you’re running around saying this team is no better than 5-11 because of the schedule it has to play…and it is a killer schedule…well, who’s to say the Giants weren’t just a team on a roll late last season, or that Derek Anderson lived a lie last season and is about to be exposed, or that the Steelers won’t be able to block a doorway this year, let alone Ben Roethlisberger.

Professional football is the hardest game in the country to predict. That’s why the house, the bookie, wins every week.

So be wary of anyone who wants to tell you today, right now, the middle of the summer, exactly what the Bengals are going to do this year. They don’t know. When you pick up that magazine this week that promises the complete scoop on who is doing to do what in 2008, put it back on the rack and put the money back in your wallet. The guys who write the reports for the individual teams are a little too close to the teams they cover.

How good the Bengals will be this year will depend on a lot of things. They’ll have to run the ball better than they have since Lewis arrived. They’ll have to get off the field on third down better than they have since 2005. And they’ll have to have a very young secondary play like veterans.

But to sit here today, the day they report to camp, and say they’ll be any specific record, don’t listen to it. Don’t believe it. That’s why they play the games.