Welcome to The Debrief, Box Score’s freewheeling conversation about the sports we love. This week: we chat about the NFL—why the 5-2 Bengals (yes, the Bengals) might be the perfect symbol for this year’s league; how the Bears pushed in all their chips to try to win the Super Bowl; and why an 18th game could be the worst thing to happen to the product.
This Week’s Contributors
Kelvin C. Bias
Kelvin walked on as a wide receiver at Arizona, where he was leveled in practice by Patriots great Tedy Bruschi during the genesis of the Wildcats’ “Desert Swarm” defense. Prior to becoming a Sports Illustrated reporter (1995-2020), Kelvin covered the Cowboys-Dolphins Leon Lett Ice Bowl debacle on Thanksgiving 1993 while at The Dallas Morning News, ruing the unwritten rule of “no cheering in the press box.” Kelvin is also a bard. His poems currently appear in The Mid-Atlantic Review and the Sierra Nevada Review, and he’s working on a sports-themed collection.
Sridhar Pappu
Sridhar is the award-winning author of The Year of the Pitcher and the forthcoming Murderers’ Row: The Making of the 1927 Yankees (W.W. Norton, March 2, 2027). He has been tethered to the Cincinnati Bengals since their 1988 AFC Championship season. Following their last-minute loss to the 49ers in Super Bowl XXIII, he told his father: “I can’t believe both the Bengals lost the Super Bowl and Michael Dukakis lost the election.”
Farrell Evans
Farrell is a Box Score co-founder, former Sports Illustrated golf writer and the executive producer of The Land We Share, a documentary about the intimate bonds between the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and the Shinnecock Indian Nation.
It’s a weird year in the NFL. The Rams were built to be the superteam and are in third place, the Chargers are 0-7, and the Giants are in first. And the Bengals are 5-2 and still making their own fans sweat. On Sunday they were 14-point home favorites, their biggest home spread since 1976, against the Titans, and they needed a last-second touchdown and overtime to win. Sridhar, are you still alive?
Sridhar: I feel fine. I mean, as a Bengals fan, you just learn to accept it, but I would’ve expected them to lose that game. And I think last year’s team would’ve seen Cam Ward march down the field in that last minute and win the game. But this year’s team stopped him, and this year’s team drove down in overtime and won the game. So I feel okay. I mean, it was the ultimate trap game, coming after the Ravens win and before going to Madrid.
Life as a Bengals fan is weird. Joe Burrow played the worst game ever. There were weird penalties. They played a team they were 14-point favorites against. So you’re walking in and everyone’s sort of chatting and thinking they’re going to win, and I’m like, “We can’t take anything for granted against these guys.” And then I’m just happy they won, because when you’re a fan of this team or any team, to start off a week with a loss like this, it would’ve just ruined everything.
Kelvin: The Bengals, they are the most confounding team in NFL history as far as I’m concerned. And I think that gambling should be banned only because of the Bengals, because you cannot pick anything that they do in a given week. They didn’t cover today. Polymarket, Kalshi, they should just take them off the board. So they play the Falcons next week, and watch, they’ll end up losing or something.
Farrell: I think the Bengals are symbolic of the parity that we have in the NFL. Mike Brown as an owner, he fell into this from his dad, and the Bengals spend as little as they can on the facilities. They have the worst facilities in the NFL.
The Bengals are a mediocre football team, and they can have the kind of record that they have because the NFL by and large is a mediocre product that makes billions and billions of dollars by being mediocre.
Free agency sort of solves the whole great team problem. So you’re never going to have teams like the 49er teams with Joe Montana, or those great Dallas Cowboys teams because you’re never going to be able to pay to have that many great players on one team. So the Bengals have spent a ton of money with Ja'Marr Chase, Tee Higgins and Joe Burrow. Now they’re spending some money on defense. But they’re still a very mediocre football team. There’s no great team, but the Bengals represent what the league is today.
Kelvin: Shots fired, Sridhar.
Sridhar: I don’t know why I’m going to defend Mike Brown here, but the days of them not spending money on facilities are in the past. So I’ll give them that. But to your point, the NFL is a mediocre product, and they want it to be like that. And the more games you play, the more mediocre it’s going to get. The more injuries are going to happen, and the more you’re going to see backup quarterbacks.
The trade deadline is Nov. 10, and this season, every contender can talk itself into being one piece away. Chicago has already pushed its chips in, sending two first-round picks to Tennessee for Jeffery Simmons. Is two firsts the price of contending in a year this wide open, or did the Bears just overpay?
