The Cincinnati Bengals are 3-0. It is the most misleading record in football.
They beat the Philadelphia Eagles 30-13, but the score does not reflect how the game played out. With 4:31 left, Jamal Haynes ripped off a 39-yard touchdown run to make it 30-13. Before that, the Bengals held a 23-13 lead. A ten-point lead with four minutes left is not domination. It is survival.
The popular take is that the Bengals are cruising and the Eagles are a tire fire. The contrarian read: Cincinnati is fumbling its way through games, and the running game is bailing out a passing attack that produced zero touchdowns. Tahj Brooks lost a fumble. Gary Brightwell lost a fumble. Two giveaways that should have kept an 0-3 team alive, except Philadelphia is too broken to cash them in. Josh Johnson went 12-of-19 for 156 yards, no touchdowns, and a passer rating of 88.9. Sean Clifford added 3 passing yards. The two quarterbacks combined for 159 yards through the air. The ground game carried the day: Kentrel Bullock churned out 85 yards on 14 carries with a touchdown, Haynes averaged 11.1 yards per carry on his seven carries, and Brooks added 37 yards before his fumble.
The Eagles' quarterback situation is a carousel of mediocrity. Andy Dalton, Tanner McKee and Cole Payton all appear as passing leaders, and all they could produce was 13 points. They couldn't punish the Bengals for their sloppiness. That's not a statement about Cincinnati's strength. It's a statement about Philadelphia's collapse.
The injury to I. Bolden on Haynes' touchdown is a fitting footnote. A winless team lost another player on the play that sealed its fate. At some point, that kind of misfortune stops being bad luck and starts being a roster problem.
Cincinnati deserves credit for one thing: it kept handing the ball to the Eagles, and the Eagles kept giving it back. But fumbles don't disappear because you're winning. They travel. They show up in January against a team with a pulse. The Bengals are 3-0 playing like a team that's one or two turnovers away from a losing streak. If they don't tighten the ball security, they'll find out exactly how misleading this record is.
The final score flatters them. The tape shows a ground-dependent, turnover-prone team that got bailed out by an opponent that couldn't take the gift. The Bengals are 3-0. They should be 2-1. And if they keep playing this way, they will be.