I said 79 yards on more than 20 carries. Not exactly 4.0 yards per carry.

matt will be more accurate this game. i think OD and KW bust loose… i see Matt tossing 4 TDS and over 350 yds passing.

I think by the fact they signed Barwin they know he isn’t the long term solution, but he was the best we could get.

The problem is they can’t pass themselves out of a hat so defenses can simply focus on the run and let the Raiders defend their own passing game.

I don’t think we “fixed” anything, but it’s true that all season long we’ve actually played the run very well on average, we just also have given up alot of big plays. If you took the 10+ yard runs away teams are probably averaging 2 yards or less per run vs the Texans. Because of that, bigger more plodding type of backs are easier to deal with, because even when an assignment is blown and a huge gap opens, often we’re able to recover fast enough to prevent the mega huge gain. I think Benson has enough speed though to make a couple of those long runs if we don’t tackle well at first contact, but there’ll consistently be contact at or near the line of scrimmage.

I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but the Bengals seem like a team that’s pretty highly overated at this point to me. They have a good record and all, but they could have lost any of the 4 games they’ve won so far easilly. They’ve shown toughness in winning some close games, but in doing so they’ve also shown the inability to pull away and take over a game early on. Eventually the “cardiac cats” will run out of lives and start dropping those close ones, and even more likely, they’ll get jumped on early and be unable to play from behind effectively.

I look for Slaton to have a monster game on draws and screens early. The Bengals are better defensively than they have been, but I think their defense is also overated at this point. Houston has the ability to expose their defense and put up major yards as while the Bengals are better defensively, they’re not a balanced defense and Houston’s offense can attack a defensive in multiple ways. If they concentrate on putting pressure on Schaub they’ll succeed in stopping the long pass for the most part, but Daniels, Slaton, and Leach will be open underneath all day long, as well as the WRs on some occasions.

If the Bengals continue to rely on 2 deep help from both safeties to help their corners, you’re going to see a couple plays where Daniels is wide open in the seams, there’s not a LB in the league that can cover him.