Pinned Stripes

Dave Lapham played 10 seasons on Cincinnati’s offensive line and has spent the last 12 covering every Bengal game as a radio analyst.

The first job punished his body; the second punished his soul.

The Bengals are 0-6 for the fifth time since 1991 and are on pace to score the fewest points, and give up the most, in franchise history. Several times this season, Lapham has overheard visiting assistant coaches in their booth laughing -- laughing! -- about the Bengals’ ineptitude.

“Some guys come out of their college programs with life in their eyes,” Lapham said. “They’re here for a few years and they become Stepford Bengals. The life just gets sucked out of their eyeballs.”

Lest you think Lapham is speaking out of turn -- he works for the team’s flagship station, after all -- consider what he has had to endure. The Bengals have been outscored by an average of 30-9 this season, and have fallen behind by at least 20-0 in all but one game. They haven’t scored an offensive touchdown in the first quarter and, in six games, have enjoyed a lead for 2 1/2 minutes.

“To see the manner in which they’re losing is sickening,” Lapham said. “If they don’t care, why the hell should I?”

That sentiment seems to have taken hold in the city that supplied the Bengals with a $450-million stadium three years ago, encouraged by the notion the team would become more competitive with a state-of-the-art venue. But the team is 10-28 since moving into 65,600-seat Paul Brown Stadium and has sold out the place only seven times in 19 home games.

“I’ve watched this franchise for 12 years,” said Paul Daugherty, sports columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer. “I ran out of adjectives for lousy about five years ago.”

The big news in Cincinnati last week was what didn’t happen -- Coach Dick LeBeau didn’t lose his job, as many people thought he would after such a horrendous start. Mike Brown, who doubles as owner and general manager, is notoriously slow to fire coaches. Dave Shula’s teams were 19-52 before he was shown the door; when an 0-3 start in 2000 ran his coaching record to 21-39, Bruce Coslet wasn’t fired but left in disgust.

Now, the yoke -- and the joke -- is on LeBeau, a kind and likable man who took over for Coslet two years ago, at age 63, making him the oldest rookie coach in league history. The former Detroit cornerback spent 14 seasons as an NFL player and 30 as an assistant coach. People who see him every day say there’s a weary sadness to LeBeau now. The stress also is evident in the players, who mercifully get this weekend off.

“Thank God it’s a bye week,” linebacker Takeo Spikes told reporters last week. “It’s bad. You can’t sugarcoat it. You start to feel like you’re a piece of meat in the ocean and the damn shark is taking his turn pulling you apart. Now at least the bleeding will stop for a week.”

Things have gotten so bad that Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune has called for the county to renegotiate the stadium lease, arguing the Bengals are in breach of contract for failing to field a competitive team.

So the Hamilton County commissioner feels cheated? Get in line. On Monday, in the wake of a 34-7 loss to Pittsburgh, Spikes said every member of the organization “from the top down to the waterboy” shoulders the blame for the losing tradition. A day later, in a contractually obligated interview with the team’s Web site, Pro Bowl running back Corey Dillon said he will study his options before next season, hinting he might retire or demand a trade.

“They better get it right, or at the end of the season I’ve got a surprise for them,” he told a team employee. “You’ll see, because I’m just going to leave it like that. Mark it. Print it. Photo it.... I’m sick of this ... period.”

Dillon, in the second year of a five-year, $26.1-million deal, would have to pay back $6.3 million of his $10.5-million signing bonus were he to retire, and the Bengals would be losing the only Pro Bowl player they’ve had in two seasons.

That’s not to say the Bengals don’t have good players. They have average talent and have done relatively well shopping the free-agent market, considering many NFL players simply refuse to play for Cincinnati and some even have clauses in their contracts barring a trade to the Bengals.

The Bengals would have loved to have Drew Bledsoe, for instance, but he had no interest in leaving New England for a franchise that has gone through 12 starting quarterbacks in 12 seasons.

Former Bengal cornerback Solomon Wilcots, who still lives in Cincinnati and has covered the team as a local TV reporter, then for ESPN and now CBS, said that instability at quarterback is a major reason the club hasn’t been to the playoffs since 1990. Wilcots has committed this grim statistic to memory: In the last 2 1/2 seasons, Bengal quarterbacks are responsible for 20 touchdown passes and 53 interceptions.

“You need hope,” he said. “When you look at that guy under center and you know he doesn’t have it, you’re not going to win.”

Whereas Wilcots stops short of pointing the finger at Mike Brown, son of legendary coach and Bengal founder Paul Brown, almost no one else is so forgiving. Even former quarterback Boomer Esiason -- a Cincinnati icon who considers the team owner a friend -- thinks Brown needs to wake up and smell the compost heap the Bengals have become.

“There’s just this permeation of mediocrity, this acceptance of losing,” said Esiason, a CBS commentator who led the Bengals to the Super Bowl in the 1988 season. “The biggest problem there is just the mentality of the franchise, the mentality of the players there. They have a willingness to give in, to not fight back.

“Dick LeBeau and Mike Brown, those are the leaders of the franchise. They are the guys you have to point to.”

The Bengals have a skeleton scouting staff -- most of that responsibility falls on the coaches -- and are generally thought to do a poor job of cultivating talent.

“The franchise is like a flesh-eating virus,” said Bob Trumpy, who played tight end for the Bengals from 1968 through ’77. “Good players go there and get bad. Bad players go there and get horrible.”

The most common criticism of Brown is he doesn’t have the eye for talent, or football know-how, of his father, who died in 1991, yet he stubbornly refuses to hire a general manager who can help turn around the franchise. Brown declined to be interviewed for this story.

“When you’re down as far as down can go, you look forward to the next week as a chance to redeem yourself,” Brown told Cincinnati reporters last week. “That’s pretty much everybody’s feeling here. We know we’ve fallen flat on our face, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get up and get back in the running and be a respectable team. We think we can, and we think we will.”

Back in the 1980s and earlier, the Bengals were among the cheapest organizations in sports. They practiced at Spinney Field on the aptly named lower Price Hill, a facility surrounded by run-down industrial buildings with boarded-up windows. Mill Creek, a sewage-strewn waterway, snaked past the field, and the smell was rancid enough to turn stomachs if the wind was blowing the wrong way.

Esiason remembers a time when the equipment men would wheel out two canvas laundry carts each day -- one filled with socks, the other with jock straps. Gearing up for practice meant fishing around to find two matching socks, then grabbing a random jock. Players called the place “the kennel” because of the chain-link lockers.

But none of that mattered; the team reached the Super Bowl twice during the ‘80s and had four winning seasons. Lately, the Bengals have done most of their winning at the end of the season, when it only does damage to their draft position. Since 1991, Cincinnati has picked up 21 of its 53 victories in games played in December and January.

Lapham has a theory about that: The players are out of shape compared to those on other teams, so they tend to wear out quickly in warm-weather games. When the temperature drops, players in poor condition are not at such a disadvantage. So he doesn’t think the Bengals will make history by going 0-16 -- something no NFL team has done -- not with opponents such as Houston, Cleveland and Carolina left on the schedule.

As the Bengals discover new depths every week, and opposing coaches laugh their way through games, no low seems out of reach.