The swings of the Cincinnati Bengals' season are enough to make any fan consider rehab. Marvin Lewis' group has felt highs, such as last week's winover the New Orleans Saints, to the lows of the home blowout loss to the Cleveland Brownstwo weeks ago.
Speaking on NFL AM on Friday morning, the Bengals coach said his team needed to play with more consistency.
"Sometimes you gotta hit rock bottom before you can go all the way back up to the top, and we certainly were at rock bottom a few weeks ago on Thursday night," Lewis said.
Andy Dalton epitomizes the Bengals' swings. The quarterback's passer rating went from to a pitiful career-low of 2.0 in Week 10 to a career high of 143.9 in Week 11.
Lewis defended his quarterback's play, saying that Dalton has become a leader this season and that not everything in that pathetic loss to the Browns was Dalton's fault.
"We didn't play well in a lot of areas, we had a lot of things to conspire to make it as though Andy played worse than he did," Lewis said. "He missed some throws, no question about that, and that is what your quarterback is paid to do. That's what this job is. But we had some other things kind of erode around him and that helped lead to how poorly we played."
The Bengals will need Good Andy to show up Sunday against J.J. Watt and the Houston Texans. It's a defense the quarterback has historically been terrible against. Including playoffs, Dalton is 0-3 with a 57.0 completion percentage, 191 yards per game, a 1-4 touchdown-to-interception ratio and a passer rating of 60.1 against the Texans.
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