A frustrating season for Cincinnati Bengals Fans were highlighted in red ink, while former key players from the team shined elsewhere.
DJ Reader is just the latest version.
Now a member of the Detroit Lions' elite defense, Reader left last offseason and has mostly maintained his usual level of play for the Super Bowl contender.
With Detroit, Reader has three sacks and four tackles for loss, each number more than he had in 14 games with the Bengals last year.
Perhaps even more notable, he outpaces his backup, Sheldon Rankins, who appeared in seven games with the Bengals and recorded one sack and tackle for a loss. He missed last week's game before the bye due to a viral illness at least.
Granted, the Bengals tried to replace Reader with a platoon of rookies and Rankins. But none of these guys were pure nose tackles like Reader. And while he went into free agency after suffering a quadrant tear, letting him walk was somewhat understandable at the time, the general idea of how to replace him certainly wasn't.
But that doesn't make it any less painful if Reader is just the latest in a long line of anecdotes.
in Houston. Jessie Bates is an All-Pro and the current state of the Bengals defense speaks for itself. Even and would have been a candidate for the Ring of Honor if they had kept him.
At some point, this is a brutal reflection of the Bengals and Duke Tobin's front office in the way they do business and select players. Now the results of critical errors on the field are clearly visible — in Cincinnati and elsewhere in the NFL.