JWill's 3 Takes: Can Cincinnati Bearcats keep incredible run in football going?
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The University of Cincinnati football team has won 44 games since 2018 and hasn't lost a regular-season game in over 1,000 days. What do fans realistically expect from the Bearcats, who have a new QB and a bunch of new players? Why does one national website say the Bengals aren't "all in" on winning the Super Bowl? What's more, readers have shared strong opinions on the name "JWill." Join the "3 takes" conversation. Contact columnist Jason Williams with your questions, comments and complaints on email at jwilliams@enquirer.com and Twitter @jwilliamscincy. Include your first name and city/neighborhood to have your questions and comments considered as a "3 takes" topic or included in a mailbag.
1. How many games will the Cincinnati Bearcats football team win in 2022?
What are your expectations for the season, Bearcats fans? Would nine wins and a conference championship game appearance be viewed as a successful year?
It seems a realistic expectation for the first post-Desmond Ridder team, right?
Hopefully, we can all agree that it’s going to be tough to stay on the 11-win pace of the last four seasons after losing a school-record nine players to the NFL Draft, including the four-year starting QB. But it’s great that fan expectations remain sky-high, evidenced by UC selling a school-record 23,500 season tickets.
We'll know quickly whether expectations should remain in the clouds or be tempered a bit. The 23rd-ranked Bearcats face their toughest season-opener since this magical run began in 2018, going into SEC Country on Saturday to face No. 19 Arkansas.
“There’s a lot of things that this is going to test,” UC coach Luke Fickell said.
Fick was talking specifically about his team. But what he said also could apply to Bearcats’ fans. A loss will be a test for anyone who’s invested in UC football. The Bearcats have spoiled long-suffering local sports fans. UC is on a 22-game regular-season winning streak, having not lost such a game since Nov. 29, 2019. It's still hard for this UC alum to comprehend the incredible run after sitting through many sparsely attended games at Nippert in the 1990s.
Fickell offered the right perspective on how we all should view the 2022 Bearcats.
“We define who we are,” he said of his players and coaches. “We define what success is. This is another step (for) this team. Not the past teams. Not the program. As you go into Week 1, you gotta really focus on this team.”
He raised his voice a bit to emphasize “this team.”
Looking at the schedule, I see nine wins, one loss (Arkansas) and two tossups (back-to-back October road games at SMU and UCF). A record of 9-3 or 10-2 would be a helluva year and another big step toward Fickell’s vision of building UC into a perennial top-10 program.
Here’s hoping UC fans remember where the program came from and show a little grace if the Bearcats lose three or four games this season.
2. The Ringer: Cincinnati Bengals aren’t ‘all in’ on winning Super Bowl
Cool-guy sportswriter Bill Simmons’ The Ringer has a fantastic piece ranking how “all in” on winning the Super Bowl every NFL team is based on an analytics concoction of salary cap space, spending and draft capital. It has the Bengals’ ranked in the middle-of-the-pack at No. 16 on the “All In-dex,” saying the team is “not going all in on pocket aces.”
More from The Ringer:
"Here’s the thing about maxing out a salary cap: It takes an owner willing and liquid enough to spend cash up front. Bengals owner Mike Brown is not that guy. And subsequently, the Bengals are committing a football tragedy. … The Bengals were dealt two pocket aces by drafting QB Joe Burrow and WR Ja’Marr Chase. If there’s a time to go all in, it’s with these two guys. Burrow and Chase’s combined cap hit this year is $17 million. When they each sign contract extensions, that combined number could be $77 million. The Bengals should be using this discount to subsidize other positions and load up for another Super Bowl run. Instead, they rebuilt their offensive line and ... stopped there.”
And maybe the Bengals stopped short on rebuilding the offensive line after a shaky preseason for that group.
3. ‘JWill’ fits the headline
Readers and friends alike are busting my chops for calling this venture "JWill's 3 takes." They like "3 takes." Not so much "JWill."
"Mr. Williams, you are not an adolescent, so please drop the JWill," one reader wrote in an email. Another said: "Like Williams better than JWill. No need to try and be hip. Just be yourself."
Uh, I'm always myself. Long-time readers of my political columns can vouch for that.
Allow me to ask: Did anyone have a problem shortening Paul Daugherty's name to "Doc" in headlines? That's simply why we're using "JWill" – to take up as few characters as possible in the headline. Our system has a character limit for headlines, and it's best to save as much space for the topic at hand. That's it. No other agenda.
Other news organizations do the same thing with columnists who have longer names. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, uses "BenFred" to shorten sports columnist Ben Frederickson's name in headlines.
Using the columnist's name in the headline is simply a way to show readers the difference between commentary and a news report.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Bearcats' Luke Fickell: 'A lot of things (Arkansas) is going to test'
