A trip to the west coast for most people conjures up thoughts of sunshine, movie stars and cable cars.
A trip to the west coast for the Cincinnati Bengals is a trail of horrors.
The first place Bengals (7-2) play in Oakland (2-7) on Sunday and it was time to check the record book to see how the Bengals have fared three times zones away. It's not pretty.
Take Oakland, which has one of the poorest teams in the league at the present , but boasted a consistently strong squad for decades. They have beaten the Bengals 10 times in Oakland. The Bengals have yet to win there. There were some years that the Raiders lived in Los Angeles, and the Bengals there were 1-4. They beat the Raiders in 1988 at the LA Coliseum.
The Bengals are 0-2 in Arizona and 1-5 in San Francisco. Their best marks are 3-4 in Seattle and 5-9 in San Diego. They have a December 20 game in San Diego. It's not a pretty picture, but that's part of the Bengals history no matter where the games are played.
Since Marvin Lewis took over, the Bengals have traveled on Friday for Sunday's games on the coast. The thought was to better acclimate the players to the time zone and conditions. It obviously didn't work. The Bengals only won once, and that was in 2003, Lewis' first season.
This time, the Bengals are going to fly out of Cincinnati on Saturday morning. "A lot of teams do it this way" said Lewis this week. "You're supposedly spending less time out of your bed and out of your environment", he explained.
Carson Palmer didn't complain about the quick turnaround, but he brought it up when he talked about the difficulty in tackling the Raiders. He cited the tough environment and the five-hour flight without an extra day of rest. "There's a lot of things working against us" said Palmer
The Bengals have already gone against many of their old losing patterns this season. They've beaten the Steelers twice, the Ravens twice and they've won four straight games on the road. Maybe this is the year their west coast miseries are put to rest.
Marvin Lewis is calling it "a nice tight business trip."
Fly the Friendly Skies. Go Saturday, win Sunday.
The game kicks off at 4:15 p.m.
