Yep . If the person at the very top is awful it ' s going to permeate all the way down to the bottom . It ' s like treating a patient for a cold when they have cancer . Yeah , you might accidentally alleviate a symptom here or there in the process , but they ' re still slowly dying because you haven ' t removed the source of the problem . <| sep |> First , why do we care about perception ? The Bengals aren ' t and weren ' t when they played the Redskins , so who cares what we thought ? Second , look who they played . They played no good offenses with good running games besides the Cowboys who ran all over them and the Steelers who ran well even without Bell . Those stats tell us nothing . They ' re an awful run defense and have been all season . They ' re allowing 112 rushing yards per game even with a very weak schedule of rushing teams . Anyway , what else was in your post that I ignored ? You basically said nothing . You said he did pretty well against good defenses that aren ' t actually good anymore for three weeks , so even though he played horrendously yesterday , he ' ll still be good against actually tough defenses coming up . There ' s nothing of substance in there it ' s just vaguely delusional hope in a player you have .