Second Look… AFC North

In our First Look at the AFC North, it came down to two coinflips to seperate the four teams.

Has anything changed?


Ben Roethlisberger has a civil suit hanging over his head, though by most reports he’s not let it affect him and has shown considerable poise in being the leader of the team.

Hines Ward is sitting out practice. Not, you might think, to save injuries to any defensive backs, but because he’s earned it and can be trusted to be in shape come the pre-season. With Santonio Holmes hoping to reproduce his post-season form in the pre-season, it falls to those two to lead the receivers with Nate Washington plying his trade in Tenessee now.

Along with Washington, Bryant McFadden and Larry Foote are also playing in new cities (Arizona and Detroit) which is going to need to see some adjustment on the defense. On the brightside, they still have Mactalksnfl favourite Troy Polamalu tearing up the backfield.

As with any defending champions, they start the season with nothing to prove yet everything to lose. After their last championship, they went a disappointing 8-8 but will surely have learnt lessons from that.

There seems to be very little happening at the Ravens, bar a few personnel changes that we’ve talked about before. One item of note is that Raven’s Running back Ray Rice appears to be edging out Willis McGahee as the number one running back (which will make alliteration-happy announcers ecstatic!). Though we can probably expect to see evenly split carries in the early part of the season.

Joe Flacco will go into his sophomore season entrenched as starter and will look to build on his fantastic first season that took the Ravens deep into the post-season. With a little bit more protection, he can do great things as long as he keeps his form up. Something that is by no means certain for a second-year QB.

The Ravens second place finish last year means that they have potentially tricky matchups against the Colts and Patriots on their schedule this year (The Steelers have the Dolphins and Titans) those will be all games to watch to see how they’ll affect the division table here.

I was initially tough on the Bengals’ receivers, then I changed my tune and it’s one of the main things I’m looking out for from training camp. If healthy and productive, they could be a real threat as long as the running game backs them up.

If Andre Smith and the team can sort a contract out, he could be an immediate starter at tackle. The longer a deal isn’t in place is going to affect his gametime early in the season.

There have been a number of changes on the defense, but nothing that shouldn’t be able to be catered for. That said, I don’t like the look of this unit – they were weak in 2008 and could easily be weak again.

A big factor when considering their finishing spot is that the Bengals have four of their last five games on the road. This will be a tough run and if they’re still in contention at that stage it will be an important sequence of games. I feel they’ve improved since my First Look – certainly on offense – but am leaving them projected at third spot for now.

The rebuilding is well under way in Cleveland, with ex-Jet’s coach Eric Mangini making his mark. He’s also delved deeply into the roster from his old club in an attempt to improve the team across the board.

The big story here is Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn in the quarterback battle. You’d hope that it would be settled as soon as possible, but with both guys putting up similar numbers last season I wouldn’t be surprised to see them sharing time through the early part of the pre-season. My money is on Quinn at this point.

With so much happening with the team, they’re tough to get behind as contenders.

Summary
Like I said before, the crunch match is in week 16 when the Ravens travel to Pittsburgh in a match that will probably decide the division (assuming that one of them has not fallen apart by then).

I do like what’s coming out of Cincinnati, but not enough to bump them at this point. So it’s no change so far.

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