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The Cincinnati kid: laugh at the Bengals if you want, but Carson Palmer is proof they can get something right

Sporting News, The, Oct 28, 2005 by Paul Attner

It happens almost every day they are together. They can be on the practice field or playing golf or pool or basketball. Doesn't matter. "Hey, Jon," Carson Palmer will say to Jon Kitna. "Bet I can beat you." And Kitna will smile and tell him, "No way." And they'll start going at it, big kids unwilling to concede anything, whether it be making a 3-foot putt or hitting a crossbar with a football from 50 yards.

It's most intense in basketball. "That's a foul," Kitna says. "It's not," Palmer says. They glare at each other and play even harder. "He cheats," Kitna says. None of the bets ever seem to be resolved, either; the two are always grumbling about the unfinished business.

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Their extreme competitiveness has led to this. "He's my best friend on the team," Kitna says. "He's a role model for me," Palmer says.

And to this: Without Kitna as part of Team Palmer, the support group Bengals coach Marvin Lewis has assembled to develop his quarterback protege, the stunningly quick emergence of Carson Palmer after a mere 19 NFL starts would not have happened this rapidly. Along with Ben Roethlisberger, Palmer has distanced himself from the other young quarterbacks taken early in the first round of the past four drafts. Even more telling, he looms as the saving face of a franchise that had wallowed so long in mediocrity. He has given the Bengals consistency and glamour. And he has gotten Cincinnati excited again about football--no easy feat.

The Bengals haven't had a winning season since 1990. Only three times since then, including the past two seasons under Lewis, have they even finished .500. Standing now at 5-1, they have the team's best start since 1988, when they won their first six games. Stores are having problems keeping in stock T-shirts sporting Lewis' training camp slogan: Do Your Job. It's typical Cincinnati--nothing flashy, just a reflection of Midwestern work ethic.

At 33, Kitna can relate to that. Hard work as much as skill has enabled him to carve out a nine-year career that began as an undrafted practice squad player with Seattle in 1996. He's a hardscrabble quarterback, short on elite talent but unwilling to concede to his weaknesses. In Palmer, 25, he sees everything he's not: An incredibly gifted 6-5,230-pound prototype, a Heisman winner, the No. 1 pick in the 2003 draft, a man created to be a star. It is Kitna who first understood the depth of the immense competitiveness that fires Palmer. It's certainly well-disguised. Palmer describes himself as laid-back, and it's an accurate surface tag. But Kitna found this blanket label misleading, a disservice; if you equate laid-back with lazy or complacent, you've misjudged Palmer.

"He will never tell you this, but he wants to be really, really good," Kitna says. "It drives him. He wants to be the best at everything he does, whether it be football or pool or golf. That's why it is fun being with him. Neither of us will concede anything. He's never going to be satisfied as a football player."

Each of the essential figures surrounding Palmer--offensive coordinator Bob Bratkowski, quarterbacks coach Ken Zampese and Kitna--have well-defined roles that have benefited from continuity (they have been with Palmer from the start) and Lewis' ability to reshape a floundering franchise, giving it steely direction and instilling an unbending demand for excellence that has been absent for so long. The turmoil and instability that at times have surrounded Joey Harrington and David Carr and Byron Leftwich and Kyle Boiler have been missing from Team Palmer, and it shows in Palmer's progress.

Certainly, it also helps that Palmer has a decent line and playmakers in wide receivers Chad Johnson and T.J. Houshmandzadeh and running back Rudi Johnson. But if you want to know why some young quarterbacks succeed in today's NFL while others stay on a path of mediocrity, look no further than how the Bengals have groomed Palmer--and how essential it has been for him to have a veteran peer such as Kitna as a guide.

The early results have been impressive. In each of his past nine starts, including three games from 2004, Palmer has posted a quarterback rating of 100-plus. That ties the league record set last season by Peyton Manning, who was in his eighth year as a starter. Over his nine-game run, Palmer has thrown 22 touchdowns, been intercepted only seven times and has completed 74.1 percent of his passes, a dazzling number that becomes even more striking considering the vertical nature of the Bengals' passing approach. The NFL's average quarterback rating last year was 82.8; Palmer's is 114.4 for those nine games, and Cincinnati is 7-2 in that stretch. Since the middle of last season, he has been among the league's best quarterbacks.

"Carson is in a really healthy environment," says CBS analyst Solomon Wilcots, a former NFL defensive back. "It's not always about the player himself; it is many times about the garden he is playing in and who is tending the garden. The coach and the system, the guys grooming him. Toss in Kitna and the planets were aligned for him."

The Cincinnati kid: laugh at the Bengals if you want, but Carson Palmer is proof they can get something right

Sporting News, The, Oct 28, 2005 by Paul Attner

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