Benson bad news for Bears

CINCINNATI – One look at Cedric Benson standing at the locker beside him and you might say Chad Ochocinco had doscientos on his mind.

It was obvious from the first, forceful carry that Benson did too.

“You get 200?” Ochocinco asked Benson after the Bengals’ 45-10 win Sunday over the Bears at Paul Brown Stadium.

One stool away, still dressed in game gear, Benson just cracked the grin he had been waiting all season to crack.

“Close,” he shot back. “I got 189.”

Benson answered quickly enough to suggest he was carrying the football in one hand and a calculator in the other, mentally computing every satisfying yard against the team that threw him on the NFL scrap heap.

The allure of 200 yards had to be why Benson foolishly was still carrying the football with a minute left and his team leading by 35. It had to be why Benson ran downhill unlike the piano-on-his-back runner the Bears enabled for three seasons.

“I saw the same thing I saw when he was with us, a good football player,” Bears offensive coordinator Ron Turner said.

Turner must suffer from football astigmatism. Had Turner ever seen Benson run with that much purpose when he coached him, the Bears would have found a way to justify keeping him. But in what is becoming one of the top storylines of the NFL season, the Bears’ loss was the Bengals’ gain.

“It goes back to the whole thing that your mom teaches you when you are young, you can’t judge a book by its cover,” quarterback Carson Palmer said of the NFL’s leading rusher. “He has done nothing but be a model teammate.”

There Benson was taking a victory lap after a 1-yard TD run, waving his hands in front of the Ben-Gals to excite a home crowd like he never could in Chicago. There he was showing speed and a burst that didn’t exist when he was a Bear.

There he was glaring at the Bears’ sideline after a 14-yard gain with a look that said “I told you so.”

“It was an emotional moment for me,” Benson said. “A small part of me couldn’t resist just going up and showing a little.”