CINCINNATI — Chad Ochocinco needs a new last name. Anyone know how to say “overrated” in Spanish? For the second straight week, Darrelle Revis and the Jets silenced the mouthy receiver. Ochocinco? More like Ocho-Stinko.
He had two catches for 28 yards in the Bengals’ 24-14 AFC wild-card loss to the Jets. That’s better than last week when he had no catches in the regularseason finale. For those of you scoring at home, that’s two weeks, plenty of talk and little production.
“I don’t think we really ever had a point where we were consistently hitting shots,” Ochocinco said of the offense. “I think the check-downs were the choice of the day. That’s not going to win many ballgames.”
Ochocinco, who joked that he checked his injured knee after last week’s game with romp in the bedroom, was as cold as the weather at Paul Brown Stadium. Carson Palmer threw his way just six times. His biggest contribution of the day was drawing a questionable 26-yard pass interference call on Revis that put the Bengals in scoring range.
Even that didn’t work out for the Bengals as Shayne Graham missed a 35-yard field goal.
Ochocinco did not record his first catch until three minutes were gone in the fourth quarter.
Revis shut down Ochocinco, but also made some uncharacteristic mistakes. Besides the pass interference, he also had two illegal contact penalties. Revis did have an interception in the second quarter on a pass to Ochocinco.
“It was the same Chad. It was the same Darrelle Revis,” Revis said with a chuckle. “One of the things I just tried to do is try to stick to my game plan last time and just try to make him do things that he didn’t want to do. He stems a lot in his routes. I just wanted to shorten the field down for him even more because he’s a dangerous guy.
You give him a little bit of space, he can make plays.”
Revis said he saw Ochocinco getting frustrated as the game went on.
Except for Cedric Benson, the Bengals’ offense sputtered all day. Palmer looked awful, overthrowing and underthrowing receivers.
“The game should have been a lot easier because we just played them,” Ochocinco said.
When asked if the Jets did anything differently from last week he said, “Not a thing.”
After his failure to produce last week, Ochocinco blamed a knee injury suffered during pregame warm-ups. He had no such excuse yesterday.
He was healthy enough to practice all week and played the entire game, even though it was sometimes hard to find him on the field.
Revis admitted the tweeting and talking Ochocinco did last week bothered him.
“I did feel disrespected as a football player,” Revis said. “As his friend, I didn’t feel disrespected. So that’s just something that I had to back myself up at the end of the day as a football player.”