Bengals catching on
Geoff Hobson Editor Bengals.com
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The Bengals are on pace to join the 2011 Saints as only the second team in NFL history to have six players with 500 or more receiving yards in a season.
Dane Sanzenbacher
When the Bengals displayed just how deep and versatile they are catching the ball Sunday in Buffalo you could have sworn James Brooks came out of 1988 to catch a swing pass while helping block Bruce Smith.
That's about how historic it is becoming.
Among quarterback
Andy Dalton's 40 passes on Sunday, 26 were completed to eight different players and to all five wide receivers that were active. And one of them, Dane Sanzenbacher, came off the bench cold for his first snap of the game with 4:46 left in the third quarter on fourth-and-15 to do something the Bengals hadn't done in this century.
Based on 16-game projections, the Bengals are on pace to join the 2011 Saints as only the second team in NFL history to have six players with 500 or more receiving yards in a season.
"It's pretty cool. We've been saying since the preseason that we know how talented we are at receiver and now it's finally showing," Sanzenbacher said.
To show what the Bengals think of Sanzenbacher, they put him in the slot on the fourth-and-long, replacing
Mohamed Sanu, and he showed why when he made a one-handed catch with the other one pinned as he went down the seam for a 23-yard play in a crowd that included safety Jim Leonhard pondering decapitation.
It was the first time since quarterback Jeff Blake ran on fourth-and-16 in Seattle in 1999 that the Bengals converted a fourth down that long.
No one practices a fourth-and-15 during the week, but Sanzenbacher ran that play in practice on Thursday well enough that the Bengals put him inside outside receivers
A.J. Green and
Marvin Jones and he came up with his second catch of the season.
"I like Dane on a lot of routes; he's a good player," said wide receivers coach James Urban.
Except for his first two years in the NFL in Chicago, the 5-11, 184-pound Sanzenbacher is Ohio all the way. A two-time player of the year in Toledo before he became Ohio State's MVP as a senior, Sanzenbacher's hands are surer than a sellout at The Shoe. Maybe it wasn't Kirk Gibson coming off the bench to take Dennis Eckersley deep in the World Series (25 years ago to the day), but this bit of pinch-hitting advertised Sanzenbacher's toughness, brains and hands.
"It can be tough sometimes mentally to stay in the game when you're physically ready to go out there; it's part of your assignment," Sanzenbacher said. "For whatever reason, Urbs likes me on that route. We did practice it before and I was a little bit more familiar with it."
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