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,” QB 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.”
Benson made his points and got his yards. Still he wanted more. Eleven more.
“He had a boulder on his shoulder today and ran like it,” Bears safety Danieal Manning said.
Give Benson credit for gaining a career-high 189 yards on 37 carries against a Bears defense that took its second byeweek of the season. But the worst damage Benson inflicted on the Bears is incalculable.
The success of a Bears castoff in a game that evened out a once-promising season at 3-3 left us wondering if we really ever knew anything about these Bears.
We thought the Bears were a well-coached team whose defense had turned the corner. We thought Jay Cutler was a $50 million franchise quarterback immune to inconsistencies that ran another Bears quarterback out of town. We thought Matt Forte was an upgrade from Benson, Rod Marinelli had cured an anemic pass rush, and the NFC North was there for the taking.
Then the Bears came to the Queen City and bowed down.
What do we really know for sure now? Only that the Bears felt as humiliated as they looked.
When inexplicable things like 35-point losses to the Bengals happen, it suggests a team lacks something intangible impossible to detect poring over rosters and depth charts. When a veteran group such as the Bears cannot pinpoint what went wrong because so many things did, it says they don’t know exactly what the team needs. Except that they don’t have it.
“Every player and coach in that locker room is embarrassed,” Cutler said. “We’re a better team than we showed out there.”
Perhaps, but the worst loss of the Lovie Smith era makes it fair to think that’s wishful thinking on Cutler’s part.
For another week, the offensive line looked closer to rotting than jelling. For the second time in six games, Cutler was closer to bad than good. For the second straight week, the Bears didn’t sack the quarterback. For the third game this season, Forte finished with 30 or fewer yards rushing.
Meanwhile, Benson was digging deep with his brother and mother in the crowd and the man he considers a father figure in Smith on the opposite sideline. After the game, he hoped to look Smith in the eyes to thank him for providing an opportunity in Chicago but couldn’t find the coach.
Lovie wasn’t in much of a loving mood anyway. Asked if he talked with Benson, a dejected Smith just shook his head no.
“This was a business trip, no family reunion or anything like that,” he said.
This was the longest of days for a team whose biggest challenge will be making sure it doesn’t mark the beginning of a long year.