“Dumpster fire” has several meanings, most of them fairly parallel, but it’s rarely used to describe something dull enough to feel like it’s taking weeks, maybe even months off your life. “Life-sucking” sums up FC Cincinnati’s 2019 season tidily as anything. You never knew quite what would happen when the whistle blew, but you understood it would hurt and that you wouldn’t enjoy it. Even down the stretch when they dialed back the defensive incompetence, they rarely won. All in all, it was…unpleasant.

2020 can’t be that bad, surely. I don’t know that, obviously, but I literally cannot think of a way that Cincinnati could be worse on all sides of the ball than in 2019. But let’s see if we can’t find some ways.