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DENVER, Co. -- The Cincinnati Bengals' past few weeks have been anything but encouraging. They lost two straight, saw their stars A.J. Green and Vontaze Burfict get ejected in back-to-back weeks and only mustered 148 yards of net offense in a loss to the Jaguars. The Bengals have been in a below-.500 hole all season that seemed even bigger when they dropped to 3-6 after blowing a late lead to the Titans last week. It would have been easy for them to get discouraged. But they've drawn motivation from something unusual -- eyeing the standings around the league. After improving to 4-6 with a win against the Broncos, the Bengals are surprisingly only one game out of the AFC wild-card picture, stuck in a logjam with five other teams that have the same record. It might take a Herculean effort to get there, but the Bengals are using that possibility as motivation to push forward.  "We all talk about it," said wide receiver Brandon LaFell. "I think last week we were talking about (how) there's a lot of teams that are 4-4 or 5-4. Everybody's just in that pack. You've got two teams that are 7-2 and somebody's got to make a run. Why can't it be us? We should've got the one last week in Tennessee, but we came out on the road again and got this one so let's put them together and make a run."
Teams often don't admit publicly they pay attention to anything outside of their building, but the Bengals have continued to maintain that they know they aren't out of the playoff hunt yet with the way things have fallen this year in the AFC. Bengals coach Marvin Lewis told his team about the 2016 Packers, pointing out how they lost 5-of-6 games to drop to 4-6, but went on a win streak to finish 10-6 and get to the playoffs. "We've got to keep playing," Lewis said. "They ran the table and this year it's going to be somebody else. There are a lot of teams in the situation we were in starting today and teams are going to get hot and get going. We play some of them and they play each other. So we have an opportunity if we just handle our business, that's what's key. We don't worry about anything else, just keep getting better every time we come out and understand the plan. I thought today we did an excellent job of executing the plan for the most part." Added quarterback Andy Dalton: "I think, for us, we just need to keep stringing wins together. This was big for us. If we had lost this one, it would have set us even farther behind. Marvin has said that there is a team that is in the position that we're in right now that gets hot every year. We're doing everything we can to make it us."
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