Bengals take advantage of Jets’ mistakes, win 38-31

CINCINNATI – Don’t blame Chad Pennington solely for this one. He had a lot of help.\nKenny Watson ran for 130 yards and three touchdowns in the best performance of his career, and the Cincinnati Bengals turned the New York Jets’ second-half meltdown into a 38-31 victory Sunday.\nHardly a drive went by without a major gaffe by two of the NFL’s most disappointing teams.\nThe Bengals (2-4) snapped a four-game losing streak that was their longest during coach Marvin Lewis’ five seasons. Watson led the way, playing like a star instead of Rudi Johnson’s fill-in.\nThe seventh-year runner with a half-dozen career starts scored on runs of 1 and 2 yards in the second half, finishing off a Jets team that couldn’t hold a 13-point lead or get out of its own way.\nNew York (1-6) has already matched its loss total from last season, when coach Eric Mangini was dubbed the “Mangenius” for taking a previously 4-12 team to the playoffs.\nThere’s been nothing brilliant about their play this year.\nIn some ways, this one was the worst yet.\nPennington, the main target of fans’ wrath, put the Jets ahead with touchdown passes of 57 and 36 yards to Laveranues Coles, showing he can still make a big play. He couldn’t make any meaningful ones in a horrid second half by the Jets: two costly pass interference penalties, a shanked punt, a personal foul for punching a downed runner, a botched snap and Johnathan Joseph’s 42-yard interception return for a touchdown that made it 38-23 with 37 seconds left.\nPennington threw his third touchdown pass on the final play of the game, little consolation to a team off to its worst start in eight years. The Jets also opened 1-6 under Bill Parcells in 1999.\nPennington has been under fire in New York for his dink-and-dunk passing and six interceptions in the previous three games. Fans were clamoring for stong-armed Kellen Clemens to give it a try, a move that Mangini has so far resisted.\nAs he watched the second half unfold, Mangini saw a lot more problems than just the quarterback.\nFirst-round draft pick Darrelle Revis drew a pair of pass interference penalties that extended Bengals touchdown drives during their comeback from a 13-point deficit. Carson Palmer finished one of them with a 3-yard pass to T.J. Houshmandzadeh, and Watson completed the other with a 1-yard run.\nBen Graham’s shanked, 20-yard punt set up the second drive, which put Cincinnati up 24-23 early in the fourth quarter.\nThe mistakes kept coming.\nPennington was calling a play in the shotgun formation when the ball was snapped, a fumble that gave Cincinnati possession at the 50. The Bengals then drove for Watson’s 2-yard touchdown with the help of a personal foul on safety Abram Elam, who threw a left-handed punch at Watson on the ground at the end of a run.\nNot that the Bengals were on top of their game, either. They were flagged for having 12 men in the defensive huddle in the first half, and had to use a timeout because they had too many defensive players on the field in the second half.