The top question facing the Bengals this season concerns the development of their second-year quarterback, Carson Palmer. But Bengals fans of vintage know the mystery can be generalized to the overall competence of their offense, having watched two of these quarterback debuts blow up in third-and-long sacks.

The shadows of David Klingler and Akili Smith still mock the eternal flame guiding Bengals fans to so much darkness through the last 13 years. Somewhere in the future, perhaps, those memories will be boxed off to a back room. For now, those last two first round picks to quarterback the Bengals are the backdrop against which we anxiously anticipate Palmer's future.

That's good news for Palmer in that he can't come off any worse than Klingler or Smith. The great hope, of course, is that Palmer will enable us to raise expectations and see much more, perhaps a playoff-calibre quarterback, the kind of performer who can bring not just the Bengals back to glory but quarterbacking as well.

While that vision is into the future, we can dream this summer about a quarterback in our midst, about the Bengals winning a few games and making a bid for the playoffs, about a defense that can force turnovers. We already know the Bengals can run and catch. Can they block, tackle, throw and kick?

Can they win in Baltimore, Cleveland and Pittsburgh? These have become questions again. The Bengals will play two games in prime time this year, including an Oct. 25 Monday night game at home against the Denver Broncos. The NFL actually sees fit to enlarge the Bengals' audience. We don't even have to worry that the Bengals won't be worthy.

It can be announced, for the first time in history, that every team in the NFL has a chance to go to the Super Bowl. After a year of Marvin Lewis, the Bengals are legitimized, changing to a representative football team from an embarrassment, seeing teams they should beat on their schedule.

The Bengals open training camp Saturday after an offseason marked by clear upgrades on the defense rather than sniping between the best players and the front office. Not even the benching of popular quarterback Jon Kitna in Palmer's favor could disrupt this ship.

Of course, there really is no disruption because this ship needed so much to be disrupted, violently if in no other way. The benching of Kitna, then, really isn't that. It's an acknolwedgement that this team needs to prod its own future, which should come sooner rather than later.

Lewis took this team 18 months ago, inheriting the 67 players who comprised a 2-14 squad. Within a year, he turned over enough players to win eight games, the amount the Bengals won in the previous two years combined. Now he's trimmmed all but 19 players off that 2-14 team.

Of those remaining, 11 were 2002 starters. Half of the 2002 starters have been cycled down the depth chart and off the team.

And there's more to come throughout the rest of training camp and the season. The Bengals are a dynamic operation now. It doesn't matter if you're Corey Dillon or Adrian Ross -- you're not making this team if the Bengals can find somebody better.

At the center of all this change is the move to Palmer at quarterback, announced promptly by Lewis last March so the youngster can take all the snaps without raising a lot of uncomfortable questions. But questions arose anyway, due to the replacement of the old pro Kitna, who took the bit last year and showed what he can do, which is 8-8 for a shot at the playoffs.

If Kitna was good enough for last year's Pro Bowl, that shouldn't make him good enough for this year's starting lineup. Palmer brings different questions from "Can he do it?" to the table, questions hinting at a higher ceiling: Will he do it? And when?

Unlike Kitna, fairly or not, questions about Palmer's ability do not arise, nor are doubts raised by his track record, since he has yet to take a regular season snap. Lewis says Palmer is the better quarterback right now, and that can only be in terms of physical ability.

Now that Palmer has sat on the bench for a year and seen the world go by, the time is right for finding out about him. It remains to be seen if playing Palmer this year is a constraint against the Bengals making the playoffs.

But no one doubts that even if Kitna would win a game or two that Palmer couldn't win this year, Palmer should be able to win games in two or three years that Kitna couldn't win in any year. That's only if the Bengals make the investment.

The shadowing question here isn't whether Palmer will be better in 2004 than Kitna in 2003, but whether Palmer in 2004 will be better than Klingler and Smith in their first seasons. And that's really a question about the Bengals, rather than Palmer.

Klingler and Smith are two examples of how not to develop a quarterback. The lesson learned is that developing quarterbacks should break in with offenses good enough to earn better downs than first-and-10, second-and-10 or third-and-10, whoever is the quarterback.

Young quarterbacks will struggle even if they're protected, and the Bengals haven't protected theirs. As young quarterbacks don't process the game very fast and they're supposed to pull the trigger, their deficiencies compound and are compounded by the inadequacies of the surrounding cast. If some quarterbacks are better on third-and-10 than others, it's because their offenses function better on other downs, too.

Can the Bengals keep Carson Palmer out of third-and-10 for long enough that he can master the less challenging plays before third-and-10 becomes the defining context of his life? Third-and-10, when the pass rush is fierce and fast, the coverages are complex and the pass defenders are turned up against the pass -- that's the context in which Klingler and Smith were supposed to learn about the vortex of the NFL. It was every third play.

If neither man could meet the challenge, we shouldn't be harsh. We wouldn't expect Carson Palmer to meet that challenge either. It wouldn't be fair.

History says Palmer isn't going to set the world on fire as an NFL rookie. Though his record shows he's a reliable learner, it also shows he's a late bloomer. The reports on Palmer coming out of Southern California said he studied hard and needed lots of repetition. The history of his collegiate career shows that he broke through with an incredible final six weeks of his senior season to win the Heisman Trophy and rise to the top of the NFL draft.

Palmer has been given a year of study and a series of mini-camps in which he took the first string snaps. He'll be at the top of the depth chart for the entire training camp, for the exhibition games and the regular season. He's the guy.

But Palmer is going to see a different game this year, as everyone knows. He'll be adjusting to the speed and urgency of first-and-10, let alone the tougher downs.

This project will fail if the Bengals are counting on Palmer to be Joe Montana. They will need the running attack to let him watch, the blocking to let him see, a comfortable envirnment in which to learn.

Someday, Carson Palmer might carry the Bengals all the way to the top. The Bengals are counting on it.

For now, though, the Bengals need to carry Palmer. If you remember David Klingler and Akili Smith, you know Palmer is counting on that even more.