Read Sports Geek’s argument that Brad Childress has the most pressure to perform early, and Loyal Homer’s argument that Wade Phillips is the man in the crosshairs.
I feel like a kid trying to go to sleep on Christmas Eve! We are just a few short days away from the opening of NFL Training Camps, and while the old adage that ‘every team is undefeated’ may hold true for now, there are several coaches in the league who already find themselves on the “hot-seat.”
Loyal Homer will argue that Wade Phillips of the Dallas Cowboys is the man with the target on his back, and Sports Geek will argue that it is Brad Childress whose head is first on the chopping block.
As for Bleacher Fan, I believe it is Marvin Lewis of the Cincinnati Bengals whose number has finally come up!
The fact that he’s been able to avoid speculation this long is astonishing to me. Let’s be honest, it’s not like the Bengals were a well regarded team when he took over the reigns from Dick LeBeau in 2003, but to say that the team has actually REGRESSED under Lewis’ tenure is a dubious honor that I’m sure he won’t be writing home about any time soon!
Sure, his first three seasons with Cincinnati showed promise. He took the team from a 2-14 record in 2002 and turned in records of 8-8, 8-8, and then 11-5 respectively. The 2005 season also marked the first division championship AND playoff appearance for the Bengals in 15 years. Things were looking promising for Lewis.
Something changed, though, following the knee injury to Carson Palmer in the 2005 Wild-Card game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Bengals came into the 2006 season full of promise, but that promise never materialized into success.
Their records for the following three years plummeted, dropping from 8-8 in 2006 to 7-9 in 2007, before finally bottoming out at 4-11-1 last year. All told, in six seasons as the Bengals head coach, Marvin Lewis has only turned in one season with a winning record, and his career record in Cincinnati is 46-49-1 (.486).
Accompanying that severe decline in performance came a string of legal charges against players within the Bengals organization that made Lewis look like the NFL’s real life version of Nate Scarborough. Then came the icing on the cake – Chad Johnson (I refuse to call him by his “new” name). I will give the man his due, he is a top-tier receiver, but he has turned his existence in the NFL into a media circus that has created far more controversy than it has touchdowns. Between the off-field drama around Johnson’s “happiness” with the organization, and his antics on the field, he has become more of a distraction than anything else.
So where does that leave Marvin Lewis? When you consider the personnel issues, compounded by the lack of success on the field DESPITE having players like Carson Palmer, Chad Johnson, and T.J. Houshmandzadeh (who isn’t even a Bengal anymore), it gives off the appearance that Lewis has zero control over the players within his organization. He comes off as a hapless victim, rather than the leader of a professional football team.
Fast forward to the 2009 season, and this year’s training camp… what is Lewis’ solution to these problems? He welcomes even greater public scrutiny by allowing his Bengals to be the focal point of the HBO mini-series Hard Knocks. That means that every decision he makes in the preseason, and every incident that occurs during training camp, will not only be scrutinized by Bengals fans, beat-reporters, and the Bengals organization, but will actually be scrutinized by a national television audience!
How has that worked out in the past? During the return of the series in 2007, the show watched Herm Edwards as he led the Kansas City Chiefs to a record of 4-12 (Edwards was subsequently fired in early 2009). In 2008, the series travelled to Dallas, where they witnessed the preseason hype around the Dallas Cowboys, preseason favorites to be NFC Champions, and who subsequently melted down mid-season and missed the playoffs altogether. Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips barely escaped the season with his job, and his job-security is still very tenuous, as Loyal Homer points out in his argument today.
Between the increased public scrutiny over his every move in this pre-season, the inability to maintain control over the players within his organization, and the abysmal performances turned in on the field over the past three seasons, Marvin Lewis will need to come out of the gates with guns blazing if he wishes to stay employed in the Queen City much longer.
Posted by Bleacher Fan 
