Cincinnati Bengals

It's time for the Cincinnati Bengals to fire Marvin Lewis

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

share

facebookxredditlink

foxsports

It’s time for the Cincinnati Bengals to fire Marvin Lewis, after yet another unfulfilled season.

If there was one takeaway from Sunday’s action in the NFL, it was that good teams find a way to win. The Raiders, Chiefs and even the Buccaneers managed to find ways to win games they probably should have lost. Tampa Bay allowed five-points to the second-best team in the conference, while the Raiders and Chiefs used late surges to win games that propelled them higher in the AC playoff picture.

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the Bengals dropped their eighth game of the season; seventh officially. If you include their London tie with the Redskins as a loss — which you should — then the Bengals have squandered away eight games in a season that now appears to be lost.

Now is as good a time as any to beg the question: is it time to fire Marvin Lewis? 

It’s not a new question. Bengals fans have been pondering this since the team squandered away a Wild Card game at home against the Chargers in 2013, a year after losing to the Texans in the Wild Card. That loss to the Chargers, one that planted the seed of doubt and frustration in the minds of Bengals fans, was followed by back-to-back Wild Card losses the following two years.

The seed planted in 2013 has sprouted into rage, heightened by the fact that the only way the Bengals won’t lose a playoff game under Lewis is by missing the postseason altogether.

Lewis has rested on the laurels of being just good enough to trick people into thinking his team is a year away while also being bad enough to never win anything. The last time Marvin Lewis had any real success was in 2001 when his vaunted Baltimore Ravens defense won the Super Bowl.

Now, 15-years later, the true end of his tenure with the Bengals might have been spurred in the place that garnered him attention in the first place. Cincinnati’s loss to the Ravens on Sunday highlighted their casual ineptitude to be a good team, and the borrowed time Lewis has been living on has run out.

There’s no easy fix for the Bengals. Perhaps they turn things over to defensive coordinator Paul Guenther, who is a coaching candidate heading into the offseason. He could, like Dirk Koetter did in usurping Lovie Smith in Tampa Bay, provide change without altering continuity. Cincinnati could blow this thing up and go for an outside hire who will retool things — something that doesn’t really need to be done to a team that is still close to contending.

But something needs to change, and it’s growing more and more apparent that Lewis is what needs to be altered.

More from FanSided

This article originally appeared on

share

Get more from Cincinnati Bengals Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more

in this topic

Cincinnati Bengals

National Football League