By Marc Hardin
FOX Sports Ohio | BengalsInsider.com
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The Bengals are in a slump. They have lost three games in a row and eight of their last 11, including postseason. If they lose Sunday at home to Miami, the Bengals will have won just 16 of their past 40 games.
As you look at the Bengals try and make a big splash, they are drowning, not waving.
Their head coach, Marvin Lewis, in his eighth year at the helm, has been trying to convince team president Mike Brown that he deserves a new contract. Yet Lewis keeps saying he needs to coach better, so much so that he is starting to sound like a skipping record.
And he's not alone.
Bengals' defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer already has admitted to coaching lapses (see the overcoached defense at New England), and now Zimmer's defense is under fire in the wake of a collapse in Atlanta, which followed failures against Tampa Bay and mistakes by the lake against Cleveland. With everybody back on defense, and with the addition of Adam Jones and the rookies, the Bengals are actually worse.
Culprits? Just off the top: No pressure up front, guys in the middle who are liabilities in pass coverage and a secondary vulnerable to big, physical receivers who can out-jump and out-run them.
Though they improved against Atlanta with regard to penalties, the Bengals still collected seven and they continue to dumbfound with such infractions as too many players on the field. These lapses, in addition to other pre-snap penalties, which continue to occur, are the product of a lack of discipline.
And when it comes to discipline, coaches are in charge. When the team can't cut it in the focus department, it's left for the coaches to fall on the swords.
In a sometimes too often pass-the buck world, coach Lewis has shown that one of his best abilities is accountability. But I'm not so sure Mike Brown wants a head coach in his eighth season who is admitting, just about every week, that he needs to coach better.
Isn't the apprenticeship over with?
It seems Lewis has been especially accountable over the last two weeks.
After the Tampa Bay loss and the "aggressive" third-and-13 call, Lewis took the blame for going for the first down from his own 38 with 2:28 to play and the Bengals leading 21-14.
Last week, Lewis told CBS's Shannon Sharpe that he has to "coach better. That's the truth. I have to coach better. When you say that, everybody shuts up."
Well, almost everybody.
On Monday, special teams coach Darrin Simmons said that the decision on Sunday for punt returner Quan Cosby to fair-catch at the Cincinnati 4, instead of staying away from the ball in the hope that it would go into the end zone, giving the Bengals the ball at the 20 with 28 seconds remaining, was a call that Lewis made. According to the team's official site, Lewis apparently thought he would get an end-over-end punt from Michael Koenen and that it would stay on the field after the bounce instead of going in the end zone, potentially costing the Bengals some time on the clock before they could down the punt.
Who's to say.
That seems like a physics problem for someone smarter than us. And coach Lewis knows a lot more about football than most everybody who writes about what kind of football decisions he makes.
But there is no mistaking that what we are hearing lately in Cincinnati is the steady drumbeat of mistake-admitting by coaches.
There's more admission going on around here than in a James Joyce novel. Hopefully, things will get corrected before a confessional stage because I don't want to be whipping out an Allen Ginsberg reference.
They say the first step toward recovery is recognition. If that's the case, the Bengals are ready to get off the operating table.
"We made mistakes to stall drives, kill ourselves, but at some point we have to have a lot of pride," said Bengals receiver Terrell Owens, who has been around a lot of team implosions in his career.
Only T.O. and his Bengals teammates know if they are ready to get up and start swinging.
It's a lot like watching the boxing-gloved fight scene between the characters of Paul Newman and George Kennedy in the chain-gang movie "Cool Hand Luke". Kennedy's big-boned Dragline beats the crap out of the smaller Luke, played by Newman, who keeps taking Dragline's roundhouse punches and getting back up only to take another punch and another, and another, until the prisoners encircling the "fight" plead with Luke to stay down.
Blood is pouring from the battered Luke's nose and he is wobbly on his feet when he gets upright and takes wild swings that Dragline easily avoids. You admire Luke's pluck and his grit even though he keeps making the same mistake, and keeps paying the same price because of his failures. Yet, at some point, you wonder, is he going to get up after this one?
When the Bengals don't get up, that's when it's time for Brown to ask Lewis to step down.
The Bengals picked themselves up off the mat on Sunday for one quarter. Without those 22 points in the third, the Bengals are looking like a beaten team before November 1.
That is not a good situation for a head coach trying to keep his job.
But, as Lewis likes to say, it is what it is.
