MTZehvor said:
It amazes me how he's managed to keep his job for as long as he has. With the possible exception of Jeff Fisher, I'm not sure any coach has achieved less with the talent he's had than Lewis. Here's a fun fact; up until they beat the Matt McGloin led Raiders in last year's wild card round, the Texans had only won two playoff games in team history. Both came against Lewis coached Bengals teams. |
The owner of the team, Mike Brown, is known as one of the most notoriously cheap owners in the league. Part of Cincinnati's business plan and free agent strategy is to use a pseudo-moneyball strategy where it finds talented but disgraced players on the cheap like Pacman Jones, Chris Henry (RIP) and Vontaez Burfect (I'm not going to even attempt to spell that correctly. The Bengals were the team that drafted Joe Mixon.
Anyway, a big reason why Marvin Lewis keeps his job is because the Bengals brings in all of these disreputable players that can't or wouldn't be able to function anywhere else, or that any other team would have gotten sick of long ago, and Lewis has a way of keeping them in line well enough to get them to function.
Lewis is an interesting case study, because on one hand you can ask why he's allowed to keep his job despite the lack of playoff success, but on the other you can ask how the hell Warden Lewis manages to keep that place from burning to the ground despite coaching the NFL version of The Longest Yard for one of the worst owners in pro sports. The truth is, not many head coaches could get the most out of many of the guys they bring in like Lewis can. Again, look at Pacman Jones pre-Bengals. So while I don't think Warden Lewis is a great head coach, I'll definitely give him credit for what he does do. Anybody in Cincinnati will take the past decade over the past 20 years before it.
