Blow it up? Or go for a quick rebound?

[BoomerFan]

It does still feel like the team is just a few moves away from being much more successful. Heck, we're one competent RT and kicker away from being at least 6-5 instead of 3-7-1. I don't think you need to blow everything up, but that does not mean the coaches should be safe. You need to take a tough look at what went wrong this year. At the very, very least a positional coach MUST be held accountable. I'd usually say 'Fire a coordinator' but there is the argument that Zampese has only had a year to try to do his thing and Guenther's unit is doing better recently. That said, I'd still take a close look at them and at least consider it. Call it a 30% chance that I'd *just* (see below) fire a coord, depending on what I'm seeing in review. And the head coach shouldn't be safe, even though we know the FO won't fire him. I don't hate Marvin, but maybe his fire has gone out and it is time to move on. And I totally believe he could bring us back to 10 wins next year but as we all know, that simply doesn't matter if you don't have enough juice to win a playoff. So if I didn't fire coordinator, I'd say I'd quietly look at head coaching options towards the end of the year and if I found a few I really liked I'd go ahead and terminate Marvin's contract and start interviewing. And then I'd let the new HC make decisions about who he wanted to keep as far a coordinators -- so even if Zampese and Guenther survived the above, they could still lose their job if the head coach changed. Or maybe one or both of them would be kept either temporarily or longer.

I realize changing head coaches is scary, but isn't there a coordinator on a successful team we could take to be our head coach? Goodness knows we've had it happen to us enough times. And remember, coaching turnover sometimes brings talented players. When we got Zimmer, we didn't just get a DC, we got two CBs, a Safety, and a DT (the latter two didn't stick very long -- Tank Johnson and Roy Williams).

So I guess what I'm saying is I'm open to coaching turnover and, even though my inclination isn't to blow it all up, if you get a new HC it may happen a bit anyways. That said, my final thought is this. Marvin Lewis = John Cooper. I like John Cooper. He's a good guy, and won a lot of games over a lot of years and I respect him. But he had to go so the Buckeyes could have Jim Tressel and win a national championship. I'm ready for the Bengals to go get their Jim Tressel (or even better, their Urban Meyer).