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Courtesy Sportsillustrated.cnn.com
Just how much is an employer willing to tolerate? Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown may not be able to take too much more from his head coach, Marvin Lewis.
It's bad enough that a very talented football team with one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL can't win consistently. It's even worse that nine of Lewis' players were arrested in a nine-month span, making the Bengals look more like a chain gang than a professional football team.
Now, Lewis is allowing his mouth to run amuck, when he should be doing everything possible to take the spotlight off of him and his criminal players.
Lewis recently told ESPN radio interviewer Dan Patrick that he believes that the Cincinnati police are profiling Bengals players.
Of course, the next day Lewis apologized, using the old, "That's not what I meant" routine in a lame attempt to excuse his remarks.
Lewis is on the hot seat this season.
He'll be scrutinized by Brown more than most head coaches, because of the litany of off-the-field problems with Bengals players and the horrible mistake Lewis made, calling out the Cincinnati police.
If the Bengals start the season 1-4, look for Lewis to be canned.
Lewis appears to have over-estimated his ability to be savior to wayward young men, but when Mike Brown exerting more control over his coaches, things weren’t as much better as they were quiter. Mike Brown had a local reputation for coddling players with internal discipline problems, and even some of the best and most revered players on past teams got into messes that didn’t necessarilly get publicized. Some of them got into publicized scrapes too.
Another issue is that times have changed. Football players have always been known for bad behavior, and the players on the Bengals are hardly uniquie in the current league. But there is more scrutiny now, especially in a provincial little hick town like Cincinnati.
I’m not advocating bad behavior, but if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to know that you can’t get away with anything in Mayberry. A lot of these guys aren’t sophisticated enough to recognize Mayberry when they see it.
And that brings me to the local cops. Marvin Lewis may not have been politically smart, but he’s pretty much right about local law enforcement. For whatever reason I don’t get profiled much, and I have looked at a number of case files involving traffic stops. I have a very good picture of what cops stop people for and don’t stop people when and when they are not profiling. They consistently overlook a lot of petty stuff when you’re not on their radar. People that are profiled get pulled over for petty or even faulty reasons. Marvin Lewis should have kept his mouth shut, though. Then he wouldn’t have to disgrace himself by trying to kiss up to these creeps.
Most of what you say is dead on. I’m not sure I’d consider Cincinnati a provincial town, but I see what you’re driving at. Although it would be naive to say that the cops do not profile particular people, I think it’s more appropriate to believe they’re watching the Cincy players, based on their awful reputations. Lewis definitely should have kept quiet, though.
Thanks for the comment, MB