How are the Bengals doing?

And if they aren’t doing well, then what does that mean for Marvin Lewis?

Those are two questions I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ve been reading a few articles here and there about how bad Bill Belichick was in Cleveland. Or maybe it’s how lucky he got in New England.

But the consensus is that he is inherently the same person in Cleveland as he is now in New England.

Based on that, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Marvin Lewis is the same person who turned around a 2-14 team and immediately made the Bengals a respectable 8-8 unit.

But I don’t know how many Bengals fans agree with me. The Enquirer has been running these silly State of the Team surveys this past week. They had asked fans of all the local teams to complete a survey and then posted the results. The Bengals didn’t fare too well.

61% of the 3,910 fans who took the Bengals survey said the team is worse off now than 2-3 years ago. Over half of the respondents ranked the current state of the franchise a 3 or below, on a scale of 1-10. And Marvin Lewis was ranked equally low.

I’m as disappointed as anyone in the season we had this year, but this seems to be a really stunning negative response on the part of the fans. And I think a big part of this is that we care so much, and we felt we were so close two years ago, and we haven’t really improved since then, and that’s just extremely frustrating.

But I continue to believe that Marvin Lewis is the right coach. Just as Belichick learned from his time in Cleveland and improved in the areas he needed improvement, I believe that Lewis is doing that, too. Hey, he got rid of Barney Bresnahan; that is at the least an indication that he’s paying attention.

Lewis led this team over a huge hump his first year, from absolutely sucktown to thrillingly average. And his third year, he got them over the next hump into the playoffs. And lets not forget that every year, except for this past one, the team had a chance of the playoffs in the last week of the season.

That’s not a great track record, but it’s not bad. Not Belichick in Cleveland bad. And here’s one person who believes Marvin has the potential to get this team over the last few humps and win a Super Bowl.