Mar 31, 2018 7 min read

ORLANDO, Fla. – Marvin Lewis wasn’t supposed to be at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando this year. At least that’s what the reports near the end of the season indicated.

The Cincinnati Bengals head coach was supposed to be stepping aside at the end of the 2017 season, one that ended with his team out of the playoffs for a second season in a row after posting a 7-9 record.

But that report came out when the Bengals were sitting at 5-9. Cincinnati won its final two games, beating Detroit, then knocking Baltimore out of the playoffs, and giving Lewis and Bengals owner Mike Brown good reason to want to continue their long-running partnership.

Lewis, a Fort Cherry High School graduate and McDonald native, will be back for a 17th season in Cincinnati, a tenure only surpassed among current NFL head coaches by Bill Belichick in New England.

So here was Lewis, sitting at a table at the NFL meetings last week, holding court as he had done the previous 16 years.

What a run it’s been for Lewis. His 125 regular season wins are the most in Cincinnati history, as are his seven playoff appearances. But all seven of those playoff appearances have ended with a thud, not a single victory.

Yet Lewis’ mark on Cincinnati can’t be overlooked. Prior to Lewis arriving in Cincinnati in 2003, the Bengals had gone 13 seasons without a playoff appearance.

For most of those seasons, they weren’t competitive. In the five seasons before Lewis arrived, the Bengals won 19 combined games, an average of less than four per year.

Lewis, who turns 60 in September, doesn’t have a playoff win yet, but if he learned anything from his coaching mentor, Fort Cherry’s Jim Garry, it’s the ability to persevere.

Garry coached at McDonald High School and later Fort Cherry for 44 years. But it wasn’t until he was almost at the end – in 1997 and again in 2001 – that he reached at WPIAL championship game. He won 265 games at Fort Cherry, but Lewis remembers him best as a teacher, on and off the football field.

It’s something Lewis and the NFL want to see back in football, particularly at the high school level.

“When I grew up and in my generation of football, our coaches were teachers,” Lewis said. “In the evolution of things and tenure and things where coaches now come from the outside, have other professions, other jobs, they’re not trained as teachers. I think it has hurt the game a little bit. We’re going back and we’re asking these people now to be trained a little differently. We’re asking them to be certified. Training coaches better is our responsibility to be proactive and train the people that are teaching the game at younger levels is really important.”

That ability to teach was something that hit home with Lewis about Garry early on. The two had a long relationship, dating back to when Lewis first started playing football at McDonald.

His coach in those early days? Jim Garry.

“Coach Garry instilled so much in me to want to be a football coach, so I owe a lot to him,” Lewis said. “He was one of my Little League coaches when I was 9-years old, I think, because his son, Joey was on our team. His reverence goes way back with me.”

Way back. And it’s unfading, even though Garry has been gone now for a decade, having died March 4, 2007.

Lewis won’t coach in the NFL for more than four decades as Garry did at Fort Cherry. That’s just not possible these days. But the fact he’s been a head coach in the NFL going on 17 seasons says a lot about his ability. Despite his lack of playoff success, his teams are always competitive. And they’re typically in the hunt to reach the playoffs. In fact, he’s had just four losing seasons with the Bengals.

Two of those playoff losses have come at the hands of the Steelers, including a highly disputed game in 2014 that ended when Vontaze Burfict and Adam Jones were penalized 15 yards each to set up Pittsburgh’s game-winning field goal as time expired.

The Steelers and Bengals have played some highly physical, hotly contested games in recent years. And some have said the games border on dirty.

Lewis, who is friends with Mike Tomlin, said he and Tomlin don’t get together in these settings and discuss how to change those games. In fact, he says neither are really concerned with the physical nature of those games.

“This is a physical game. Our game in 2005 was on the cover of Sports Illustrated,” Lewis said. “It’s a physical division we play in. Baltimore is no different. Cleveland is no different. It’s a physical football game. As long as everything is played within the scope of the rules, I don’t think there’s anything Mike and I can do. We can’t hold our guys back. We want them to play within the scope of the rules and not do anything that hurts your football team.”

That hasn’t always happened. But that doesn’t mean Tomlin was unhappy to see Lewis stick around in Cincinnati.

Quite the opposite.

Lewis is the longest tenured African American head coach in NFL history, someone young minority coaches can look to for guidance.

“As a younger African American coach, to see him sail through the ranks is kind of the blueprint for those who have come after him,” Tomlin said a couple of years ago. “I’m in that group. I’ve got a lot of respect for him on those levels.”

Lewis is no longer the young guy in the room. He’s no longer another minority coach looking to climb the ladder. But he still pays attention to those things in the league. And he sees some movement in the right direction. Eight of the league’s head coaches are minorities. That number was four in 2013.

There is still work to be done in a league where 70 percent of the players are minorities. But things are moving in the right direction.

Lewis said it’s getting more difficult to find good young minority coaches to become coordinators and then rise to head coaches because the competition for their services is increasing.

“All of us in those positions have to try and be proactive as much as we can,” Lewis said. “We’re competing with colleges, as well, with the way college coaches are being compensated. It used to be (the NFL) was the utopia of things. We know it’s not a utopia. But now, there’s another option. And it’s being taken by people. Hopefully, as we move forward in the future, things will improve in that and we’ll have more minority coaches in positions as quarterback coaches and those positions so they will have opportunities to ascend to being coordinators.”

Coaches, almost by definition at the collegiate and NFL levels just don’t stay in one job for all that long, either moving on to their next position or getting fired.

That’s what made the tenure of Garry – and now that of Lewis – so unique.

Fort Cherry has already named its football field after Garry.

And it could certainly name something else at the school for another former Garry player who played in and coached in the NFL for a long time, Marty Schottenheimer.

Perhaps, the district also will find a way to honor Lewis.

What could it name after him?

“Probably that jogging track that we used to have to run around, and not very fast, I might add,” Lewis said with a laugh.