There was a cute little video posted Wednesday on Twitter by Cincinnati television sportscaster Aly Cohen, a 17-second snippet that shows practice squad running back Tra Carson getting bopped in the helmet by a football thrown during a drill when he was facing the opposite direction.

After everybody has a chuckle, the camera turns and shows the venue for this, one of the final practices of the Bengals’ 2016 season: Paul Brown Stadium.

Just life, man. Gotta have a little fun while you're at it. pic.twitter.com/IgyTS5Cgag — aly cohen (@alyco32) December 28, 2016

Other NFL teams on a sunny, 40-degree day might have been outdoors for their work. The Bengals have to be. They’ve got nowhere else to go.

Consider this when you evaluate Marvin Lewis' 14 seasons as Bengals head coach. He announced Thursday he would return to the team for a 15th season on the Sirius/XM radio show hosted by SN’s Alex Marvez and former NFL lineman Ross Tucker, and some wonder why it should be his choice given he’s never won a single playoff game.

That he coached in seven of them, though, represents one of the most underrated coaching achievements in the league’s history.

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You may believe the NFL is the ultimate parity league: television revenue distributed evenly, player draft arranged in inverse order to the previous year’s standings, salary cap that disallows the richest franchises from hoarding the most impactful talent. But all league ownership is not created equally, and the Bengals are less equal than most in that department.

Although Mike Brown has been the team’s owner for the entirety of Lewis’ tenure, Lewis has managed not only seven playoff appearances but also four division championships in the highly competitive AFC North. That’s seven more playoff trips — and seven more winning seasons — than the Bengals had achieved in the 14 years before he arrived. The average record for Brown's Bengals pre-Lewis: 4-12.

It may be too long ago for some to remember what the Bengals were like after Mike Brown took complete control of the Bengals in 1991 and soon afterward installed Dave Shula — then 32, with a single season as a coordinator on his resume — as head coach.

That began a 13-year run in which the team did not achieve a record better than .500, under Shula, Bruce Coslet, Dick LeBeau or the early, rebuilding stages of Lewis’ tenure. They became a national punchline for their affinity for gathering and tolerating players with off-field issues. Brown, when he chose to address the topic, generally presented it as a desire to give another chance to players unwanted by others. But given his penurious approach to running the franchise generally, it could be viewed as his own twisted version of “Moneyball”: talented players unwanted by others are less expensive than those in high demand.

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One of the funniest stories about Bengaldom was told by David Fulcher, a three-time Pro Bowl safety for the team in the late 1980s/early 1990s, during an appearance on WCKY radio. Fulcher played nearly his entire career for Cincinnati, but in 1993 he left as a free agent and signed with the Los Angeles Raiders.

One day not long after Fulcher arrived in LA, he was in the locker room and felt like having a soda. So he went to the machine in the corner of the room and inserted a quarter. It dropped through the machine and landed in the coin return. He did it again, same thing. And again. He started to get frustrated at the machine being broken, then heard several players nearby laughing at him. The soda was free. Of course it was free. NFL teams take care of their players. But Fulcher was used to playing in Cincinnati, where players needed to have change available.

They are the only Northern team in the league without an indoor practice facility. The three teams that surround them geographically — the Colts, Steelers and Browns — each have one. The University of Cincinnati has one, and the Bengals borrow it (if available) in the most extreme weather. Otherwise, they practice in the stadium or on the grass fields nearby.

Even just last week, as safety Shawn Williams said on WLW radio, the team had to practice outdoors in 20- and 30-degree temperatures. In Houston to play the Texans on Christmas Eve, the temperature was 50 degrees or so warmer, and the players felt the difference.

They still lean more heavily on their coaching staff for evaluation than pretty much every NFL team. The Baltimore Ravens list 14 members of their scouting and personnel department in their staff directory, including eight designated "scouts." The Bengals list 10 with personnel responsibilities, including Mike’s brother Pete and his son Paul. There are three men designated as "personnel executives,” a euphemism perhaps employed to disguise the lack of heft in the scouting department.

The Bengals’ eagerness to take character risks experienced its apotheosis when Vontaze Burfict, who’d been called for 12 personal foul penalties in four seasons, delivered a blow to the head of Pittsburgh receiver Antonio Brown that moved the Steelers closer to a potential game-winning field goal in the closing seconds of their playoff game last January, and that was followed by an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty against Adam Jones, who’d been suspended for a year earlier in his career, released after a single season in Dallas and then rescued from the Canadian League by the Bengals.

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Lewis defended his players after that incident, and either his acceptance of this approach to personnel by the front office, or his participation in it as a part of the football operation, remains his most obvious weakness as a coach. He should be either strong enough by now to tell Brown he wants this changed, or wise enough to realize it’s holding back the team.

If he has been part of the problem, though, Marvin Lewis has been far more the solution. Can the Bengals do better? It’s not impossible, but given how this organization operates, they are far more likely to do a lot worse.