Jim Owczarski

jowczarski@enquirer.com

MOBILE, Alabama – Sitting in his customary position near midfield of the south bleachers at Ladd-Peebles Stadium, Marvin Lewis leaned forward to rest his forearms on his knees. Behind sunglasses, he looked out over the field turf and at the groups of would-be NFL players on the Senior Bowl rosters.

They are the future of the league, and perhaps some wind up in Cincinnati at the end of April. But it’s not where, or who, Lewis wanted to be sitting at and looking at this week.

“There’s only one team that gets it as successful as they want it to be,” he said. “Everyone goes through the similar process. The overall thing, the goal is to be world champions. Only one group gets to do that.”

Lewis, 58, will be entering his 15th season with the Bengals in 2017 and told The Enquirer on Wednesday he feels good and would love to continue to chase the organization’s first championship beyond just this coming season.

“We’d like to agree to something at some point,” Lewis said about a desire to receive a contract extension. “It puts, I think, everybody’s mind at ease going forward for their futures. A lot of the people in the building, it makes it easier on them.”

Lewis and Bengals owner and president Mike Brown work together on Lewis’ contract, and extensions have often been announced in April.

Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis on Beyond the Stripes

When asked if there was an update on the status of cornerback Adam Jones, who was arrested on Jan. 3 and faces several charges, Lewis deferred to the organization to say "it's not my comment to make." On Friday the club issued an apology "to the public and to our loyal fans."

Marvin Lewis’ long-term game plan for football and life

While Lewis and his staff are in Mobile to look ahead and chase a Super Bowl trophy, the biggest takeaway from the year-end self-evaluation the head coach took away from a 6-9-1 season was centered around one word: competition.

“It’s kind of all-encompassing,” Lewis explained. “It means you’ve got to do a better job of our guys understanding the situation, everything about situational football, just the competitiveness of practice, the execution of the things in practice, pushing young players to pull more out of them. As coaches we’ve got to pull more out of these players all the time. The response of this is how we’ve done it is not quite good enough. It’s not good enough. Everything has got to be better. We’ve got to pull more out of each guy.”

To illustrate that thought, Lewis pointed to the group of rookie receivers in 2017 that contributed, from second-round pick Tyler Boyd to undrafted free agent Alex Erickson.

“My vision would be to get more earlier out of guys like Tyler Boyd, to be successful,” Lewis said. “Sometimes it’s on the player, sometimes it’s on us as coaches. But at the end of the process, but if we can get more out of them so that we get it done earlier. Then maybe at some point in his development, the light comes on in week two or three or week four or five.”

As a team, the Bengals finished the 2016 campaign 24th in the league in scoring and 13th in total offense. Defensively, the team rallied to finish with the league’s eighth-best scoring defense, but was 17th overall in total defense.

They lost six games by eight point or less.

“There are a lot of positives but the end result is when you don’t win, that’s the ultimate thing,” Lewis said. “And there was not enough ‘good enough’ to win the games. That’s the ultimate goal. Yeah, it wasn’t like there were 80-yard runs or 80-yard passes (allowed on defense), or a whole bunch of this or a whole bunch of that, but when you don’t win it gets magnified if there’s anything like that.

“It’s the same thing on offense if you don’t score in the red zone, and you don’t do those things, you’re going to lose. You work too hard to get those opportunities not to make good on those opportunities every chance you get.”

Looking ahead to 2017, the Bengals could potentially have 11 draft picks once compensatory selections are awarded, and there are usually one or two undrafted free agents that surprise and make a run at the final 53-man roster.

While Lewis maintained that the coaches are still too new to the evaluation process to go deep into specific prospects, he allowed that trying to roster 10 or more rookies could be difficult.

“That’s a lot to absorb,” Lewis said. “You never know what happens through injury and things that occur. You don’t know what’s going to occur. But I think at the end of the day, just sitting here now, that’s a lot to be able to digest, 11 draft picks. That’s a lot of change, a lot of young guys. But you never know what happens. We’ll see. There’s a long time before that.”

Speaking about players he knows that will be on the roster, Lewis said this is the year that second-, third- and fourth-year players will be expected to make a leap and help the Bengals get back to the playoffs and compete for a championship.

“It’s time,” he said. “Now it’s time for them to make real winning football, game-changing type football contributions.”