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Bengals defensive coordinator Paul Guenther said during the team’s bye week that he will be looking for places where he feels younger players could be more effective than the ones who have been in prominent roles on the team so far this season.

Safety George Iloka agreed that changes should be part of the team’s attempt to improve their play in the second half of the season and broke out the old adage that only crazy people believe doing the same thing over and over will lead to a different result. Iloka probably wouldn’t tell coach Marvin Lewis that he thinks he’s crazy, but Lewis doesn’t sound like a man who believes that the time has come for big changes to the team’s defense.

“Paul shouldn’t have … you have to be careful doing that,” Lewis said on his weekly television show, via ESPN.com. “We’re going to keep working and guys will earn opportunities as we go. But you’ve got to earn opportunities. We’re not going to just make a wholesale change and so forth. Our good players are expected to play good and I think that’s part of it. They have to play up to a certain level all the time. We have guys doing that on offense, but we have to get the same throughout the football team in every area. And we have to continue to coach better — that’s part of the responsibility as well.”

Given Lewis’ spot in the team’s hierarchy, Guenther does need to be careful about implementing changes since his boss doesn’t seem to be too into the idea. The results of the first half don’t make staying the course all that appealing, though, and that’s especially true if your future in the job is tied to how the unit performs.