If you’re going to get fired from your job as a head coach in the NFL, you would rather your holiday season interrupted than getting the false impression that you’ll be around for draft scouting meetings. The main reason for this is that teams look to make decisions within the first two weeks following the regular season and have either signed someone or conducted multiple interviews to narrow down that decision.

That process has already taken place around the league, and even the teams that haven’t announced their new head coach yet due to his current team still playing have had plenty of time to make up their minds. An example of this is the New York Jets, who are rumored to be ready to announce the hiring of Rex Ryan once the Baltimore Ravens’ season concludes.

What makes the Tampa Bay situation even more puzzling is that they hired from within. A day after canning the man playfully known as ‘Chucky,’ the Bucs introduced Raheem Morris as head coach, less than a month after he was promoted to defensive coordinator after serving two years as the defensive back coach under Gruden.

Whatever happened behind closed doors down in Tampa must have been pretty interesting. This decision seems to have been made hastily and possibly pursuant to a disagreement between Gruden and the Buc hierarchy.

Some people never learn. Even when their team is going through a miserable season in which they were lucky to have the one win they can show for themselves, selfishness rises to the top. In the case of the Cincinatti Bengals, what could go wrong has gone wrong. Head coach Marvin Lewis somehow manages to keep his job as the inmates have run the asylum during his watch. The leader of the pack has been Chad Johnson…oh, excuse me…Ocho Cinco. It pains me to have to do that. On second though, screw him. I’ll call him Johnson if he likes it or not!

While his antics may have been amusing in the past when the team was playing decent football, that act has gone cold mighty fast. Whatever the reason(s) why the attention-seeking Johnson was deactivated approximately 10 hours before a Thursday night kickoff, the fact of the matter is that he is a lightning rod for controversy. Is he talented? There is no questionof that, so to leave him out of a game where he could have made a difference is even more glaring.

What appears to have occurred is Johnson having a disagreement with one of the assistant coaches during a team meeting and him possibly walking out of the room. What makes this even more annoying is teammate John Thorton stating that Johnson “has done worse” in the past and didn’t get suspended, and that Lewis was making a “statement” by doing so. The problem that I – and everyone else should – have with this is that if Lewis had done his job before and layed down the law, Johnson would have never dreamed of committing such insubordinate acts, if he even was still on the team.

Maybe this is just another prime example of why Lewis took so long to get a head coaching job in the NFL. He was being lauded as such a great defensive mind when he was on the staff of the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens, and rightfully so. But to be the ‘bad guy’ and have to throw down the hammer is a totally different situation that being an assistant coach.