If the Bengals lose, Mike Brown’s refusal to build a indoor practice facility or even a bubble will play no small part in it. It poured yesterday and now we’re in an ice storm with snow to follow. The Cincinnati Bengals can’t effectively practice on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of the week before the Super Bowl.
What CincyBillsFan says about Mike Brown not firing coaches is very true. How else do you explain how much futility they endured before firing Marvin Lewis? But there is another thing. The Brown family has very little money, relatively speaking. For example, they have no facilities that the team owns of any kind. The county owns the stadium and there is no training complex. They practice in the stadium and the weight room is in the basement. They don’t even have a practice bubble, something even D3 college teams have. They also don’t pay a premium for assistants. They have the smallest scouting staff in the NFL. For many years, they had no college scouts at all. The only reason that they are winning now is that their core players are all on rookie contracts. Everyone talks about their cap space. They always have cap space and they never spend it. They won’t pay Tee Higgins. They might not pay Mixon. It’s not that he cheap, it’s that the team is his only asset of any value.
As the OP noted, that roster was f-ing loaded at RB and TE. If you had Frank Gore, Willis McGahee, Clinton Portis, Najeh Davenport, Jeremy Shockey, and Kellen Winslow Jr. on a single college roster, you'd run 12 personnel too.
I'm sure that all of this is nothing new. As someone mentioned above, Frazer interviewed with the NYG after Daboll too. But because Flores realized that he's not getting another HC job because of all the stuff that Ross and the Dolphins' GM is spreading around the league about him being difficult to work with, he decided to torch all the bridges to get one final NFL payday before going to college. That's my speculation.
If this is true, it's a byproduct of Sean McVey and Zac Taylor meeting in the SB. All teams will want an offensive assistant under 40. Zac Taylor's highest position before being handed the reins of the Cincinnati Bengals was QB coach.
I don't think that he can do that unless Tampa releases him because he's still under contract with them for next year. Otherwise players would "retire" to get out a bad situations all the time.