Marvin Lewis has coached the Bengals for ten seasons. To his credit, Lewis has helped resurrect the worst franchise of the 1990s; on the other hand, Lewis has not won a playoff game in ten years with the Bengals. That’s unheard of in this era where coaches are expected to win and win big right away. No other active coach has gone even five straight seasons with his current franchise without a playoff victory. At the end of the 2012 year, four coaches — Andy Reid in Philadelphia, Jim Schwartz in Detroit, and Norv Turner in San Diego — had gone four straight years, and Reid and Turner were both fired after the season. Schwartz was given a longer leash after he inherited an 0-16 team, but he is now on the hot seat. Only three others coaching at the end of 2012 had gone even three straight years for the same team without a playoff win — Buffalo’s Chan Gailey, Mike Shanahan in Washington, and Ken Whisenhunt in Arizona. Shanahan made the playoffs last year but lost, while Gailey and Whisenhunt were both replaced. ^[1]Jason Garrett and Leslie Frazier technically meet the requirement, too, but they only coached for the second half of the season in 2010.

Prior to the Super Bowl era, there was only one playoff game a year (other than playoff games to break ties). Since 1966, Lewis is one of just two coaches to coach one team for a decade and fail to win a playoff game. ^[2]If you want to look before the Super Bowl era, there were two longer streaks. Steve Owen was the Giants head coach from 1931 to 1953. He compiled a 151-100-17 record and won two championships with … Continue reading The 11th, the elder Jim Mora, was fired by the New Orleans Saints in his 11th year after a 2-6 start. The table below shows each coach since 1966 who was the head coach for the same team for five straight years and failed to win a playoff game during that stretch. The “First Yr” and “Last Yr” columns show the first and last years of the streaks, not of the coach’s tenure. Coaches who were fired in the middle of their last season are marked by an asterisk, while coaches whose reign started in mid-season (but who are treated as if they coached the entire season) are marked with a “+” sign.

Obviously Shula and Brown had extenuating circumstances. For Shula, he took the Dolphins to the Super Bowl in ’71, ’72, and ’73, winning the championship in the last two of those years. No one would have predicted that he would then experience an eight-year drought in the playoffs, but he had built up more than enough equity to keep his job. In the case of Brown, not only was he an NFL legend, but he brought the Bengals into existence and was the team’s very first coach. He was also the owner, and retired after 1975.

Mora’s tenure with the Saints serves as a solid comparison. Like Lewis, he had built a reputation as a talented defensive coach, and Mora took his team to the USFL Championship Game in all three years of the league’s existence. Mora’s team won the USFL title in ’84 and ’85, and then — like Lewis — was asked to turn around one of the league’s perpetual doormats, the Saints. He took the Saints to the playoffs four times and revived the franchise, but was fired in his eleventh season at the age of 61. At 55, Lewis is a bit younger, but this appears to be a make-or-break season for him with the Bengals. Since 1991, every team in the NFL has won a playoff game except for the Bengals. Cincinnati had one of the youngest teams in the league last year, added weapons Tyler Eifert and Gio Bernard in the NFL Draft, and are perhaps the third-best team in a watered down AFC. The Bengals have made the playoffs the last two years, but will 2013 be the year the streak ends?