That was the case last week when Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis offered some new insight to the team’s pursuit of Andy Dalton in 2011.
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Lewis had not been tracking quarterbacks for a number of years because the Bengals had been set with Carson Palmer. But when Palmer threatened retirement if he wasn’t traded after the 2010 season, Lewis dedicated a lot of time to scouting the position, and he kept coming back to Dalton.
“I remember even prior to (the Combine), the Super Bowl was in Dallas that year and my wife’s watching Good Morning America – I don’t remember where we were – and there was the kid with the red hair again, on TV,” Lewis said. “I was like, ‘where do I know that kid from?’ He was on the other team at the Senior Bowl.”
A few weeks later at the Combine, Lewis and offensive coordinator Jay Gruden were walking through the team hotel toward the tunnel leading to Lucas Oil Stadium when Dalton appeared again.
“I don’t know where we were going to watch, and there was the kid with the red hair standing in one of those rooms down there doing something,” Lewis said. “Before we had come over here, I had gone over to Jay’s office and said ‘Hey, have you looked at the kid from TCU yet?’ And he said ‘no, I hadn’t got to him.’ I said ‘you need to get to him.’”
Knowing they would need a quarterback who could come in a first-year starter, Lewis said he began analyzing recent draft picks who had done it such as Matt Ryan, Matthew Stafford, Joe Flacco.
“I remember talking to Hue Jackson about it, because he had been in the process when they drafted Flacco in Baltimore,” Lewis said.
Lewis said watching Dalton’s college tape “was the ‘ahh’ moment,’ but another came when he, Gruden and current offensive coordinator Ken Zampese, who was the quarterbacks coach at the time, went to TCU to give Dalton a workout.
“Just watching Andy with our coaches and his teammates,” Lewis said. “We had our own private workout that day and he had 10 teammates show up to be his receivers. So it was really cool, the fact of how people responded to him and how he responded to our coaches.”
The day the Bengals coaches arrived for the workout, there was a story in USA Today saying whichever teams ended up with A.J. Green, who the Bengals would draft in the first round with the fourth pick, and Andy Dalton, whom they would grab in the second round at 35th overall, would be the big winners in the draft.
“Jay’s like, he’s accusing me of talking with some writer,” Lewis laughed. “But we were literally holding our breath because from the offensive point of view, those were our targets.”
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