Lewis on the future: Nothing `earthshaking'

For the fifth consecutive Marvin Lewis news conference, I have asked about the team's plans for the future:

This answer was what Lewis had this afternoon.

"Don't get your hopes all up on Monday. I think you really kind of, the comments I've heard jumped the gun. For the most part, we've redone our coaches' contracts each and every year. So you can relax, for the most part.

"And, so, things that way, we'll make decisions as we go forth in the offseason, but we're not going to have earthshaking news that you can run home about.

"We're going to evaluate our players and our coaching and try to move forward. We've got to build a better team that can go win games in this division week in and week out, and that means being able to run the football more effectively, being able to take care of the football, defend the run and eliminate explosive plays, and make plays on special teams. So that's what we're going to go back and look very, very hard at, how we got started and look at where we went sideways and make sure we get back on track.

"You're going to have injuries always play a part, but that's no excuse for it. When you have injuries you got to have your good players step up and got to go win games for you. We didn't do a good enough job as coaches to get our guy in position to do that, and that's why we're sitting here and looking at not playing on."