Hiring Jim Turner would contradict Zac Taylor’s theme of preaching character

The Bengals’ new head coach Zac Taylor was finally announced officially on Monday, and we were met with all the optimism you should expect from an introductory press conference on Tuesday. He said all the right things, and he seemed to have the full support of the team’s owner. Taylor also talked about a standard he hopes to create in Cincinnati.

“Communication, character — those are two things that this thing will be built on,” Taylor told reporters on Tuesday. “I’m going to continue mention good people and having the right people. That’s coaches and players, because everyone has to have a shared vision and play for each other, and not just play for themselves. I have no concerns whatsoever that those people are in the building and will continue to add to that. The culture drives the program. Everyone runs the same plays, the X’s and O’s are all the same, but people dress it up a little bit differently. If everyone is playing for each other, then great things are going to happen for us.”

Those statements don’t seem to match the recent news on the team’s search for an offensive line coach. Just hours after Taylor’s press conference, it was reported that the team is set to hire Jim Turner for the opening.

That name may not ring any bells, but he was the Dolphins’ offensive line coach when the Richie Incognito and Johnathan Martin bullying fiasco went down. The same situation that recently led to Martin being arrested for threatening his former teammates on Instagram with a caption over a picture of a gun.

That was of course started when Incognito and his teammates persistently harassed Martin during his time in Miami. Turner was fired by the Dolphins for his involvement in the bullying.

Some may brush that off as a one time thing, and that we should give him a chance because people change. Personally, I also believe in second chances. You can look at Joe Mixon as an example of a second chance gone right.

After his unforgivable assault of a woman while he was at Oklahoma, he has managed to avoid getting into trouble since joining the Bengals, and he has become one of the best teammates anyone could ask for.

However, this seems like trend with Turner. He eventually went back to Texas A&M following trouble finding a job after the Dolphins fired him, but he couldn’t even get to the first game without getting suspended for making sexist jokes at a football clinic for woman.

This isn’t “locker room talk”, nor does it show awareness for someone who already got in trouble for inappropriate behavior as an authority figure. Why is a man who has repeatedly showed he doesn’t deserve to be entrusted as a leader deserving of yet another chance? You can only imagine what his conduct is like in private when conversing with players and coaches.

That isn’t the kind of guy you bring in when you want to build a culture of players and coaches who do it right. It also doesn’t help that his offensive lines have never had a track record of success either, which just makes the reported hire even more confusing.

It would be a very unfortunate start for Taylor to start off his tenure with a hire like this.