According to steaming pile of shit The Charlotte Observer, the Panthers have given the old one fingered salute to the Cincinnati Bengals.

LEWIS STAYING WITH PANTHERS: Two sources close to the process said that the Panthers have denied Cincinnati permission to talk with secondary coach Tim Lewis about the Bengals' vacant defensive coordinator position.

Cincinnati is looking for someone to replace fired coordinator Chuck Bresnahan, and Lewis was believed to be a top choice of Bengals coach Marvin Lewis. He remains under contract to Carolina, though, and the Panthers plan to keep him.

This is big news because it hardly ever happens. It's not good business to keep a guy wallowing with Ken Lucas and Marquand Manuel when he could be wallowing with a bunch of felons in Cincinnati.

The logic goes something like this. If we refuse him the right to interview for a job, potential coaches will see this and think that if they do well they'll be stuck here. That'll hurt us as coaches continue to leave (get fired or resign).

It's odd though that we decided to do this with Tim Lewis. The secondary wasn't exactly amazing this year and there's probably the second most talent on the team at that position. He didn't really do anything that wasn't done last year except play Richard Marshall even less. Basically we've kept a coach that's not that great in exchange for telling the league "Hey, we're assholes!"

I suspect we're hanging on to him because Fox knows a yes man when he sees him and he doesn't want to risk a coach coming in having his own ideas.