CINCINNATI (AP) — Safety Taylor Mays is getting a chance to start over with a team that’s been interested in him since his college days.

The Cincinnati Bengals acquired the second-year player from the San Francisco 49ers on Tuesday in a trade for an undisclosed draft pick.

Mays spent the morning trying to learn the playbook, then practiced with the team in the afternoon. The pass defense has been a problem in preseason drubbings against the Lions and the Jets. The Bengals tried to upgrade the safety position through free agency, but Donte Whitner signed with the 49ers instead.

Mays was San Francisco’s second-round pick last year out of Southern California. He started six games early in the season, but played less as it went along. He played sparingly in the preseason, and the 49ers made it known they were interested in trading him.

“It’s good not just for us, but for Taylor,” San Francisco coach Jim Harbaugh said. “I think it was a positive thing for Taylor. We’ve got a lot of respect for Taylor. I’ve been around him for three or four weeks now and I understand he’s a good football player. I respect him as a person. He’s a hardworking guy. I think it’s a better fit for him in Cincinnati, and I think he feels the same thing.”

Mays knew the 49ers wanted to get rid of him.

“It was tough at first,” Mays said. “It didn’t affect my confidence. I like to say I feel confident in the potential I had. That’s the mentality I had every day, and it didn’t change. I have that mindset and figure everything would work out, and I’m just fortunate that it did at this point.”

The Bengals were interested in Mays coming out of college, meeting with him before the draft.

“We’re excited to have the opportunity to work with Taylor,” coach Marvin Lewis said. “He’s somebody that coming out of college, we did extensive work on and really felt like he was a good prospect. It gives us a younger player.”

Safety Chris Crocker wasn’t sure what to make of the move and how it would affect the rest of the safeties.

“I don’t know yet,” Crocker said. “He’s a new guy. He has a lot of catching up to do. It’s going to be a new playbook. He’ll have to establish his role. Who knows what that’s going to be.”

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The Cincinnati Bengals are wasting no time getting the Andy Dalton era underway.
Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis said Dalton will be the starter in Cincinnati’s preseason opener Friday night against the Detroit Lions. It could be the first of many starts for Dalton in a Bengals uniform. He was drafted in the second round last April to replace veteran Carson Palmer, who demanded to be traded and subsequently retired.

“It’s a good opportunity for me,” Dalton said after Monday night’s practice. “I knew once I got drafted here there was going to be an opportunity. I feel I’ve come out and worked hard and tried to get better each day. That’s all I can do right now.”

The Bengals may keep Dalton and the first team on the field longer than usual, according to Lewis. Cincinnati is in the process of learning a new West Coast offense.

“We haven’t had all the offseason work that you normally would have,” Lewis said. “So I think we need to play together as a football team on both sides of the ball.”

CINCINNATI — Cincinnati Bengals coach Marvin Lewis told a St. Louis radio station that he sees rookie Andy Dalton as the starting quarterback in the team’s season opener. The Bengals took Dalton with their second-round pick, the 35th overall selection in the draft. They have an urgency at quarterback with veteran Carson Palmer holding firm to his threat to retire if the team does not trade him. “There’s no question when we selected Andy Dalton we selected him with that in mind that he’d possibly be our opening-day starting quarterback,” Lewis told ESPN 101 Radio. In the same interview, Lewis said he had accepted that Palmer will not be back, although Bengals owner Mike Brown has repeatedly said that he is not trading Palmer.

Copyright 2011 by SportsDirect. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read More: Julio Jones (WR – Alabama), Cincinnati Bengals, St. Louis Rams

In our 2011 NFL Mock Draft coverage it’s come to this: Deciding which teams seem the most worrisome as Julio Jones traps, teams that could decide they need a wide receiver as much as the St. Louis Rams do, even though they’ve never had to run stories about Danario Alexander’s knee. The Washington Bengals are the Rams’ most common enemies on this front, picking Jones at 10 in a number of post-Combine mock drafts, but the Cincinnati Bengals are the latest threat—at fourth overall—after Peter King intimated that they have Jones higher than A.J. Green on their draft board. 

The good news is that the Bengals still have to deal with Carson Palmer’s retirement-backed trade demand; Julio Jones is great, but it would be easier to pull the trigger that early if the team had some idea of who might throw to him. A report on Twitter has Bengals coach Marvin Lewis saying that “the QB need is greater” than at wide receiver, but before you take that without salt keep in mind that he began it by saying “we have options at wide receiver that include Chad Ochocinco.” 

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Switching from football to soccer won’t be easy for Chad Ochocinco, if it happens at all.

Locked out of his day job, Ochocinco opened a four-day tryout with Sporting Kansas City on Wednesday and by the end of his first day with the Major League Soccer team the star receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals was panting for breath.

“Exactly what I expected,” the six-time Pro Bowler explained. “I would be a little winded being that I haven’t ran at this pace or this level since the end of our season of football. It was fun. I didn’t expect to come in here and be Superman.”

Ochocinco plans to go through with the tryout, and, if possible, join the MLS team. The famously spotlight-hungry player insisted he was motivated by love for a sport that was actually his first choice until his grandmother persuaded him to focus on football after the 10th grade.

“I would play for free,” he said.

Wearing No. 85, of course, Ochocinco worked out with more than 40 media representatives lining the practice field, roughly 10 times the number that normally show up for a midweek workout. He moved fluidly on the cold, blustery day and was taller than almost all the professional soccer players on the field.

His athleticism was obvious and so was his soccer rust after so many years away from the game.

“The time I’ve had off from the game of this football has been a very long time,” he said. “There’s no way I can make up that ground, the years I’ve been away from the game. But I do have a love for it.”

With the NFL in a lockout and a court fight looming, Ochocinco has said now is a good time to check into another sport. Sporting Kansas City coach Peter Vermes said he tried to use the practice to help Ochocinco get acclimated to something new.

For much of the day, he had individual instruction from assistant coach Zoran Savic.

“He was a little bit hesitant early on, a little bit tentative,” said Vermes. “But I think now he’s got a good feel for what a day goes like for us. You can see he’s very coachable. I wouldn’t try to make any determinations at this point.”

On Tuesday at the NFL owners meetings in New Orleans, Bengals coach Marvin Lewis took at shot at Ochocinco when asked about the receiver’s MLS tryout.

“How does he do at anything?” Lewis told reporters. “What has he ever done that he’s completed? What circle has he ever connected in any way?”

Ochocinco responded to his coach’s comments via Twitter early Wednesday, providing a link to a column on Black Sports Online that criticized Lewis for his comments about the receiver.

“Marvin Lewis won’t say anything bad about Carson Palmer, stays kissing his ass, but disses @ochocinco daily #smh,” he wrote.

Vermes knows many people will view the tryout as a publicity stunt, either by Ochocinco or the team.

“I’ve said this before — I’ve always considered it from the very beginning to be a long shot. But I can tell you this, we bring trialists in all the time,” Vermes said. “To be frank, they’re always long shots. But we also bring guys in with much lesser physical tools than he has and they get trials with us as well. It’s very normal in our sport to do this. It’s just different because it’s a guy who’s coming from the NFL.

“I did not want it to be a media thing for him. He said it wasn’t.”

Ochocinco insisted he would have stayed with soccer and given up football if it had been practical.

“I had that talk with grandma. We talked about what do you want to do for your career,” he said. “In that time in 1994, soccer was not the thing in the states, especially in high school. Football was the route I had to go and I put all my energy into that. With the lockout here, this is something I always wanted to do. It was her choice for me not to play soccer and now I have the opportunity to do it. It was always my No. 1 sport, my No. 1 love.”

He also said he encountered no resentment from the established players when he showed up.

“I don’t think I’m going to take anybody’s job. It’s not going to happen,” he said. “These guys have been playing this game for years and I’m trying to make the transition from football to football. To come in here and take someone’s job is pretty farfetched.”

Knowing he’ll eventually return to the Bengals when the players and owners settle their differences, Ochocinco said he would be content to just be a squad man and practice with Sporting Kansas City

“That would be fun,” he said. “When the lockout, when it does happen, or we’re able to go back and play, I’ll be in better shape than everyone else because I might be the only one training at this level.”

Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer(notes) has made a pretty big stink this offseason about how he never wants to play for the Bengals again.

CBSSports.com reports that “members of the team’s coaching staff, including head coach Marvin Lewis, visited with Palmer” and he’s told them all the same thing: if he doesn’t get traded, he’ll just retire. The source that shared this info with CBS also reports that Palmer doesn’t expect that the team will be sending him elsewhere.

The site’s sources say that Palmer is so “fed up” with the Bengals that “he’s OK with not playing … so long as it’s not playing in Cincinnati.”

Let the rumors come to you. Follow Scoop du Jour on Twitter or Facebook.

Source: CBSSports.com

Related: Carson Palmer, Cincinnati Bengals

CINCINNATI – He is perfectly willing to walk away from football, he tells friends, if football means playing for the Cincinnati Bengals.

“I will never set foot in Paul Brown Stadium again,” is how he put it to one confidant.

He continued, “I have $80 million in the bank. I don’t have to play football for money. I’ll play it for the love of the game but that would have to be elsewhere. I’m prepared to live my life.”

Palmer has obviously expressed those feelings or others like them to the Bengals. And at long last, it appears they are taking him seriously. Rather than let him walk away into retirement and leave them holding an empty bag, they may be softening their stance to let him try to resurrect his career elsewhere in which case they’d get something in return.

That is the message one takes away from a Peter King report Monday. The well regarded Sports Illustrated NFL insider says that the uncertain labor situation is holding up any definitive movement at the moment.

His report reads in part, “Talking to one Bengals official over the weekend, I was surprised to hear that whenever trades are allowed after the signing of a new CBA, the team will listen to offers for Palmer.”

It was last Thursday that Marvin Lewis told reporters at the combine that he knows Mike Brown and that he’s not inclined to cave in such situations.

They said the same about the Berlin Wall months before it fell in November of 1989.

Carson Palmer is apparently determined to leave Cincinnati.

Palmer, who has demanded the Bengals trade him, told a confidant he “will never set foot in Paul Brown Stadium again,” WCPO-TV in Cincinnati reported Tuesday.

Bengals owner Mike Brown said in January that he will not trade Palmer because the quarterback is crucial to the team’s plans.

Several sources told ESPN senior NFL analyst Chris Mortensen in January that Palmer will contemplate retirement if the Bengals do not trade him.

According to Tuesday’s report, Palmer said “I have $80 million in the bank. I don’t have to play football for money. I’ll play it for the love of the game but that would have to be elsewhere. I’m prepared to live my life.”

Palmer hasn’t talked to the media since making his trade request. A text message seeking comment wasn’t returned. Agent David Dunn released a statement saying that “because of the lack of success that Carson and the Bengals have experienced together, Carson strongly feels that a separation between him and the Bengals would be in the best interest of both parties.”

Palmer was the franchise’s building block when it made him the first overall pick in 2003, Marvin Lewis’ first season as coach. He led the Bengals to the playoffs in 2005 and 2009 — their only winning records in the past 20 years — and rebounded from severe knee and elbow injuries along the way.

Information from The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Cincinnati Bengals have hired James Urban to tutor the team’s wide receivers on Marvin Lewis’ coaching staff, the team announced Monday.

Urban, 37, served as the Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterbacks coach the past two seasons, helping Michael Vick to win The Associated Press’ 2010 NFL Comeback Player of the Year award. 

Urban was promoted to assistant offensive coordinator after the season. He’s served with the Eagles since 1999 in a variety of front office and coaching roles.

In Cincinnati, Urban will work with offensive coordinator Jay Gruden, who runs an offense similar to Eagles coach Andy Reid’s attack.

The Bengals also announced that Paul Guenther will move from assistant linebackers coach to tutor defensive backs and serve as an assistant on special teams.

David Lippincott was named defensive quality control coach after serving as an offensive assistant the last three seasons.

Who’s to blame for the Cincinnati Bengals going 4-12 last season? Terrell Owens says that’s an easy one: The owner and the coaches.

“You start with the head coach, and then you start with the staff on both sides of the ball,” Owens said on NFL Network’s Total Access. “Offensively, we really didn’t have the coaching that we really needed to muster what we had on the offensive side of the ball.”

But Owens wasn’t done with head coach Marvin Lewis and his staff. Responding to NFL Network analyst Warren Sapp naming Bengals owner Mike Brown, Owens said Brown also deserves a heaping help of blame.

“I’ve made a comment about if you’re trying to win some championships, it starts from the top down,” Owens said. “[Sapp] mentioned Mike Brown; I think even before I got there, they said the owner was a little different. Obviously, I saw that.”

According to Owens, the players were good enough that the Bengals should have been a good team. But the players couldn’t do it alone.

“I think if you look at the talent we had in that locker room this year and we mustered four wins, that should let you know something is not right,” Owens said. “Throughout the year, I saw some things that really wasn’t right.”

Of course, there were reports during the season that one of the things that wasn’t right was Owens himself not being a good teammate. And there have been indications that the reason Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer wants out is that he’s sick of having bad teammates, including Owens.

But Owens says the blame for Palmer wanting out starts at the top, too.

“Obviously if you have your franchise quarterback who is supposed to be that guy for your team trying to get out of there, that’s kind of telling the organization something, and that’s telling a lot of people out there something as well,” Owens said.

It also tells us something about Owens that he doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that his arrival in Cincinnati had something to do with the Bengals’ decline from first place to last.