08-29-2021, 02:47 PM
(08-29-2021, 11:35 AM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: I'm really not sure how many times this has to explained to people who make posts similar to this, but I'll try once more just for good measure.
People who say the Bengals are cheap are NOT talking player spending. No team is "cheap" when it comes to the payroll spent on the players. The salary floor doesn't allow a team to be cheap.
You can look at every single team from 1 through 32 and you'll find them pretty much jumbled together. These rankings will slightly change depending on the windows used. One team may be top half over one particular span while they'll bottom half over another. Another team may be bottom half over a particular span while top half over another.
The point is, if you take total player spending over a long period (say a decade) you'll find that there isn't much of a difference between dollars spent on players. We're talking the difference between 1 and 16, and 17 and 32 being seperated by a percent or two. Again, the floor sets the stage. With every team having to meet a minimum of 88%, and with no team spending 100% every year, you'll have every team pretty much falling between 90-96% of cap spent.
So when you hear "Bengals are cheap" or "Mike Brown is cheap" is has nothign to do with player spending. This goes for free agency as well. Just because you spend more in free agency doesn't mean you're spending more total. It just means you're spending more out of house than you did in house. The same dollars are allocated but with a different approach.
The reason people perceive the team as being cheap are as follows:
-No indoor facility
-No GM
-Smallest scouting department in the league
-Small front office
-Front office filled with family members vs. paying qualified outsiders (more money with salary on top of profits and less expenses)
-Little to no investment into PBS. Primarily funded by tax dollars
-Horror Stories: Small towels (Kijani Story), Coin operated pop machine (David Fulcher story), no shampoo (Jonathan Josepth story), coach plane tickets (Tony Siragusa story), locked up gatorade, renting HDMI cables, etc.
I hope this helps clear this up a bit. I don't know how many times I hear this argument. And no matter how many times people try to correct it people never learn. The Bengals being cheap has nothing to do with cap spent or being active in free agency. When it comes to TOTAL DOLLARS SPENT they are 100% cheap.
Considering the context of this thread is 100% about paying players, which my stat is about, and not indoor facilities, scouting, front office, etc . Also, consider the guy right above me posted a picture of Mike Brown in a thread about paying a player it would seem it was 100% insinuated he was being cheap. So yes, still to this day the narrative of the Bengals being “cheap” has referenced player spending and it is false.
To the floor comment, the difference between the Bengals spending and the 32nd team was about 80 million dollars. That isn’t chump change even in the “floor” system and shows that they are spending substantially more than the lowest spending teams.
