JoeyB -Fortunately, not a lot to do in Cincinnati...

[HarleyDog]

(12-23-2021, 04:12 PM)Murdock2420 Wrote: I'm not flipping through all 4 pages of this thread to see if this was mentioned, but there are three reasons you don't make this comment even as a joke:

1) You have a lot of connections to the city through people who are invested in the "nothing to do" nightlife. Such as Jeff Ruby who has had multiple meals happen while recruiting new free agents. You don't want to slap these people in the face who provide this service for your team, and spend money on season tickets to give away or for staff or for themselves. There is a large connection between bars and sports teams in the cities that have them. Don't burn that bridge.

2) You just turned off a lot of potential free agents. Burrow spent the off-season having the above mentioned dinners with people and trying to get them to come play here. Now you just said, come spend several months here for a season of football, but there is nothing to do. That is not a great recruitment tool.

3) You insulted a portion of your fanbase. While there will be some who don't live in Cincinnati or saw it as a joke or whatever, there will also be a portion of your fanbase who didn't take it as a joke and are highly offended. Be it they own a bar in OTR, or work in one, or just love their city. It's just a dumb comment to make if you are trying to be the leader of a team. Why run the risk of pissing off any part of your fanbase with a comment to try and be "funny" when it could have been 100% avoided by saying something like "We are focused on football, not on the nightlife." No chance to offend with that. He's young and hopefully he learns from this shit strorm on social media.

Tbf, he’s in front of the press and they asked a question. He did his best to answer. Doesn’t really matter and doubt anything would have came from the comments had a writer not used click-bait content. Also, he said not a lot, he didn’t say there was nothing to do. I doubt he weakened our FA over the comment or even upset business owners. As for fans, I haven’t read or witnessed anyone pissed about what he said, only a few questioning it.

If it did weaken our FA, then it’s an acceptable trade off. I doubt the team or the organization want players coming here because of the nightlife.