03-10-2016, 01:09 PM
(03-10-2016, 12:30 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: Honestly, I'm not even sure why you always argue about this. I've seen you say that you wish the Bengals would pursue someone every now and then. It seems we want the same thing. Heaven forbid you agree with Toast Jones though.
We argue about it because people like Toast Jones claim that anyone who disagrees with him does not want to win.
We argue about it because people refuse to acknowledge that MANY free agents do not work out.
We argue because even though the Bengals have a long history of paying top money to keep our best players a lot of people here insist Mike Brown is too cheap to pay top dollar to top players.
We argue about it because the Bengals spent over the league cap last year and a certain group of people are still obsessed with Mike Brown being cheap. "Free-agent" threads turn into "practice bubble/gatorade/what we spent in 2011" threads.
Too many people carry grudges that cloud their vision.
RoyalRedlegs posted a link to a very balanced article about the Bengals cap situation this year. It looked at all the VALID deductions from our $38 million in cap space and said we should have about $27 million available instead of the $15 million that the team announced (through Hobs). I am still waiting until free agency is finished before I will comment on how much more we should have spent.
Also the the Bengals have been choosing to roll over the unused cap space instead of taking it as profit like some teams do. And the reason we were able to spend over the league cap last year was because we had rolled over cap space from the previous year. The amount of money they were able to roll over this year was smaller because we spent over the cap last year.
As far as I know the Bengals are the only "family business" in the NFL. The owners of every other team (except the publicly held Packers) made their money from some other source before buying an NFL team just for prestige and entertainment. So I doubt the Bengals will ever be among the biggest spenders in the league. But recently they have been far from the bottom and in the last couple of years they have been well up in the top half of the league.
