Roughly $4 billion

[*rfaulk34*]

(Today, 01:56 AM)Whatever Wrote: But the wealthy owners CAN outspend the poorer ones.  That's the thing you don't get.

Contracts for top talent are now more about guaranteed money than average annual value.  How many times do you hear with the Bengals that contract issues revolve around guaranteed money?  All money guaranteed within a contract has to be put into escrow per the current CBA.  Teams can use strategies to alleviate the salary cap hit, like for example, they can use void years to push out a portion of the signing bonus hit.  However, you still have to come up with that cash up front for the signing bonus, and the wealthier teams will always have more liquid cash on hand to dish out for insane bonuses that the Bengals struggle to match.  The Bengals' issue is not having cap space.  It's the fact that strategies like void years allow teams with more liquid cash to offer larger guaranteed money numbers and stay within the cap.  

**** me running with this damn laptop! I had a gigantic post all typed out and i was down to my last line or two and i fat palmed something and it all disappeared...mfsob. Here's the end of the post.

Look at it this way. The Bengals are valued at roughly $4B. Liquid assets should be about 2-10% of value, depending on individual wants and needs. The Bengals are in a business that requires them to put large sums of money in escrow for guarantees, just like every other NFL franchise. If their liquid is only 5% of that 4B, that means they have 200,000,000 cash available to put in escrow, which would be about 37M more than the Eagles who have the largest amount of money in guarantees right now. 

The average NFL operating expense for an NFL franchise in 2023 was 541M. In 2023 the Bengals received 549M in revenue sharing. That means the NFL paid for 100% of the Bengals operating expenses for the 2023 season. The NFL has paid for at least a portion of the Bengals expenditures for a loooong while now. 

Anyone trying to say the Bengals simply can't pay whatever other teams pay, are "cash poor" or whatever hobspin someone wants to put on it, is either trolling or not willing to look at or believe the large sums of money the team has made for many years and how they've had heaps of money dropped on them for the last 10+ years. 

INb4 someone yells, "they barely broke even!!!!". Don't forget they get to keep 100% of ticket sales, concessions and corporate sponsorships.