03-04-2016, 12:47 PM
(03-04-2016, 11:16 AM)BengalChris Wrote: I seriously doubt Mike Brown is taking home $130M a year. My guess is that there have been years in the past where he's taken home less than his top players. I remember one year where he took out a personal loan so the team could pay the signing bonus for a player. If I remember correctly it was for Carl Pickens, but it could have been someone else.
Now the team is in better financial condition than it was when Mike Brown were deciding the draft picks [thank God], but it's still one of the lower income teams. Not as bad as say Jacksonville, which appears to be on life support until it can be sold and moved to London.
Not each team took in $310M ($155M x 2). That's the average and the Bengals income is certainly lower than that. And from that comes a massive insurance payment, fees to the league, marketing costs, facilities costs, uniforms, travel, hotels, meals, equipment, etc, etc, etc. The list of expenses is a lot longer than most might imagine and those costs have only gone up and up some more.
I think probably everything you state is most likely true. We also know from court documents the Brown family paid $200 million in cash to purchase shares of the team from other co-owners. I"ve also read the Bengals make a profit from the stadium deal. So I don't think they are hurting for money. Pretty much everything is speculation because their financial information isn't public record, although it seems like you have some good sources.
Regardless, the salary cap is the same for all 32 teams. Everyone has to deal with rookie pools, injuries, workout and incentive bonuses, etc. I'm just so sick and tired of the annual poor mouthing at the start of free agency as to why they can't do better than their track record of "kicking tires" because of the rookie pool and the injury pool and the other pools. Especially, given they are usually in the top thrid of the league in available cap space. Combined with thier build through the draft for the future and retain our own approach. It's time to re-sign Iloka and Marvin Jones, two guys they drafted to build for the future, but they may not be able to re-sign them because they have to build for the future. So safety and wide receiver become more of a draft need and then they're just spinning their wheels.
Oh, I just thought about dead money. They claim they manage dead money well because it is so low. Well, yes and no. It's not good to have dead money, but it is a way of managing the cap. Usually teams get dead money when the trade a player or cut an aging vet with a high cap hit. The reason why teams cut an aging vet with a high cap hit is because it saves the player's salary toward the cap. The dead money is from the ammoritized bonus spread out over the length of the contract. The player was paid that money when they signed the contract. Example: Chad Johnson, the Bengals had a much better trade offer from Washington and would have been better off in the long term, but one of the factors was the dead money. They act like "we can't spend that dead money," but they already spent it. Don't worry about the dead money if it can give you needed cap space..
Most of this is just random ranting so don't think it is directed at you.
