2019 Salary Cap - Bengals Cap Space

[Whatever]

(12-11-2018, 10:00 PM)Joelist Wrote: The real problem comes in when you look at profitability. IIRC you basically have to be the Dallas Cowboys to make real money. Most everyone else is in the 10-15 million per year profit club. Now add in that profit and loss looks at things like signing bonuses differently than the cap - that 60 million signing bonus on the 6 year deals may only be $10 million against the cap but it is 60 million off of P & L. Ever wonder why we backload instead of front load deals and are not so enthusiastic about signing bonuses?

Then there is the fact that the Bengals ownership has no other business interests. This is pretty unusual in the NFL, and I think the only other franchise like this is Green Bay. What it means is the club cannot be run at a loss and as a tax write off like a lot of others can be.

This does not excuse the many flaws of ownership, among which are that for people in a resource constrained environment they do not do a good job of prioriotizing where the money needs to go to increase the profitability of the product - create a better product and revenue can go up. But perhaps it sheds a little light on the sometimes strange behavior of ownership.

Another factor is that when the Bengals were founded, Paul Brown only actually had 10% ownership of the team. Over the decades, Paul slowly started to buy out his partners and this duty fell to Mikey after his passing.  For example, Mike paid out over $200 million in buying up Bengals shares in 2011.  The Brown family still only controls about 85% of the shares.  It could be said that when you look at the current value of NFL franchises and league growth that Paul should have pushed harder, earlier when it could've been done a lot cheaper.  

In any case, the Bengals will definitely have the cap space to make some major moves this off-season if they so choose.  They don't really have any FA's they absolutely need to resign.  They will probably earmark some for a Boyd extension, but it will be interesting to see what else they do.