04-07-2019, 04:27 PM
(04-07-2019, 01:30 PM)samhain Wrote: You misremember, sir. I was at the home opener. Club level was a ghost town as it has been for a long time. It was the most empty I've ever seen for a prime time game, and I've been to many. I was fairly surprised at the number of empty seats that night.
The team reports a lot of sellouts. They seem to use this term very loosely when you see these claims and look at the empty seats. This has been the case ever since the league stopped the blackout policy for non-home sellouts.
Indy was opening day so you're going to have a bit of excitement, particularly when you're playing a team 2 hours away. Not really an indicator of anything.
You're right to say that they won't come back regardless if they don't win. I'm gonna go ahead and let you in on a secret: They're going to suck again. The o-line and linebacking corps were demonstrably awful. Like among the worst in the league awful. Still no effort at all to change this. If they put the same effort into finding better players as they do into creating propaganda to make guys like Hart and Miller seem like long-term answers, maybe they'd be in a better place.
I went back and looked up the attendance figure and you are correct, it was much lower than I expected. Those attendance figures did go up over the next two home games, though, which at least suggests that Marvin's presence didn't have all that much to do with it one way or the other - it was wins and losses. We'll see if these fans who were supposedly turned off solely by Marvin's return come back to see the new coaching staff (spoiler: they won't).
As for your little "secret", I think most people anticipate just that, though some of us are at least holding on to a little optimism. I don't necessarily expect them to be good next year, though I think there's at least a chance. In the end, it all goes back to the point I've made elsewhere - it's not often that bad teams turn in to good teams through free agency alone, and if the Bengals are going to struggle I don't see the point in signing a bunch of guys who probably aren't going to make a difference one way or the other. I've compared it to what the Reds did - the Reds were bad, they went out and were active in free agency to try to stir up fan interest, the Reds are still bad, and nobody cares. And most people could see that coming from a mile away! It is possible that the Bengals are taking a more long-term approach and that's why they've been relatively quiet.
Hell, the fact that this thread is suggesting that they might draft a QB furthers supports that - if they do it, they're doing it with the expectation that they're not going to compete next year, in which case some of these 1, 2, and 3 year free agent deals some people around here were jealous of wouldn't have accomplished much of anything. Free agency is (IMO) primarily a tool to help teams that are close get over the hump. The Bengals should have been all-in on free agency in, say, the 2015 offseason... I'm not going to kill them for not doing so now when they're at a low point.
