Mr. Castellini would you please buy the Bengals...

[Shake n Blake]

(01-28-2020, 03:51 AM)Joelist Wrote: The real question is how can the front office manage to both be middle of the pack-ish in spending AND be perceived by players, coaches and front office people around the league as miserly?

I think the answer is more in HOW they spend money as opposed to how much they spend. They come across as very passive and for want of a better term LAZY in their approach to the offseason. One reason the Glenn trade got such a positive initial reaction was it was for once proactive. Ditto when they actually traded up in the draft recently - it was so unusual for them.

Their typical approach is to be super passive about both free agency and the draft. They typically sit and wait until the quality starters are gone instead of actually doing the work of identifying desired players and then bringing them in and - yes- overpaying if needed to get them. In the draft they tend to sit wherever they are or trade down (Marvin did more than once) instead again of identifying their targets and trading up if needed to get them. Now this may also be the fault of having no scouting department to speak of really which overloads the coaches.

The problems:

1. They often keep players who under-perform their contracts. Think Leon Hall at the end when he was making over $9 million as our 4th-5th CB, or Cordy Glenn last year. I think part of the reason this happens is that the Bengals despise dead money, even if it's a small amount.

Cutting Glenn and redistributing that money in free agency could've helped last year.

We could've done so with only $2 million in dead cap. I'd say most teams would've pulled the trigger to improve the roster. The Bengals would rather keep the under-performing player and avoid the hassle of any dead money as well as having to possibly use free agency to fill that spot again.

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2. Sometimes they overpay guys already on the roster, like Bobby Hart and Gio Bernard. Gio was (again) barely used even after becoming the 12th best paid RB in the league: https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/rankings/average/running-back/

His contract is totally ridiculous. I like Gio as a person, but yikes.

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3. They treat free agency like it's a disease. Sometimes I wonder if the above problems exist because Mike Brown hates spending money in free agency that much. Or it could be vice versa. The problem could be that free agents often want high amounts of guaranteed money. This would be a problem for a team that loathes dead money.

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Honestly, it's tough to figure out why the Bengals operate the way they do, because they're one of a kind...but I agree Mike is not miserly in cap spending. He could however, be considered miserly as far as utilizing free agency, and he's definitely miserly when it comes to spending on scouts, a GM and a practice facility.