Media's contempt of Bengals sparks the ire of present and former Bengals.

[*Nately120*]

(02-19-2020, 08:06 PM)Whatever Wrote: This is ridiculously far off base.

The first issue is that a high product quality doesn't necessarily equate to sales.  McDonald's has low product quality, but they still take in exponentially more than favorite little family owned burger joint.  In a real business, you can be highly profitable despite poor product quality because there are always people out there looking for cheap products.  Conversely, you can have a very high product quality and go out of business quickly due to low sales volume because most people are not going to pay for top quality.

That aside, the economics of a sports team are governed by completely irrational consumer demands.  For example, nobody cares when buying a tv if the manufacturer hasn't won any awards for the last 25+ years.  They look at the features, product quality, and price of the model they're looking at.  Also, consumers will accordingly curve quality expectations based on price.  The Bengals are 30th in the league in average ticket price.  Therefore, they should hypothetically also be 30th in product quality.  Since, they've provided a higher quality product than indicated by their price point almost yearly, the consumers should be happy with them and they should be experiencing good sales if they are a "real business.". Instead, consumers are down on them because they are expecting Mercedes-Benz quality when they're paying Kia prices.  Again, not a reasonable consumer expectation for a normal business, but we're talking sports.

They would never go out of business without revenue sharing, anyways.  They would simply move the team to a new market to increase sales and prices.

The NFL is an oligopoly where the participants in the NFL have to be born into ownership or vetted and approved by the other owners (see Trump not being let into the NFL club when he attempted to buy the Bills).  The Bengals operate under the umbrella of the NFL where total expenditures have floors and ceilings to prevent larger market teams with deeper pockets from out-spending smaller market teams and the draft gives the worst teams the earliest picks for what should be the better players.

Yes, ticket sales and prices are a supply and demand situation, granted, but the TV deals and revenue sharing aren't doled out relative to the amount of wins your team has or the amount of fans you bring into the stadium (to my knowledge).  The way I see it (and I'm not an insider, so I'm mostly spitballing here) if the Bengals/Lions/Bills etc could be sold to clones of Robert Kraft it could be expected that total revenue of the league and the size of the pie each owner would receive would increase.

Mike Brown was born into a high-ranking position within one of the most profitable and desire oligopolies on earth.  If we were to compare the NFL to the major burger joints it would be like saying McDonalds made the most money and Crapburger made the least so the new burger that is the best tasting thing ever will only be sold at Crapburger in order to keep the burger franchises competitive.

I don't know how much of this makes sense...I'm procrastinating here.