Meet The Billionaire Family Behind The Cincinnati Bengals, The NFL’s Second-Least-Val

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Saw this article on Forbes. Thought it was interesting and worth sharing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinbirnbaum/2022/02/12/meet-the-billionaire-family-behind-the-cincinnati-bengals-the-nfls-second-least-valuable-team/?sh=53c0c387186c



To understand the contrast between the two teams chasing football immortality on Sunday, the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals, look no further than their owners.

The Rams are the glitzy $4.8 billion crown jewel of billionaire Stan Kroenke’s $10.5 billion sports empire, set to play on Sunday in the palatial SoFi Stadium he built for his team. Kroenke—whose wife, Ann Walton, is an heir to the Walmart fortune—also owns the Denver Nuggets and Arsenal FC and is seen as one of the most powerful people in sports. Meanwhile, the Bengals—the NFL’s second-least-valuable franchise, at an estimated $2.3 billion—are a family business, cofounded by coaching legend Paul Brown half a century ago and tightly controlled by his 86-year-old son Mike, who is a relative unknown outside of football.

It’s a modern-day matchup of David and Goliath.

“The Brown family, as long as I’ve been around the league, has never been focused on making the most money,” says Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm Sportscorp, who has worked with numerous NFL teams and owners. “They’ve been focused on operating in a professional, solid manner and trying to put a good product on the field.”



Win or lose, football has always been the family’s focus. Patriarch Paul Brown helped bring the team to Cincinnati in 1967. Mike, his middle son, who played quarterback at Dartmouth and graduated from Harvard Law School, worked alongside him from the outset. Mike’s brothers, Robin and Peter, were also involved with the team until their deaths in 1978 and 2017, respectively. Over time, other family members joined. Mike’s daughter Katie Blackburn is executive vice president of the team and the first woman to be named to the NFL’s Competition Committee. Son Paul H. Brown, son-in-law Troy Blackburn and even Mike’s granddaughters, Elizabeth and Caroline Blackburn, work for the Bengals as well. (The Browns declined to participate in this story.)

The family’s football roots date back even earlier. Paul Brown was a legendary coach and a pioneer in the NFL’s early years. The Ohio native, who played football at Miami University, went 96-9-3 as a high school coach, won the national championship as the head coach of Ohio State in 1941 and ran the Cleveland Browns as general manager and head coach for 16 years. The literal namesake of that franchise, Brown led the team to three NFL championships in the 1950s. Then Cleveland owner Art Modell fired him in 1963.
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THE RICH AND THE RICHER
The Brown family’s ​football team is worth billions of dollars, but Stan Kroenke’s sports empire blows them away.



After a brief retirement, Brown sought a return to professional football. This time, he had no interest in working for someone else and decided the best way to keep control was to start a team himself. With the help of his son Mike, Brown homed in on Cincinnati. Backed by a group of 11 local investors that included Brown, in 1967 the city won the tenth franchise of the American Football League, which had already agreed to merge with the NFL in 1970. Brown and his partners paid an estimated $7.5 million expansion fee. He got only a 10% stake, according to court documents, but controlled the club as head coach, general manager and voting trustee.

The Bengals got off to a strong start, reaching the postseason three times from 1970 to 1975. Brown relinquished his coaching duties in 1975 but remained general manager until his death in 1991. In that span, the Bengals reached the Super Bowl in 1982 and again in 1989 but were beaten both times by Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers.



Meanwhile, changes were sweeping through the owner’s box. Brown, who had increased his stake to 20%, agreed to sell nearly all of his shares to Bengals cofounder and president John Sawyer in 1983. There was a catch, though: The Brown family could buy back almost all of Sawyer’s stake as early as 1993 for $25,000 per share, a fraction of its value at the time. When the date arrived, Mike and the family did just that, paying Sawyer a net price of $1.6 million. (The IRS later contested the transaction, arguing the deal was part of Paul Brown’s estate and $30 million in taxes plus interest were owed. But the courts ruled in favor of the Browns.)

Under Mike Brown, who became the team’s de facto general manager when he assumed control (the only other owner with a similar arrangement is Cowboys’ Jerry Jones), the team’s performance on the field has been dismal. From 1991 to 2004, the Bengals posted an abysmal 71-153 record, failing to qualify for the playoffs even once. In 2005, Cincinnati won 11 games and returned to the postseason, only to have star quarterback Carson Palmer shred his knee on the first play of the first playoff game. They lost. Loyal to a fault, Brown stood by then-coach Marvin Lewis for a total of 16 seasons—only seven were winning ones.

“He took too much on himself and was not very good at it,” longtime Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty told Cincinnati Magazine in 2014. “[The Bengals] were not only the worst team in the NFL, they were arguably the worst team in professional sports. And it was entirely Mike’s show.”



Brown found other ways to be successful, though. He delivered the Bengals a new venue in 2000, Paul Brown Stadium, four years after the city passed a half-cent sales tax increase that funded new stadiums for both Major League Baseball’s Reds and his club. Taxpayers picked up most of the $455 million bill and millions in future maintenance costs. The family profited, collecting more than $50 million in salaries and dividends from 1994 to 2000, while at the same time paying coaches, trainers and scouts less than most other teams, according to a 2011 Cincinnati Magazine article. Brown also, in a series of transactions, raised the family’s stake to 97%. In 2002, court records show, he paid around $6 million (the Bengals were valued at $507 million at the time) for 10% owned by Austin Knowlton, who died in 2003. Brown bought out the other 30% held by Knowlton’s estate in 2011 for $200 million.

Around the NFL, Brown has been criticized for his reluctance to maximize the Bengals’ revenue streams, marching to the beat of his own drum. The team, for instance, has never sold the naming rights to Paul Brown Stadium. “He is not afraid or intimidated to be the only negative vote in the ownership room,” Ganis says. Brown was notoriously the only one to vote against expanded replay review in 2019. “That takes a certain amount of courage, frankly, and commitment to your convictions to do something like that.”

Now he finally has the chance to collect the prize that has eluded his family and city for decades. But no matter what happens on Sunday, don’t expect too much from Brown. In the immortal words of his father, “When you lose, say nothing. When you win, say even less.”