I’ve long been puzzled as to why the scrooge of Cincinnati wouldn’t sell the naming rights to Paul Brown Stadium (Sure his family name on the stadium but the man is legendarily cheap after all. Just read about how the Bengals would have reporters pick free agents up at the airport or how Ki-Jana caused team morale to soar by buying the locker room new towels that weren’t shrunken and threadbare).
So as I’ve been pondering this I’ve been doing some reading and I came across this recent article on stadium deals. It lays out how the Rams are about to get hosed into building a new stadium or risk losing their team to relocation. The article mentions a clause in the Bengals lease I had never heard about before. The Bengals lease wasn’t really negotiated by adverse parties (typically how contracts are decided - each side arguing their case for the details to favor their organization), but it was just two sides agreeing with each other on how to bilk the taxpayers out of the most money. Consequently, there are still awful parts of the lease that have yet to be revealed to show just how much the Bengals bent over Hamilton County taxpayers on the lease deal. This is one of those awful things.
The Bengals lease for Paul Brown Stadium contains a state of the art
clause, requiring Hamilton County to pay for and install any new
technologies in use by 14 other NFL teams. PBS opened in 2000 and
since then by my count ten stadiums have opened or been fully renovated and another two (Dallas and New York) will open in the next few years. So the County is inching closer and closer to having to fork over
hundreds of millions of dollars to keep PBS up to date with all the
latest gadgets the rest of the NFL stadiums have.
On the plus side maybe the County will be forced to splurge on that practice bubble the Bengals have always needed but never wanted to pay for (I think the hope right now is that UC and the Bengals can split the cost of a bubble, but seriously what other professional team would ever consider being this cheap). On the down side the stadium might get used twenty times a year tops counting the Bengals 10 home dates - so paying for all these stadium improvements might not be the wisest use of taxpayer money.
The point of all this is that the Bengals have no excuse not to do everything in their power win a championship. The Brown's are going to be flush with cash as long as they own this team and play in PBS. It seems the fans, the county, and the taxpayers have done everything in their power to make the Bengals a winner. We've suffered through 17 straight seasons without winning seeing a playoff victory. There is not a single franchise in the NFL that hasn't won a playoff game since the Bengals beat the Oilers 41-14 in the 1990 playoffs (I'm not counting the Texans since they've only been in existence since 2002 but I am counting terrible teams like the Cardinals, Browns, Lions, and Chiefs). So now as we enter the 18th season of this unbelievable streak of futility I'm only left with one question. What exactly is Mike Brown and this team waiting for?
(P.S. If you want to read a really depressing article read this one CityBeat wrote a few years ago as it explains the whole sordid stadium deal.)
Indeed, reading about these things fills me with The Rage. If you want to know all the juicy details of our lease and how it compares to other similar leases, read this great article back in 2000 before the Bengals first game in Paul Brown Stadium:
http://bengals.enquirer.com/2000/08/19/ben_bengals_lease_pretty.html
One of the key things it notes is that stadium deals only a year after this were much different and less gov't reliant because the NFL signed a lucrative tv deal for the NFL Network that brought in a lot more shared revenue. Makes you wonder who may have been privy to this information while the negotiations for stadium deals were going on...
Posted by: Todd | July 10, 2008 at 10:07 AM