Off topic -- NYT discussing the Cincinnati Bengals (football team).
October 24, 2002
The Bengals Hit Bottom, and Keep Getting Worse
By JERE LONGMAN
CINCINNATI, Oct. 23 - The jokes are now as frequent and
bruising as the defeats.
What's the difference between the Cincinnati Bengals and a
dollar bill?
You can still get four quarters out of a dollar bill.
Where do you go in case of a tornado?
Paul Brown Stadium. They never get a touchdown there.
Why
doesn't Dayton have a professional football team?
Because Cincinnati would want one.
There may not be a
more inept franchise in all of professional sports than the
Cincinnati Bengals, the only team in the National Football
League that has yet to win this season. The Bengals have
started 0-6 for the second time in three years, and, in a
league designed for parity, are the only team apart from
the expansion Houston Texans not to reach the playoffs
since 1990. The weekly suspense is not whether the Bengals
will win, but whether their affable coach, Dick LeBeau,
will keep his job.
Things are so bad that some players avoid revealing what
they do for a living. Others stay home to avoid ridicule or
boozy threats from frustrated fans. Assistant coaches from
opposing teams have been spotted laughing at the Bengals.
Hamilton County officials, seeking to renegotiate terms of
a sweetheart stadium lease, are threatening to sue the team
for failing to put forth a good-faith effort to win. Corey
Dillon, a three-time Pro Bowl running back, has hinted at
retirement if major improvements do not come immediately.
"They better get it right or, at the end of the season,
I've got a surprise for them," Dillon said recently. As if
to emphasize his point, he spoke not to a reporter but
directly to the team's Web site.
After a 34-7 loss to Pittsburgh on Oct. 13, fullback
Lorenzo Neal said: "We're the laughingstock of the whole
league. It's embarrassing. It's a disgrace."
If the team has not enthused ticket holders, it has at
least inspired the local lexicon. To become "Bengalized"
means to lose one's ambition or self-assurance in a culture
of defeat. Even the team's longtime radio analyst has
referred to players as the Stepford Bengals.
"After two or three years here, you see the life sucked out
of their eyes," said Dave Lapham, who played on the
offensive line for the Bengals from 1974 to 1983 and who is
in his 17th season as the team's radio analyst.
Although Paul Brown Stadium has been acknowledged for its
futuristic architecture, and is said to celebrate the city
with its open corners, the arena hardly celebrates the
team. There is little evidence in the bland concrete and
steel adornment that Cincinnati reached the Super Bowl in
1982 and 1989, little to suggest that a proud past might
elevate the despairing present.
The Bengals were founded and first coached by Paul Brown, a
pioneering figure in inventive football, a man who devised
the draw play and introduced the use of face masks and film
study. The team is still run by the Brown family, yet
innovation is exactly what the front office now lacks,
according to its many critics.
Boomer Esiason, the former quarterback who still does a
weekly radio show here, said that an institutional problem
had beset the team. The Bengals are seemingly stuck in a
bygone era, he said, left ill equipped to deal with the
modern realities of the N.F.L., where teams can no longer
build simply through the draft and must skillfully
negotiate free agency and a salary cap, relying on
sophisticated personnel and scouting systems.
Paul Brown died in 1991, and the Bengals have since been
run flaggingly by his son, Mike, a lawyer and former
Dartmouth quarterback who is the team president. Mike
Brown's daughter, Katie Blackburn, is executive vice
president. His brother, Pete Brown, is senior vice
president in charge of player personnel, and his son, Paul
Brown, is vice president for player personnel. A more
successful franchise might be celebrated for its quaint
family management in a tainted corporate era. But a team
humbled by uninterrupted losing faces accusations of
nepotism.
Several former players, pointing to the family-run success
of the rival Pittsburgh Steelers, have suggested that the
Bengals hire a football expert with the title of general
manager or director of football operations. Mike Brown,
they said, is a likable man, but he has not spent money
wisely and is both meddlesome in personnel decisions and
isolated from the players. Through a team spokesman, Mike
Brown and other members of the family declined to be
interviewed for this article.
"Mike is a very nice man; I feel bad for him," Esiason
said. But, he added: "A permeation of mediocrity flows
through the organization. No one is holding people
accountable."
Constant defeat has led to a perception of a bungling team
whose ownership is not committed to winning. Cincinnati is
viewed as an N.F.L. Siberia, where free agents are
reluctant to be exiled. This viewpoint of an uncaring front
office is misguided, said Jack Brennan, a team spokesman,
who noted that professional football is the Brown family's
only business and that its members are reluctant to take a
day off from work, much less a vacation.
"Mike's passion is to run this football team," Brennan
said. "I don't think he ever wakes up with a desire to do
anything else."
The team has said that it is re-evaluating its scouting
department. The Bengals employ only two scouts and rely on
significant involvement from assistant coaches, even though
most teams separate those duties. While Mike Brown has long
espoused that a quarterback can cure most ills, the Bengals
have been particularly awkward in finding a golden arm.
Two quarterbacks taken as first-round picks, David Klingler
and Akili Smith, have been busts. Five different
quarterbacks have started on opening day in the past five
seasons. Three have played this season - Smith, Jon Kitna
and Gus Frerotte - and a fourth, Joe Germaine, has been
added to the roster.
"They need to give Dick LeBeau more control over who he has
playing for him," the former star running back Ickey Woods
said. "I know from past experience that coaches haven't had
the power to make their own decisions about who stays and
who goes and who starts."
LeBeau disputed this, saying he had more authority than his
predecessors did. It is the team's play, not its
management, that is keeping the Bengals in the hole, he
said. Cincinnati ranks last in the league in points scored
and has the worst turnover differential in the American
Football Conference.
"The system can work," LeBeau said. "We have to play better
on the field."
Many, however, are growing impatient with losing. The
Bengals have sold out only 7 of 19 home games since moving
into Paul Brown Stadium two seasons ago. Hamilton County
approved a half-cent increase in its sales tax to pay for
the stadium, which the Bengals said they needed to remain
competitive. Now county officials are questioning whether
the team has held up its end of the bargain and are
examining whether they can reopen the Bengals' stadium
lease.
The county gets no game-day revenue from parking,
concessions or advertising, said Todd Portune, a county
commissioner. By the lease's expiration in 2027, he said,
taxpayers will have paid nearly $1 billion in stadium
construction costs, debt service, operations and upkeep.
"This deal is a product of the WorldCom, Enron, dot-com
environment of the 90's," Portune said. "I think America
has awakened to this like a bad hangover and realized those
excesses and abuses and unchecked greed are completely out
of kilter for what is appropriate."
Most urgently, the Bengals need a victory on the field, not
in court. Defeat seems almost inevitable each week, the
slightest crack leading to a crumbling of the entire team.
"Confidence is lacking so bad, we're not able to do what
we have to do collectively," said linebacker Takeo Spikes,
the team's emotional leader.
Perhaps a winning streak will start Sunday against
Tennessee. But that would place only a small bandage on a
large wound, said Lapham, the radio analyst and former
Bengal.
"They have to evaluate every facet of the way they do
business," Lapham said. "They have to make drastic changes.
It's not only a local nightmare. It's a national
nightmare."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. |
