Tag: Cincinnati Bengals

Let the Bengals Leave: They cost too much, lose all the time, and they aren’t worth the money in Cincinnati

I enjoy the NFL product more than most do from the perspective of the premium seats.  Several times a year, I get a chance to watch a football game from the Club section or a private box, and I do like it.  I like the Club Seats at Bengals games, from Paycor Stadium, as they call it today.  I like having the Cincinnati Bengals in town and think it’s great for Ohio to have two NFL teams.  But let’s not forget who does what and for whom here.  Both Ohio NFL teams are complaining about their stadium accommodations.  The Cleveland Browns want to move from their current waterfront Dog Pound and out into the suburbs which seems like a really dumb idea.  Their stadium is right on the Lake Erie waterfront and is really nice.  Most NFL teams have received new stadiums that are exotic domes, such as the new ones in Las Angeles and Las Vegas.  Or they are complaining about getting one.  My favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has a very nice stadium I’ve visited several times. I think they do a really nice job in their community, tying everything together, engaging in community activity, and providing entertainment through sports.  I was never happy with how Raymond James Stadium was publicly funded, as they all are.  But with the Glazer family in Tampa, they built a nice stadium with a big Disney-like pirate ship in it, and it gave fans something fun to enjoy.  And there are events at Raymond James Stadium that go on all year.  They don’t just play NFL football there.  Compared to the Bengals, the Bucs go to the playoffs a lot, and they have won a few Super Bowls.  But the Bengals just don’t win much.  Their season is usually over by December, and they have lost when they have had a chance at the big game.  So, the Brown family in Cincinnati have not been nearly as good of owners as the Glazers in Tampa.  All things have not been equal regarding the NFL experience and the owners who run them.

It was very contentious for taxpayers when the Bengals pushed to get the current stadium they play in, what was called Paul Brown Stadium for a while.  It was not that long ago that it was built; Paycor Stadium is very nice and is one of the big features of the Cincinnati skyline.  And as I said, I attend several games yearly as part of the Club experience.  I’m not a stand-in-line kind of person.  If I can’t get out of my car and go straight into the stadium security and to my seat with a private food service option, I will probably not go to a professional sports venue.  And I’ve been to Paycor stadium in the nice summer months and in the snowy cold days of winter.  And I think it’s great.  But it’s not worth infinite amounts of money.   The Bengals are coming up on the last year of their lease agreement with the county of Hamilton, and they want a better deal.  They threaten to move to a different city if the Hamilton County commissioners don’t lay down and cave to their every demand.  Currently, the Bengals want the taxpayers of Hamilton County to pay $150 million in 2024 and another $150 million in 2025 on stadium repairs, with the team contributing $50 million in exchange for a five-year extension through 2030. However, the county has only committed to $39 million in renovations for 2024 going into 2025 with a sort of blank check mentality. 

So here’s where I’m at with the whole thing: let the Bengals go.  See if another city wants to deal with their crybaby NFL antics.  I’d say the same thing to the Cleveland Browns, too.  While I like the NFL experience, it is a nice thing to have, but Cincinnati, Cleveland, and the state of Ohio generally do more for the NFL than the professional football teams do for those cities.  Good luck, Bengals. Have fun moving to Chattanooga or some other secondary city.  It wouldn’t take long for them to regret the move.  We all remember what happened in Cleveland when Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore only to call them the Ravens.  Then Bernie Kosar, who used to be a quarterback, lobbied with others to bring an expansion team to Cleveland to become the new Browns, named after the Bengals’ owners.  In the end, the NFL, which is more the way I think of the product than I used to, is an entertainment option closer to big-time wrestling.  It’s something for people to talk about on Monday morning around the water cooler.  But not good for much else.  I think the referees tip the scales to favor betting odds, and they do it through play calls at critical times to get one team to win over another in a close game.  (Buffalo clearly converted that 4th down over the Chiefs in that recent big game)  There is too much money involved for the NFL not to be rigged in some fashion, so the whole product’s value is purely entertainment.  And there is a limit to how much money anybody should spend on entertainment.  I think these NFL teams should pay their own way, especially in the Bengals’ case; they should pay Cincinnati for the privilege to play.  It should not fall on the county to pay the expenses of a private enterprise.  The NFL everywhere has a broken financial model that double dips the taxpayers.  But when teams don’t win now and then, a team like the Bengals abuses their relationship with the public.

Considering the size of the payrolls, some of these repairs that the Bengals want to be made at the stadium, whether it’s 30 million for some new paint or 300 million for structural improvements and general maintenance, the money should come out of the Bengals, and they should be happy to pay it to be treated as well as they are in the city of Cincinnati.  Instead, and this is expected in all NFL cities, the expectation is that the public pays once in taxes to build stadiums for these entertainment options, and then they have to pay again to go to the stadium.  And it costs a lot of money.  Nothing is cheap at an NFL game.   So, the NFL product is a pretty bad financial model, and they treat the cities they play in as if they are doing everyone a favor by watching them play football.  As I said, I think the Glazer family in Tampa does a good job building a relationship with the community that pays taxes for a stadium that is much more friendly to the community than what the Bengals do.  Or the Browns.  And the Bengals, for all the trouble and cost they impose on the community, can’t win enough even to justify themselves.  Everyone knew at the start of the 2024 season that the Bengals were in trouble.  Sure, they had a great quarterback and some great receivers.  But the coaching staff was lazy, disengaged, and lackluster.  And the defense was horrendous.  And that was game one of the season.  Going to games during that entire season was like buying an expensive hot dog so the grandkids could listen to loud music and watch losers lose.  The Bengals have not been good owners; they take, take, take from the community, and they don’t know how to win or give the community something to be proud of.  And my advice to the county of Hamilton would be just to let them go.  Call their bluff and let them leave.  One or two playoff games could have generated more than enough money to pay for the stadium repairs.  When you have several players with multi-million dollar contracts in the hundreds of millions, this money they want from the county is chump change.  The Bengals should pay for everything.  And they should pay for the right to play in Cincinnati.  If they’re going to leave, let them.  See how they like the next place they go.  Cincinnati would do just fine without them and their losing ways.

Rich Hoffman

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The NFL Experience: There are things more valuable than safety and security

The very next game after the Bengals had the Monday Night Football game canceled, I had a chance to go and see them in Cincinnati play the Baltimore Ravens for the last game of the season. It had been a busy year where literally every weekend was spoken for. But knowing that the Bengals were going to be in the playoffs and that, especially during this time of the year right after Christmas, this is when I like the NFL experience the most, I wanted to go to a game and enjoy what that product did for the entire city on a cold winter afternoon. It’s hard to experience the NFL product fully; it involves more than just watching the game for three hours out of your day like you do when you watch the games on television. Even that is hard for me and is often difficult. I get pretty mad when the team I’m cheering on doesn’t win because I feel that I wasted my time on them only to end up feeling not encouraged. So attending sports events for me is a lot like gambling. With my life so carefully managed from one moment to the next, investing in an experience where I don’t control the outcome is a lot of risk. But once the Christmas lights come down and we enter the full clutches of winter, I love that our culture produces the NFL playoffs to edge us through the hardest winter months. By the time the NFL playoffs are finished, and we have the Super Bowl, which I consider a great American holiday, we are almost ready for spring. The maple syrup starts flowing, and we know the days of extreme cold are ending. So the NFL experience is very valuable for all kinds of reasons, and they are best viewed from the Club Seats in Cincinnati. 

I was not supportive of the NFL calling off the game against the Bills literally just a few nights earlier because the game itself means so much more to people than just the events of a player who happened to get hurt. The NFL is a very progressive corporation, what many call the No Fun League, putting on the field a uniquely American product. So the NFL is always in an interesting tug of war between appeasing their fan base and marching to the beat that comes out of the World Economic Forum’s strategic intentions for world domination. And, of course, the attack comes from where nobody really understands the direction. While fans watch the military flyovers during NFL games, which are quite spectacular in their own way, and complete the National Anthem with hats over hearts, the tide of the game, which is entirely out of the NFL’s control, takes on a life of its own. And it’s something you can only ever really see in person by experiencing firsthand. During this particular game, I had a very personal relationship with the military craft that was used, and they flew over very low, so low and slow that you could see the pilots. With all the fireworks, I had my grandson with me, which was quite a ceremony. Clearly, he was having a moment with the whole stadium, and patriotism was fully in the air. The haters of American culture might have the ear of the NFL and are pushing for its destruction through woke policies, but the current of American society itself was on full display all around us, and I found it very refreshing, worth its own currency in those cold January months.   

Ultimately, the NFL is like a pioneer trying to cross the current of a raging river. They started something that Americans genuinely love, and that made them happy until their masters of finance leveled an attack against our culture, trying to use that love as a device of hate, to destroy that very culture by luring innocent people near it, then to influence them with extortion to social behavior changes that were controlled by the Desecrators of Davos as I call them, the Bond villains who are a part of the World Economic Forum. And those types of people called off that game against the Bills to remind people that safety and security were more important than the results of a game, which I will always argue are oppositely true. The result of a game, or an event in life of any matter, is far more important than safety and security. American football, represented by what the NFL puts on the field, is a dangerous sport that represents capitalism at its finest. It is different from European soccer in many ways that are critically important to our culture. Soccer is a kind of pinball game where skilled players get a random chance to kick a ball into a goal uniquely. American football is all about planning and precision. You get four downs to get 10-yard increments. Every play is like a business plan, and success is the end zone of all that planning and coordination paying off. The offense on the field is all of us. The defense is life itself, trying to keep you from scoring. Football in America has much more going on than most sports. People have an unconscious understanding of it, even if their conscious reality manifests into too much beer drinking and dancing to booming music. Football in America has a unique relationship with capitalism, and we have a perceptual understanding of that value, which is why globalist forces are attacking the game the way they are. If you want to bring down America, which many forces in the world do, then American football is the way to do so. That leaves the owners of NFL teams in a strange place. Do they follow the rules of wokism from the World Economic Forum, or do they listen to the fans who continue to make them rich and allow the currents of capitalism to wash over them in a way they enjoy and can thrive in? 

I tend to be very free with the wallet at these kinds of events; I like my children and grandchildren to know how vital NFL games are to Americana itself. I don’t complain about the expensive drinks or hot dogs. I like the very expensive jerseys and hats. I like to tip the guys out front of the east entrance who are playing the drums. I love the energy and the celebration of life that is obvious at all NFL games. And I wish everyone could win every time. It is much like gambling to investing so much time and money into the NFL experience, but I see it as nothing but positive. And after going, I was reminded how dumb it was to cancel that game just because a player was injured. When bad things happen, we want to take time to see them taken care of. But there was more going on with the Bills player who suffered a heart attack on the field during Monday Night Football during the first game of 2023. Likely the heart attack was brought on by the NFL’s push for untested government vaccines, playing their role in the Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and the gang of destroyers who gather every year in Davos about this very same period. There are a lot of hostile forces in the world, and fans at NFL games are uniquely prominent in their effects, which is obviously frustrating for those forces. That’s why games should never be canceled, no matter what. The show itself has a value that transcends the way antagonistic forces shape logic, and the rebellion against their wrath is very much the core of the NFL experience, an unintended consequence. It’s what people cheer for during the game and why going to the games is such a cherished activity. And it’s why we must fight to keep our corporate products out of the hands of global politics intent to rule us all behind bureaucratic rules and regulations centered on safety and compliance. Those are the real enemies, and we love to cheer when our football teams score, regardless of what defense is set up to stop us. In the end, that’s what people celebrate, and it’s certainly worth doing.

Rich Hoffman

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The Police Extortion of the Cincinnati Bengals: Communist labor unions always expect “the rich” to pay for their mismanagment

For me, and this has always been the case, there is a limit to how much of the thin blue line I’m willing to pay for. We need police in our society; we can’t function without them. We should not defund the police as Democrats have suggested. But when you are dealing with public sector unions that always want to expand government, “defund” is not an open checkbook that is beyond the reach of management. Throwing infinite amounts of money at police or any government employee is a bad idea. Society should pay for the police and to pay for them well. But not infinitely.

Traditionally, when police or fire employees insist that they always receive more money, they say, but we run into fires, we run into gunfire, so you don’t have to. I will volunteer to run into a burning building to save a dog any day of the week. I will gladly engage with a dangerous group of shooters any day of the week, any hour of the day. And I’d do it without pay because I would look at something like that as fun. So I’m not a big fan of that argument. Yes, police work is dangerous. But those who get into it understand that. It’s a privilege to wear the badge. The community should support the police enthusiastically. We should all live by the laws of our society, constitutionally supported. But the arguments of pay, such as what Dan Hils did on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas, is an exploitation of the standard union point of view, which is always communist in nature, to attempt to argue more pay in all the ways that the police unions expect it. There is a limit to what police are worth. When an FOP president makes the case from an obvious liberal point of view to a radio talk show host who is typically a small government kind of guy, it makes for an interesting debate that often hides in the cracks of our society.

Everyone knows I’m not a big fan of the Cincinnati Bengals. My favorite team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and it has been since Mike Brown fired Sam Wyche as the head coach. My support of Wyche went with him to Tampa from Cincinnati, and I have never forgiven the Brown family for that firing. They are losers as NFL owners. They run a bad organization that does not represent the city well. Sure they went to the Super Bowl last year because they have really good players. But over the years, they don’t know how to close the deal, and if they win, it’s usually because they get lucky and the other teams overlook them. But I don’t like this Billionaire Bengals talk from the FOP president, Dan Hils. I also have to remind people that every labor union in America started as a communist idea. Every entertainment union, government sector union, and union that runs some manufacturing aspect are all Karl Marx’s products. With Trump he’s a former Democrat who has opened up the tent of the Republican Party to include labor unions. In politics, there are many viewpoints, and people often don’t get everything they want. So it’s worth discussing unions’ problems with the same people who now consider themselves MAGA Republicans. With that in mind, all this talk about the Bengals paying double time and triple time for traffic staff before and after games is a perfect example of how the same people who will talk about saving money with taxes on one topic find themselves nodding in agreement with Dan Hils on the extortion racket being played out with the Cincinnati Bengals and talked about on the air as if the Bengals should pay whatever it costs for safety because they have the money and can afford to. Just because someone like Dan Hils, from the perspective of a communist police union, thinks that the Bengals are rich, does that mean they should be obligated to pay some artificial value for more traffic cops at Bengal games? 

I go to Bengal games a few times a year, and I prefer the great seats when I go. When I arrive, it’s usually where the player entrance is, so I get to see all the security they have at these games from that point of view, and there is a lot of police there—a lot of security. I tend to think that the Bengals should hire their own security for their own events. But as Dan Hils points out on Brian Thomas’ broadcast, the Bengals can’t pay for their security on a city street leading to and from the stadium. Those are city streets, and the police union has it rigged so that only they can provide traffic services. It’s the same kind of mess that you deal with at any union where tasks are placed in silos, and restrictions to productivity are also associated with the labor assigned to that task. For instance, you might have a box of pencils sitting on a dock meant for the office area. But the unionized dock workers are on a break, or have called off work for the day. Or maybe they are on strike. So there sits the box of pencils. The office people need them. They can look through the window into the dock and see the pencils sitting there. But they are not allowed to go in and pick them up so they can get their pencils. They have to wait for the union to perform the task. That is the kind of political game the Cincinnati FOP has going on regarding city streets leading to and from the stadium. Because the unionized police want a monopoly on the work, they complain that the work just can’t get done because they don’t have the staffing or the money. But the Bengals aren’t allowed to provide a solution. Or perhaps the people attending the games might volunteer to help direct traffic. They are prevented from helping because they are not lawfully permitted to perform that task. 

Spoken like a true communist union president, Dan Hils places all the blame on the Billionaire Bengals because they are rich and can afford to pay whatever the members of the Thin Blue Line require. But the Bengals’ options are to use Dan Hils unionized employees at rates of double time or triple time to pay for the mismanagement of the police force in general at whatever cost they decide. Rather than hiring their own people at $15 per hour or less to perform a task that is only worth minimum wage for a few hours on a Sunday to keep people from running into each other. And because we are politically on a path to support the police no matter the cost, someone like Brian Thomas, who is a small government guy, gets pulled into a discussion about defending a government union’s ridiculous extortion racket. And from the perspective of Dan Hils, his argument is that the Reds pay for the security, as to other sports events in the downtown area. So why don’t the Bengals pay too? Well, because the police union is forcing a customer to pay for goods and services that they control exclusively, and they expect to pass their mismanagement off as an undisputed bill, which is ridiculous. The police are great to have, but I don’t like their labor unions. I’d volunteer to help the police if there weren’t so many dumb rules that keep people from helping them. In many ways, they create their own problems by forcing restrictions on themselves and then expect a community to pay for their mismanagement of financial resources. And at a certain point, when they ask for too much, the community should just get rid of them and form their own law enforcement that doesn’t have a union attached to it. And my argument would be that it would work far better and be a whole lot cheaper. Just because rich people can afford to pay, that’s not up to Dan Hils to decide. It’s up to market values to determine, and the FOP of Cincinnati clearly isn’t interested in that kind of discussion. They are just like everyone else; they want the most money possible for the least work produced. It’s up to management in all cases to determine the value of that ratio.

Rich Hoffman

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The Buccaneers Fired Dirk Koetter and the Bengals Finally Fired Marvin Lewis: To win you have to get rid of a problem, especially in areas of management

One of the reasons I am still a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan after many seasons of losing is because the organization as ran by the Glazer family is always on a quest to find the right combination of coaching to match with the players they have on the field to be victorious. If they fall short, they do not hesitate to fire their coaches such as they did Sunday afternoon at the end of their season after losing to the Atlanta Falcons. Dirk Koetter had been with the team for three years but it was obvious with all the weapons the Bucs had on the field to use that the coaches just didn’t have an approach, and they ended the season with just five wins, most of them coming at the beginning. I thought Dirk Koetter was a pretty good guy, not the worst coach in the world, but even after victories after he’d hand out game balls to star players, there was something not quite right about him, and that surely turned up on the field. The Bucs organization is quick to determine that someone is working out and they fire them when its apparent that things just aren’t going to change which is precisely why I continue to love the Tampa Bay Buccaneer organization as a whole. They may not win every game, but at least they try to.

That is why the Bengals in Cincinnati should have terminated their relationship with Marvin Lewis years ago. The guy just doesn’t get it. They have stuck with him for 16 lackluster seasons and the results have never been good. He should have been fired many years ago because it was disrespectful to the Bengals fans who pay premium money for the NFL experience to expect them to put up with Marginal Marvin for so long. The resentment was obvious at the stadium even under the best of circumstances. I had gone to the game this year with good club seat tickets to watch Tampa Bay play the Bengals in Cincinnati on a beautiful October day just before Halloween. It was an absolutely perfect day for the NFL experience in a big city with real playoff implications, because at the time both teams were in the hunt. And the Bengals won that day so everyone should have been happy. But virtually everyone from the vendors selling beer to the men in the restroom talking to each other about the game across urinals were talking about how they were surprised that Marvin Lewis hadn’t found a way to blow the game. Any kind of respect for Marvin Lewis had left Cincinnati a long time ago, yet Mike Brown had stuck with him perpetually with no end in sight.

In any kind of successful organization, you can’t be trigger happy either. You have to give a new coach time to implement a change culture of winning from losing, and that should take a year or two. But in the NFL fans are the ones paying the bills, its unrealistic to expect them to put up with a bad team for more than a few years and still retain their season ticket packages. A lot of people say that Mike Brown doesn’t care about such things so long as he has a profitable television contract which I find hard to believe. As a businessman of any kind it is stupid to leave any money on the table and you don’t get to be as rich as the Brown family is by being stupid. I just don’t think they know what they are doing as football people. The father Paul Brown did understand, but his family didn’t and it shows.

The Bengals have been living in the past, they have had a couple of Superbowl appearances in the 1980s but nothing since and they are hanging their hat on that one achievement. Meanwhile the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Superbowl back in 2003 for a great 2002 season which had been many years in the making. But that was then, the world we live in is very much a what have you done for me lately reality. While at that Bengals game I wore my 2002 Superbowl victory hat for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and people kept saying to me that it was silly to wear that hat because it was a long time ago. I would then say to them with friendly banter that I would be happy to wear the Bengals Superbowl victory hat if they could get me one. Of course, that was when laughter from both sides exploded at the absurdity of it. But why should it be absurd?

The NFL is designed to give every city with an NFL team a shot at victory. I view much of the NFL structure as an entirely socialist enterprise where winners are penalized, and losers are boosted up, particularly in regard to draft picks. But this is because the goal of the NFL is to sell tickets and merchandise and if a team doesn’t make it to the big dance at least once a decade their fan base cools it in regard to spending. People generally support their home town team, but they don’t necessarily dream of a new football jersey for Christmas for a losing team. They want to at least thing that there is a chance at victory. Those are the basics of business. Yet in Cincinnati we have been asked to put up with losing as a reality and that goes against so many raw emotions for which the NFL experience depends. To stick with a coach like Marvin Lewis for so long because he’s a nice guy, which he is, or because he’s a progressive employment option that earns street credibility with the very progressive NFL isn’t enough to justify what they have asked fans to endure. You don’t keep a coach because of being nice or black, but because they win. That is the only objective in playing professional football—winning.

I would love to cheer on the Cincinnati Bengals. But I will always love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and will spend quite a lot of money flying down to a game or two from time to time to blow many thousands of dollars on the Tampa economy because the Glazer family are always trying to do what they have to do to win. If the Bucs don’t win a single game in the whole season, I will still cheer them on. It didn’t surprise me at all that just a few hours after losing to Atlanta that Dirk Koetter was terminated as the head coach. It would have surprised me if he hadn’t been fired. But after the Bengals lost against the dreaded Steelers, YET AGAIN, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the Bengals had signed Lewis to a 150 year contract extension—but under tremendous public pressure, they finally fired Marvin Lewis. Because the Bengals have become synonymous to losers, and that is a terrible thing to bestow on a city that has supported that team through many years of lackluster performance. It’s a terrible disrespect to a community that doesn’t deserve it and I do feel sorry for Bengal fans. At least for me I can look forward to positive changes in the Buccaneer organization which gives me hope for an upcoming season of victory. That season may be over by the upcoming October, but at least they are trying. The Bengals are like drunken gamblers who have lost their life savings at a slot machine. They just keep pulling the lever and hoping for a new car. But all they ever get are lemons. Hopefully their next coach will be a real one.

Rich Hoffman

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