The Bengals, circa now, er, 1993

A reader e-mailed me this story, which I wrote for the Sporting News, in 1993... nothing changes but the calendar...

Oozing failure - Cincinnati Bengals
Paul Daugherty
The Bengals are paying the price for not having paid what it takes


There are some things to remember when you're talking about the Cincinnati Bengals:
* In the years when they win more than they lose, they are not "cheap." They are "frugal." In the Super Bowl year of 1988, the Bengals soared all the way to "thrifty."
*The milky, white stuff oozing from pores in the ancient viaduct that hovers over the team's practice field has never been analyzed. Probably, it is no more lethal than the air, which has such a tang, it is listed in the local "Dining Out" guide.
* If you visit Riverfront Stadium, don't eat the Ultimate Death Dogs in the press dining area. Don't try to decipher the team's media guide or the weekly press notes that once paid tribute to the fine Buffalo Bills head coach "Carv" Levy. Don't sit in the first row of the overflow press box without a parachute; the floor is plywood.
* And, absolutely, positively do not marvel at the carpet in the Spinney Field dressing room or the honest-to-gosh color TV in the lounge.
While welcoming me to Cincinnati in the spring of 1988, Bengals founder Paul Brown offered a tour of the Spinney Field facility. A $1 million refurbishing had just been completed. Though Spinney remained the Bates Motel with a weight room, Brown wasn't happy. "I don't know why we need all this carpeting," he said. "And why do we need TV? We're here to work."
Brown was satisfied with the fresh paint covering the chain-link locker stalls and that enough new stalls had been built that every single player would actually get his own chain-link habitat. But he had a really hard time with the new rug.
"New carpet," Brown said, "never won a damned football game."
That's pretty much where we are with the Bengals, now and forever. New carpet never won a damned football game.
These days, when the Bengals jam their leather helmets into their back pockets and head for home, a few questions remain. Fans wonder if the organization will compete in this new era of kind-of-free free agency.
History says no. The Bengals ignored the Plan B system until its final season. In the first winter of free agency, the Bengals walked lightly. They signed three unrestricted free agents: quarterback Jay Schroeder and cornerbacks Mike Brim and Sheldon White. None made the team significantly better.
The team's grand plan, as outlined by General Manager Mike Brown, was to slash the payroll in '93. Then, when the salary cap arrives in '94 and teams discover themselves uncomfortably above it, the Bengals would swoop in, checkbooks in hand, offering 50 cents on the dollar.
"If there is an opportunity for us, it's next year," Brown said last spring. "We're going to be sitting there, vulture-like. The worm will turn."
As the talent-poor Bengals have slipped to 0-9, fans in Cincinnati have not been willing to let the G.M. slide on that statement.
You could question Brown's willingness to buy big-time talent. You could say, as former Bengals tight end Bob Trumpy, now an NBC analyst, has, that the Bengals' perfect season will always be 8-8: Good enough to keep the stadium filled, not so good that salaries will soar.
You could even say that Brown is cheap and greedy and terribly afraid that the NFL's new method for re-routing its mountains of swag will cut sharply into his own considerable cash pile.
That is a vicious lie. Mike Brown is not cheap and greedy.
One thing is certain: The Bengals have never embraced change, unless it made them money. Free agency won't do that. It's sort of the '90s version of new, damned carpet.
Cris Collinsworth is a former Bengals All-Pro who hosts a sports talk show in Cincinnati. He has been in town since 1981. He says, "That franchise started to go down with the advent of Plan B (in February 1989). Now that free agency is here, they haven't won a game."
The loss of free agents "has been a constant drain on them," Collinsworth says. "They've never gotten back more than they've lost."
There is no denying that this year. Free-agent defections and questionable personnel moves, especially on the offensive line, have hurt the Bengals. At various points in this Hindenburg season, the offensive line has been manned by three free agents (two of them rookies) and one veteran, Joe Walter, playing out of position.
Fans have questioned the futures of Coach Dave Shula and second-year quarterback David Klingler. Shula is 5-20 as Cincinnati's coach; Klingler is 0-11 as a starter. Suggestions have been made that neither will ever be successful. A better question might be: How can you tell?
Because of the bad line and mediocre receivers, it's no longer a question of which quarterback - Klingler or Schroeder - gives Cincinnati a better chance to win. It is deciding which guy is better able to take the pounding.
Klingler admitted as much after the Schroeder-led Bengals lost to Pittsburgh November 7. "It doesn't matter who's back there," he said. "If we play like we did today, Clark Kent couldn't quarterback this football team." Shula says, "I couldn't say right now that (Klingler) has had a square deal with the people we have."
All that could be remedied, perhaps, if the team chooses to spend more money. The Bengals will be better if Mike Brown chooses to approach the top of the salary cap.
But Collinsworth predicts the cap will not affect the Bengals: "They've had their own salary cap for years. I don't think they're going to approach the league's cap. It's going to be $35 million or $40 million per team. They didn't pay that when there wasn't a cap. Why would they pay it when there is one?"
There is also the question of recruiting. A free agent might like to play in a place where he isn't ducking a white, milky substance. He also might enjoy going where winning is important and a recent phenomenon.
This is not the old NFL, where if a guy was drafted by the Bengals, the best he could do was sign his contract and get his full set of booster shots.
This is the new NFL, where teams will try to show themselves off like new cars. The Bengals' showroom won't set off sparks. As Collinsworth puts it, "Some of these guys will look at Spinney Field and say, That's it? We're out of here. What time does the flight leave?'"
Add that to the team's record the past three seasons (8-33), and the leaguewide perception among players that Cincinnati is a budget store in a Neiman-Marcus world, and the question is pretty plain: Given a choice why would anyone choose the Bengals?
Look at what others are doing. The Browns, the Bengals' chief rival, have 14 people in their player personnel department. Eleven are scouts. The Bengals have four and two. The Browns have a practice facility, finished in 1991, that includes five grass fields, a 6,000-square-foot weight room, a basketball court, racquetball courts, a pool and a TV studio.
The Browns are shifting their scouting emphasis from college to pro. "That's where you're going to be spending your money," says Mike Lombardi, Browns player personnel director. "The key to free agency is to know your team. It's called scouting inside-out as opposed to scouting outside-in. We have to be able to find players that fit our philosophy, then grow with them from within. Continuity is the key. If you're changing systems every year, it's hard to develop players that fit what you want to do.
"We have an assistant offensive-fine coach who scouts offensive linemen for the draft but also helps develop offensive linemen. We were the worst team in the league at developing offensive linemen. We learned from that. We knew we'd need to start developing our own players, because not every year are you going to be able to spend $1.2 million on a Houston Hoover." Hoover was signed as a free agent the last offseason.
"The bottom line is, we all have to change the way we run our business," Lombardi says. "We have to adapt to the new system."
The Bengals have the smallest front office in the league. The Dolphins have more full-time publicists (three) than the Bengals have scouts. At the 1988 Super Bowl, quarterback Boomer Esiason, enjoying an MVP season, had to bring his own masseuse to Miami to rub out his aches and those of his teammates.
And there is Spinney Field, located in a neighborhood just south of downtown. Esiason once called it "the hellhole of the world." Two years ago, a local TV station did a series of reports on the learning difficulties of young children in the area, speculating that the bad air was the cause.
More recently, NBC broadcasters Marv Albert and Paul Maguire poked fun of Spinney during their telecast of a Browns-Bengals game. They noted that a few players, upon arriving at Spinney for the first time, believed they were the victims of a practical joke.
Given the money and the opportunity to play, maybe some free agents might overlook the rest of the equation in Cincinnati. Will the Bengals bulk up their personnel department to find the players they need?
Bengals coaches do the bulk of the team's scouting. "Coaches can do it, but they don't have the time," says Bob Ferguson, Broncos director of football operations. "If you're spending all week putting a game plan together, you don't have time to scout players."
Ferguson adds, "There are going to be very few teams that can fit free agents under the cap. I would think the Bengals have an opportunity. If they're interested."
The teams that do the best scouting and wooing will be the most successful; not necessarily the ones who spend to the limit of the cap. Money doesn't buy brains. That's why we have Madonna and George Steinbrenner.
But are the Bengals interested? The local belief is that Paul Brown invented football and spent his life perfecting it. He cared about winning. But you wonder now what he would think of the money required in the exchange.
You don't wonder that with his son, Mike. Mike has accepted the torch from his father. Mike's unofficial motto is "Make Money Or Die." Metaphorically, Mike's still fussing about the damned carpet.
His latest move to keep the family checkbook humming in the eight-figure zone is a threat to leave Cincinnati, to Baltimore or Memphis or anywhere else that will supply him with a stadium and luxury boxes, gratis. Brown's contention is that the Bengals can't compete financially if they have to play at Riverfront Stadium.
They have a bad lease with the city, no luxury boxes and a stadium capacity (60,389) Brown says is insufficient. He wants a new, 70,000-seat playpen, with 100 luxury boxes.
The question is, would the Bengals use the added swag to pay players? Or would they donate it to the stockholders' Christmas Club accounts?
You have to believe things are a whole lot nicer for the shareholders than the fans. The rich get richer. The fans get milky white stuff.
It's easy to get a line on Bengals
The decline of the Bengals' offense can be traced to the organization's neglect of the offensive line. Cincinnati has selected only one offensive lineman in the first three rounds of its last nine drafts. The only high pick (Freddie Childress, second round, 1989) was a bust.
Line coach Jim McNally had success building the line of the 1980s with late-round picks, but his bosses let themselves become too convinced he could consistently turn water into wine.
The draft error were compounded in 1993 when the Bengals failed to pursue linemen in free agency and released several journeymen in training camp in favor of youngsters too green to cope.
"If I could live my life over, would I handle the line differently? The answer is yes," General Manager Mike Brown says.
Line problems clearly have hampered the development of David Klingler. In his first 12 games as No. 1 quarterback, he missed all or part of six games with injuries.
The offensive coaching staff has been subpar since coordinator Bruce Coslet left to become the Jets' head coach in 1990. Its schemes just haven't gotten the job done. To stem the decline, Mike Pope added the job of coordinator to his coaching of tight ends - he is the first coordinator since '90 - and former player Ken Anderson was hired as quarterbacks coach. But to date, Pope and Anderson have no results to show for their efforts, and still must be considered question marks in their new roles.
After gaining only 165 yards in a 38-3 loss last Sunday to Houston - tied for the second-worst defeat in team history - the Bengals remained last in the NFL in points scored and near the bottom in many categories. A look at the Bengals' decline since 1988: Rushing Passing Total Sacks
Year Record yards yards yards allowed Points
1988 12-4 x-2,710 3,347 x-6,057 30 x-448
1989 8-8 x-2,483 3,618 6,101 41 404
1990 9-7 2,120 2,943 5,063 33 360
1991 3-13 1,811 3,158 4,969 33 263
1992 5-11 1,976 1,943 3,919 45 274
1993 0-9 708 1,485 2,193 35 100
x - led league.
COPYRIGHT 1993 Sporting News Publishing Co.COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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