Bengals owner Mike Brown has a unique analogy to working the salary cap
Not many NFL owners have been around the game of football longer than Cincinnati Bengals President Mike Brown. The soon-to-be 88-year old son of Paul Brown is as old fashioned and seasoned as they come. Brown's earliest memories are of football, watching his legendary father coach high school ball in Massillon, OH. We're talking right […]
Not many NFL owners have been around the game of football longer than Cincinnati Bengals President Mike Brown. The soon-to-be 88-year old son of Paul Brown is as old fashioned and seasoned as they come.
Brown's earliest memories are of football, watching his legendary father coach high school ball in Massillon, OH. We're talking right around the start of World War II here, folks. To say the game he's lived his whole life around has changed dramatically since then is a vast understatement.
The financials of the game have changed even more, something that Brown has slowly adapted recently with the help of his family. Signing bonus prorations and void years can be confusing, but in the salary cap world, Brown views it all in a *very* down-to-earth manner.
In his annual talking session at this week's Bengals media luncheon, Brown analogized paying several great players under the salary cap to…feeding hogs at a farm.
"We have some good players that need to be fed, and that's challenging, mathematical," Brown said. "You get a bag of corn and you have 10 hogs, well, you're going to put that out to them, the bag is going to be gone, empty, and some of them are gonna get it, well that's too bad. And that's pretty much how the system works."
That's certainly one way of putting it.
As other teams finesse the cap and fuel a narrative that the system isn't even real, Brown abides by it to the fullest. The Bengals' sizable contracts are usually front-loaded and feature few guarantees, putting more stress on the current cap and creating room for future years. That methodology also makes it tougher to sign multiple lucrative deals at once, which is what the Bengals are trying to accomplish pretty shortly.
Joe Burrow is officially next up in the ever-growing quarterback market. His floor has become Justin Herbert's newly-signed five-year, $262.5 million albatross with over $130 million fully guaranteed. On top of Burrow, Tee Higgins and Logan Wilson are also looking for new pay days, and Ja'Marr Chase will be eligible as after this season's conclusion.
It's a good problem for the Brown family to have, and the team's President for the past 30+ years sees it as a necessary hurdle for the sake of the league.
"This is the way it works under the system that the NFL has," Brown said. "It's actually a good system; keeps competition likely. But it's a hard system. If you're doing pretty well, and you got some guys get into their contract moment, you've got a problem. We'll try our best."
If Burrow, Higgins, Wilson, and Chase are the hogs, then the corn will be well spent.
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Featured image via © Sam Greene/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK
