:-)

Most people won't get this.
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Looking for a little bit of serious discussion for a minute. This is something i posted over on the mothership and i wonder if some people who knows way more than me about finances and maybe have a little insight on how an NFL team might operate, could tell me where i could be wrong or right here. There are still a good number of Bengals fans who believe the Bengals are actually "cash poor" and that just makes me laugh in this day and age of revenue sharing. Here's the post.




**** me running with this damn laptop! I had a gigantic post all typed out and i was down to my last line or two and i fat palmed something and it all disappeared...mfsob. Here's the end of the post.

Look at it this way. The Bengals are valued at roughly $4B. Liquid assets should be about 2-10% of value, depending on individual wants and needs. The Bengals are in a business that requires them to put large sums of money in escrow for guarantees, just like every other NFL franchise. If their liquid is only 5% of that 4B, that means they have 200,000,000 cash available to put in escrow, which would be about 37M more than the Eagles who have the largest amount of money in guarantees right now.

The average NFL operating expense for an NFL franchise in 2023 was 541M. In 2023 the Bengals received 549M in revenue sharing. That means the NFL paid for 100% of the Bengals operating expenses for the 2023 season. The NFL has paid for at least a portion of the Bengals expenditures for a loooong while now.

Anyone trying to say the Bengals simply can't pay whatever other teams pay, are "cash poor" or whatever hobspin someone wants to put on it, is either trolling or not willing to look at or believe the large sums of money the team has made for many years and how they've had heaps of money dropped on them for the last 10+ years.

INb4 someone yells, "they barely broke even!!!!". Don't forget they get to keep 100% of ticket sales, concessions and corporate sponsorships.
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I know nothing about the Bengals and their finances, but these two word are very important.

Davis had very little cash even though the Raid were worth billions.
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I can see why a team(s) might have cash issues year to year due to bad contracts, multiple contracts (fired coaches) and things like that. The thing is, the Bengals don't have any of that. I'm not sure if dead cap (i don't think it does) has anything to do with coaches, but if you're paying out money to guys who don't work for you and you're carrying 50+M in dead cap money, it would make it hard to escrow.
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I know jack crap about NFL finances. I nod my head in discussions and pretend I know what people are talking about, but in reality when it comes to cap discussions and whatnot, I don't know what's going on.

That being said, people ask, "Why doesn't Mike Brown demand greater degrees of excellence from his coaches? Why does he hold onto these guys for so long?" Or we'll talk about things like that discussion item from a few days ago about the super tiny number of employed front office personnel compared to most teams around the league.

"Why does the team operate in such a way that it hamstrings the franchise in unnecessary ways?"

Well, the kindest and most logical answer to me is because ownership isn't as rife with resources to make those things happen. Because any other alternative answer involves calling the guy incompetent or just plain stupid.

But again, I recognize that my opinion/outlook could be uninformed and incorrect because I don't have my facts straight.
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He's the ultimate 'can't teach an old dog new tricks' kind of guy. He's loyal to a fault and that loyalty is the money he has to pay in contracts. He will wring the last penny out of them, results be damned. As long as he's can use black ink, that's all that matters.

Old ways, set in stone. Unwilling to adapt and change with the times. He's always been cheap, just like his dad because that's what he knows and he's locked into it.


Anyway, to my question. I was looking at it wrong. I think i have it now. The escrow a team has to put aside is the total number of guaranteed money, minus the first year salary and signing bonus (and maybe options etc). Anyway, to make it easier i'm just going to calculate total guarantee - first year salary + signing bonus.

So for a guy like Burrow, Mike Brown would have to put about $178M in escrow for his guarantees. So, i can see where the numbers might get big enough for some serious sticker shock for a guy like Mike, or for a guy(s) who don't manage their caps well and/or hire/fire guys like it's going out of style, ala Faid.

Paul Brown was an OG football guru. Mike played FB in college but he's more lawyer/business man than football guy.

Thanks for the input, homie.
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only two years before reality sets in for rfaulk34
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Yes! Only 2 more years and Burrow will be one SB ring behind Mahomes.



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How’s that? I haven’t heard of any league investigation that plans to punish the Chiefs by stripping titles from them.
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Let’s say just one ring in the next 2 seasons. Care to make a $50 bottle of alcohol bet on one ring in the next 2 seasons?
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One thing that plays a part is guaranteed contracts. When the team has to guarantee a contract for a big money player, they don't get to just live on the promise. The team actually has to put that money into escrow so that if the owner goes bankrupt, the player still gets paid. In the modern age of enormous contracts for quarterbacks and some other players, that amounts to a lot of cash. Therefore, owners that are not very liquid have more trouble signing players to long term contracts than cash rich owners.
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Yep. That's a discussion i've been having today with a couple other Bengals fans on my home board.
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