Mike Brown (football team owner)

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Mike Brown
Position(s) Owner, General Manager, and President
College Dartmouth '57
Career Record 92 Wins - 172 Losses
Team(s) as a coach/administrator
1991-present Cincinnati Bengals

Michael "Mike" Brown (born 1937) is the franchise owner of the Cincinnati Bengals, an American football team in the National Football League. He is the son of former Cleveland Browns, Ohio State University and Cincinnati Bengals coach, Paul Brown. Paul Brown was the co-founder of the Bengals, and since his death in 1991, Mike Brown has taken the responsibilities as the team owner. [1]

Contents

[edit] Controversy

Despite having one of the worst winning percentages of professional sports teams since taking control, Brown has been stubborn and slow to make changes that would seemingly make the team a winner. Brown has a long history of nepotism, placing relatives and in-laws in key executive positions. He is known to be strongly loyal to staff and players who demonstrate commitment to Brown's vision, regardless of the individual in question's productivity or history of success. Even during the worst years of the mid-90s Brown refused to fire coaches, add scouts or rid the team of malcontented players. Brown prefers to run the Bengals in a manner consistent with the ways of the old NFL, eschewing modern advancements in scouting and player evaluation for more old-fashioned methods popular in the time of his father, NFL legend Paul Brown.

[edit] Stadium Deal

Claiming that his team could not remain competitive without a new stadium because Riverfront Stadium has “virtually no luxury seating and the league’s smallest seating capacity,” JA 2579, Bengals’ owner Mike Brown (the son of Paul Brown) threatened to move the team if Cincinnati or Hamilton County would not build a new stadium. At an owners’ meeting in 1995, Brown announced that Cincinnati had breached its lease agreement when it was late by one week in paying $167,000 in concession receipts. According to Brown, this breach entitled the Bengals to relocate to a different city. At an owners’ meeting the following month, Brown declared that if the city failed to provide the team with a new stadium, the Bengals would consider moving to Los Angeles. Brown later visited Baltimore, which offered to build the team a $200 million stadium with a practice facility and a pledge of $44 million in income. On June 24, 1995, Brown gave Cincinnati what amounted to an ultimatum: If the city did not agree to a new stadium deal within five days, the Bengals would start negotiating with Baltimore. Cincinnati’s City Council and the Hamilton County Commissioners relented, opting to fund the new stadium with a proposed county sales-tax increase. In March 1996, the sales-tax referendum passed with 61% support.

During negotiations over the new stadium lease, the County retained two national experts in developing and leasing professional-sports stadiums. As negotiations proceeded, it became clear to the County that the Bengals’ goal was to acquire sufficient revenue under the new lease to move the team from the last quartile of NFL teams in revenue to the second quartile. County officials asked to see the Bengals’ financial records during the negotiations but the team refused, explaining that the disclosure of this information would violate league policy. The parties executed a lease for the new stadium in May 1997. Four years later, in May 2001, the Los Angeles Times published an article disclosing the revenues and profits of NFL teams, which it had obtained from the record in a lawsuit between the NFL and the owner of the Oakland Raiders. The data showed that the Bengals ranked eighth in profits in 1996 and ninth in 1997 out of 31 teams. On May 16, 2003, six years after the parties signed the stadium lease, Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune (a former Cincinnati City Council member, though not a Hamilton County Commissioner at the time the parties executed the lease), filed this lawsuit in federal district court against the NFL, the Bengals and the other 31 NFL teams. The Hamilton County Board of Commissioners eventually was substituted as the plaintiff in the case. Legal Findings

[edit] Sources

Preceded by
Paul Brown		 Cincinnati Bengals Owners
1991–present		 Succeeded by
Current Owner

[edit] References

  1. ^ Paul Brown