Bengals Owner Mike Brown on Friday “passionately disputed public pronouncements” that the team would “entertain moving from Cincinnati,” according to Geoff Hobson of BENGALS.com. Brown said, “I played a role in bringing it here. I played a role in keeping it here. I don’t know if there’s much more I can do. I would hazard to guess the Bengals will be here when I’m not.” Brown: “We had an opportunity to move when we came here to the stadium. We turned it down knowing full well that we were turning down literally hundreds of millions of dollars that we would have seen if we moved. I think that ought to be understood. It seems to be ignored.” Brown said of this past season, when the team finished 7-9, “We had a down year. We think we’ll bounce back and whatever issues with the team will be cured if we win enough.” Brown said that the decision to bring back coach Marvin Lewis “isn’t as unpopular as perceived with his mail running half and half.” Brown: “I made the call for more than one reason. It gives us our best chance to be successful this coming season. Marvin gives us continuity. That’s important in this league. I also made the call because I felt he deserved consideration for all the time and effort he has put in here. He’s been our head coach for 15 years” (BENGALS.com, 1/19).
LOOKING TO REBOUND: The Bengals finished 31st in the NFL in attendance, and Brown said, “The best single thing we can do to re-establish our attendance is to win on the field. All the other things are peripheral to that. We won’t be able to improve any of that until we get out there and have our chance to do so.” He added about the team’s 50th anniversary celebration during the season, “We brought old-timers back on a weekly basis and I thought that went extremely well. Yet doing that is not going to fill the seats. They’re going to come when we win. In some ways, ours is a hard market. It is the fact that our people are judgmental about us” (CINCINNATI ENQUIRER, 1/20).
