Bengals Gonna Bengal?

Amenities still don't exactly flow at PayJoe Stadium

Where are you now, Ki-Jana Carter?

Did you see the NFL Players Association report card on your former team? If yes, are you (A) laughing, (1) Crying or (C) both?

The NFLPA polled every player on every 2022 roster, asking each for their thoughts on how well their teams treated them. They got answers from 1,300 players. The results serve as a guide of sorts, for free agents seeking new teams, but also as a road map for where teams can step up their off-field games.

The Bengals failed miserably in some categories, and did very well in others. The Men are very happy with their strength coaches and the equipment in the weight room. They are very unhappy with the food they’re served, the PayJoe locker room and training room and the way their families are treated on game days.

l’ll get to those specifics momentarily. First, a few stories from the Bengals’ less-than-benevolent past.

Which brings us back to Ki-Jana Carter.

(Stop me if you’ve heard this stuff before, but it’s just too. . . too. . . too something to pass up.)

Carter might not have been one of the most successful Bengals of all time — injury-wrecked, he ran for just 747 yards in four seasons — but for a time he was among the most beloved.

He was?

Yeah. He bought towels. Big towels, beach-sized, enough for the entire team. Until then, players dried themselves after showering with what looked like hand towels. Bigger than wash cloths, but not big enough to handle the water dripping from a just-showered 270-pound man. Tragicomedy, thy face was Willie Anderson, 6-5, 340, attempting to dry himself with a 12-inch square white piece of cloth.

The Hand Towel Era was not limited to hand towels. They were mere symbols.

The day I met Paul Brown in the spring of ‘88, he gave me a tour of Spinney Field, the Bengals practice facility at the time. It was a place the CIA interrogated Russian spies on weekends: Wire mesh, junior-high lockers, indoor-outdoor carpet that was constantly wet, toilets known for flooding. Players stepping on and over one another in a rectangular room about the size of a Cadillac Escalade.

Walking around the locker room, PB offered no apologies. Instead, he was obsessed with a lone, 20-inch TV bolted to the back wall. “Television,’’ he decided, “never helped anybody win a football game.’’

Nor, apparently, did new jock straps, back in the days when players wore jock straps. If you were a Cincinnati Bengal in the 1980s and you wanted a jock, well, there’s a big, rolling laundry bin right over there. Grab y-self one.

Boomer Esiason had to bring his own masseuse to the ‘89 Super Bowl, even though his damaged golden left shoulder really needed massaging and, well, he was Boomer Esiason, the MVP of the league.

Back then, a player could have all the Gatorade he wanted, as long as he bought it himself. And dare we talk about the neighborhood itself?

Lower Price Hill, just downhill and down-wind from Queen City Barrel Company, which spewed toxic gunk into the air while making barrels. You could see the pollution. More, you could taste it. A former O-lineman, Ken Moyer, told me the sweat rolling from his mustache during practice tasted like metal.

Media parked in an area beneath the 8th Street viaduct. Something foul and corrosive dripped from the underbelly of the bridge. It ate car paint. To this day, I believe I should have charged the Bengals for the paint job I needed after the ‘88 season.

Compared to that, these truly are the good old days.

Except they’re not. Vestiges of bygone Bengaldom remain.

NFLPA:

The Cincinnati Bengals are ranked 27^th in our team guide. The staff itself is well liked, and players credit head coach Zac Taylor for recent improvements that have been made – which speaks to why he grades out as one of the most well-liked coaches in the NFL by his players. However, the facilities and resources offered are ranked far below average.

The Bengals are one of three teams that do not provide dinner to their players; they are also one of two teams that do not provide vitamins, and they are the only team that doesn’t provide supplements. Additionally, players feel that they have some of the smallest hot/cold tubs in the league; they have issues with the showers and toilets not consistently working, and they are the only team that does not have outlets in their lockers to charge devices.

OK. I hear you. No outlets isn’t exactly a tragedy. Neither are electric outlets a lot to ask from an organization that backstrokes in Benjamins.

Players are encouraged to come in on off days, but the cafeteria is closed, so they can’t grab so much as a banana.

Your heart doesn’t exactly bleed. I get it. Pack a lunch. But this is the NFL, where first-class treatment is expected. Staff the damned cafeteria, yeah?

This one, though, is undeniably bad:

The players who responded to the survey also complained that there is nowhere warm and safe for mothers and kids to go during the game because the Bengals do not provide a family room, unlike the majority of teams. Players reported that wives have sat on the public restroom floor to nurse their babies.

Um, what? NFLPA:

These examples are consistent with players opinions. Only 44 percent of respondents believed club owner Mike Brown is willing to spend money to make the facility better, ranking him tied for 29th in this category.

The more things change. . .

The players are misinformed here. Brown can simply demand, per his lease, that Hamilton County pay for the upgrades.

Here are the grades assessed the Bengals by the players association:

Training Room — D-minus

• 23% of players feel they have enough hot tub space (Ranked 31^st)

• 53% of players feel they have enough cold tub space (Ranked 27^th)

• Locker room - D, needs renovating

• Many showers and toilets do not work

• Lockers do not have outlets for players to charge devices

• A’s and B’s across the board for the strength coaches and equipment.

Luxury is the standard in the NFL. It’s time for the organization to be as successful as the people it employs.

Now, then. . .

XAVIER DOES WHAT IT DOES. . . It’s such a pleasure watching the Musketeers play this year. Have I mentioned that?

Yeah, Doc, only about a million times. Are you on the payroll?

I am not, though I probably should be, given the (complete lack of) wages you guys pay me.

They won at Providence last night. That’s very hard to do. They won with two guards having career evenings. Quasi-am basketball in March is often a guards’ game. Especially point guards, given the amped-up control-freakism coaches slide into during the Madness. I’d certainly take my chances with Boum and Jones dribbling and taking orders from Sean Miller.

“21-of-30 from the field, 7-of-12 from 3, 13-of-14 from the foul line,’’ Miller recounted. “They had 16 rebounds and eight assists and 62 points.’’

They won a high-pressure game on the road against a good team. Again, nice prep for a first Mad weekend. Xavier remains hard to guard, even without Freemantle. Teams with multiple scoring options — and multiple ways to create shots — are tough outs in the tournament.

It’s not hard to see Sweet-ness with this group, depending on the sort of matchups it gets. Scoring, IMO, is more important in March than defending. Depth is overrated, though you could make a case that an early out in the Big East tournament would not be bad news for the Musketeers legs. Still, Claude and Edwards have proven capable for short stretches.

The most fun weekend of the year is nearly here. Four games, four televisions. Beer, food, brackets. Perfection, yeah?

TV OR NOT TV, AGAIN. . . I rarely watch the Reds on TV. Too much attention required. So this doesn’t affect me. But where is The Club gonna be seen?

Here’s some exasperation on the subject from my Substack brother, Craig Calcaterra, who writes the newsletter A Cup of Coffee:

Major League Baseball is preparing to take over the local broadcasts for as many as 17 teams amid the financial deterioration of the Bally and AT&T SportsNet regional sports networks.

If those companies can’t pay the freight for the media rights they bought — and they’re making it pretty clear that they can’t — MLB and the clubs have the ability to take their broadcasts rights back. What I have not yet seen, however, is . . . how they plan to actually get those broadcasts out. Whose cameras will be used. Who will produce and broadcast the games. Where, actually, those games will appear. Over the air? On some new local vertical on MLB.tv?

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . A Top 5 Eagles tune for me. Vastly underrated and underplayed, written and sung by the best Eagle of ‘em all, the late Glenn Frey, RIP.

I believe in 2nd chances/

I believe in angels, too.