Tom Archdeacon: Bengals owner Mike Brown: ‘We failed and we know it’

The latest Economist/YouGov poll has Donald Trump’s unfavorability rating among voters at 61 percent — a month ago another poll had him at 70 percent — and yet for at least one person in Cincinnati, the Republican presidential nominee is Mr. Popularity when compared to another guy in town.

“Last night, Jack Brennan, our PR guy was telling me how he drove from Clifton where he lives to work here at the stadium and he got behind a pretty beat up old pickup truck that had a bumper sticker on it along the lines that he was for Trump,” Mike Brown said.

“And down below it on the bumper was another bumper sticker that said:

“Mike Brown Still Stinks!”

Actually the qualifier on the old red truck rumbling along Vine Street was a bit more profane than that, but either Brennan cleaned it up for his boss or the laughing Cincinnati Bengals owner did for the press types who gathered around him Tuesday at Paul Brown Stadium for the team’s 49th annual media luncheon that kicks off another season’s training camp.

“I guess I’ve never gotten free and clear of how people see me,” Brown smiled, “but I think the team has made real progress.”

A year ago the website RealClear Sports ran a poll of the top 10 most despised owners in sports and Brown was ranked No. 5. Early this year Deadspin ran a story headlined: “My God! Mike Brown May Be The Worst Owner In Sports.”

I think both these websites are off target, mostly just putting a new headline on an old rap.

I like Mike Brown, but then again as I’ve said before, I neither pay to get into his games nor did I have to play for him in that lost decades of the 1990s.

The Bengals have made the NFL playoffs the past five years, a claim three other teams in the league — New England, Green Bay and Denver — can make. But therein lies the problem, too.

“We’re in good company, but they somehow marched on and we didn’t,” Brown said. “So people see us in some ways as a team that falls short and we have to correct that.”

The past five years the Bengals have lost that first-round playoff game and, in fact, have not won in the postseason since 1991.

And in that quarter century of failure nothing was more disheartening than last season’s monumental meltdown against the Pittsburgh Steelers in a wild-card playoff game at Paul Brown Stadium that Cincinnati should have won.

With 96 seconds left the Bengals led 16-15 and had the ball. All they had to do was run out the clock. Instead Jeremy Hill fumbled.

Then injured Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger hobbled back onto the field and got his team near midfield. But his team was out of time outs and then he threw an incomplete pass to Antonio Brown.

It seemed the Bengals would finally escape.

And that’s when Cincinnati linebacker Vontaze Burfict was flagged for a nasty hit on Brown that left the receiver momentarily unconscious.

In the arguments that followed, irate Cincinnati cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones got flagged for another 15-yard personal foul and instantly Pittsburgh had the chip-shot field goal to win the game.

Brown was asked which was more painful, all those losing years in the ’90s or the loss to the Steelers last January.

“This one hurt,” he said. “You get through a year where you think you’re gonna get there and we had — we had this one by the scruff of the neck — and then suddenly it turned around and bit us. Did I feel really bad? Yes. Everyone in the stadium that was a Bengals fan felt that way. …

“I’m sure some people wanted to slap us upside the head for that — there’s no doubt they were upset. So were we.

“But I also know when something goes against you, you have to finally accept it and get ready for the next one. … I wouldn’t say that loss left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s just we failed and we know it and we regret it and now we want to see if we can do something about it.”

That’s why Brown so loves this time of year, a time when last year’s wrongs can start to be righted.

He’s been going to training camps for over 75 years, ever since he tagged along with his dad — the fabled Paul Brown — and his old Cleveland Browns teams to their camps at Bowling Green State University.

Back then the young Mike helped the equipment men get gear together, was allowed to sit in on film sessions and meetings and at night he’d go upstairs and play Hearts with some of the guys he most revered, the team’s pioneering black players Marion Motley, Bill Willis and Horace Gillom.

He says he still looks forward to camp and coming out to his stadium office at 6 a.m. each day of the season.

“If I had a choice in the morning to go anywhere, Acapulco, the president’s office, anywhere. I’d rather come here,” he said. “I love it.”

Brown talked about his appreciation of coach Marvin Lewis — they’re starting their 14th year together — and sang the praises of quarterback Andy Dalton (“He gives us a fighting chance no matter who we’re lined up against.”) and the much-maligned Burfict (“We want him on the field…he’s a game-changer.”)

And should his team — again considered one of the best in the league — finally break through and make a splash in the playoffs, does Brown think his perception might change?

Might one day the qualifier be “beloved?”

“No,” he said with a laugh. “But what the heck? I’m in a business where there’s gotta be someone to kick around, as Nixon once said.

“ ‘You won’t have me to kick around anymore.’ Remember his speech?

“I’m happy to be kicked around. I’m still here, so go at it if you will.”

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