A few months ago, Cincinnati Bengals boss Mike Brown quit trying to buy love and decided to buy silence instead.

Monday, August 07, 2000

A few months ago, Cincinnati Bengals boss Mike Brown quit trying to buy love and decided to buy silence instead.

Tired of losing with guys who took the organization’s money with one hand and slapped it with the other, Brown started demanding loyalty clauses in new contracts for all players.

This is how it works: Sign on the dotted line, then slam a teammate, management or the coach in public and kiss a chunk of your signing bonus goodbye.

That’s some plan for turning around the sorriest team in pro football. It’s not only a running joke, impossible to enforce and already the subject of a grievance by the NFL Players Association; it’s like the captain of the Titanic buttonholing passengers as the ship is going down and demanding they sign up for next week’s cruise.

Loose lips may have sunk some ships, but the Bengals haven’t needed assistance. No franchise in sports has taken on water faster since Brown took the helm from his father.

The late Paul Brown built a football dynasty in Cleveland that still bears his name and was working on another when he died at age 82 in August 1991. Under Paul Brown, the Bengals went to two Super Bowls and advanced to the AFC divisional playoffs one last time in January, 1991. Seven months later, Mike Brown moved from understudy to president. Cincinnati hasn’t seen a winning season since.

Most franchises mired in that kind of swoon do anything to hang onto talent. Often it involves overpaying for players, disciplining them too little and granting some say in how the ship is run. Brown, ever the tough guy, took the opposite tack.

At the end of the 1998 season, punter Lee Johnson questioned management’s commitment. He was released the next day and docked one game’s pay – $20,588.24 – for conduct detrimental to the team. The players’ association filed a grievance then, too, that was settled.

That bad idea probably spawned this one. And either way, that whole line of thinking is why Dan Wilkinson and Carl Pickens, the last two players the Bengals tried to keep by tagging them franchise players, fled town before the glue ever had a chance to dry.

Now, there are two sides to every story. Wilkinson, a No. 1 pick in 1995, greased the skids by calling Cincinnati a racist town, but quit campaigning the second he wound up in Washington with a fat new contract. And Pickens, a second-round pick in 1992, had a long and distinguished history as a malcontent.

But there was something very reasonable in what he said about being a changed man after signing with the Tennessee Titans recently as a free agent:

”My reputation is due somewhat to the situation I was in at Cincinnati,” he said. ”Being basically at the bottom, you take on a negative personality.”

Some people will argue that Pickens was born with that, but losing brings out the worst in everybody. He barely talked to reporters during the 1998 season other than to say he wanted out of Cincinnati. Then Pickens dared the club to make him their franchise player, showed up late for training camp the next season, and held his tongue just long enough to sign a five-year, $23.25 million deal three days before the opener.

But true to form, when last season ended miserably, Pickens summoned reporters to his locker and ripped the organization again, this time long and loud. He said he couldn’t believe the Bengals would bring back coach Bruce Coslet and that he wouldn’t play for him again anyway.

Brown held his own tongue until June. Then he summoned a reporter of his own and said, ”We don’t want to go through the kind of situation we went through with Carl. And we feel the players, who are the club’s employees, should be loyal to the team.”

Not everyone agreed.

No. 1 pick Peter Warrick refused to sign a contract until the clause disappeared. Tackle Willie Anderson did not, agreeing to a contract extension that seals his lips for six years. A violation could eat into his $8 million signing bonus, but the only people Anderson believes will lose out on the deal are reporters.

”You,” he told them, ”are not going to get a lot of answers.”

Frankly, neither is anyone else until the grievance hearing. Brown wrote a newspaper column to deflect early criticism and won’t discuss the matter further. But he insists the clause will be invoked only in extreme cases.

”I would tell you that we aren’t looking to restrict players’ conversations unreasonably,” he said.

Right.

But the first somebody who cocks an eyebrow because it’s fourth-and-inches and the kicking team is trotting out onto the field better have his checkbook close by. Just in case.

Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org