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Mike Brown: 32nd Best Owner

Michael Silver released his NFL Owner Rankings. Want to take a stab at #32?

32. Mike Brown, Bengals

Boy, Brown has sure done a fantastic job of bringing the Bengals into the 21st Century. Once known merely as a pathetic football team whose on-field ineptitude mirrored management's cheap, clueless approach -- the Bungles -- Brown's team has now become a national punch line, his players the poster children for malfeasance. Welcome to Sin City, or Cinci for short.

Until very recently, Brown sat back and watched as clowns like Chris Henry did incomprehensibly stupid things like get arrested for handgun charges while wearing his own jersey and kept their roster spots. You'd think someone who employs so many miscreants (10 Bengals players have been arrested in the last 14 months) would be careful about invoking the names of certain notorious villains, but this is what Brown did in front of more than 50 of his peers at last March's owners' meetings. In the midst of a complaint about the current stadium-building plan that is part of the league's revenue-sharing arrangement, Brown was reminded by a fellow owner that he had taken advantage of the same plan (and a provision that allowed him to waive the club-seat premiums that normally go to visiting teams) upon opening Paul Brown Stadium several years earlier. According to a witness, Brown replied, "Look, it seemed like a good thing in the beginning. A lot of people think a lot of things are good in the beginning. A lot of people thought Hitler was good in the beginning."

And on that tasteful note, I respectfully sign off.

Yea, just yea.

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