Mike Brown (American football executive)

Michael Brown (born August 10, 1935) is an American football executive who is the owner of the Cincinnati Bengals in the National Football League (NFL).

He played nine games for the Big Green in 1956.

In an unusual meeting between future sports owners, eventual New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner hired him to a summer job as a deck hand for Kinsman Marine Transit Company.

Brown eventually followed his father into football management.

Brown graduated from Dartmouth College in 1957, where he played quarterback for their football team, and from Harvard Law School in 1960.

The son of Bengals co-founder Paul Brown, he joined the Bengals upon their founding in 1968 and assumed ownership after his father's death in 1991.

Before beginning his career as a football executive, he played quarterback at Dartmouth.

Brown is the only living son of Paul Brown.

Paul Brown founded the Bengals, then an American Football League (AFL) team, in 1968.

(This was several years after Paul Brown was dismissed as Cleveland Browns head coach in a well-publicized falling out with Art Modell. ) He began his executive duties with the Bengals as assistant general manager.

Along with personnel decisions, he was a spokesman for the team on issues of league rules and team policy.

His older brother, Robin, died of cancer in 1978.

Brown assumed ownership responsibilities upon his father's death in August 1991 and has remained in the ownership position since.

His first significant move as owner was to fire popular coach Sam Wyche after the 1991 season (although he originally claimed that Wyche resigned).

Days later, Brown hired Dave Shula to be head coach, making Shula (at the time) the second youngest NFL head coach in history and making Dave and Don Shula the first father-son to lead different NFL teams in the same year.

Since Brown became owner, the team has eight winning seasons out of 30, a winning percentage of .418 (199–278–4) in the regular season, and no playoff wins in seven appearances from 1991 to 2020.

Going into 1993, Brown sought to negotiate a new lease with Cincinnati to keep the Bengals in the city.

Initially, Brown rejected advances from other cities to discuss moving the team.

Rick Eckstein, co-author of "Public Dollars, Private Stadiums," described the Hamilton County arrangement as "the single most lopsided stadium deal since 1993" and questioned Bob Bedinghaus' role with the team after having been County Commissioner when the deal was reached.

By 1995, he argued that Riverfront Stadium's small seating capacity and lack of luxury boxes was hindering the Bengals' success.

In 1995, he announced that Cincinnati had breached its lease agreement when it was late by one week in paying $167,000 in concession receipts.

He threatened to move the team to Baltimore if Cincinnati or Hamilton County would not fund a new stadium.

The leverage of this threat proved successful as Cincinnati's City Council and the Hamilton County Commissioners opted to fund the new Paul Brown Stadium with a proposed county sales tax increase, which needed voter approval.

Portune felt, among other things, that published revenues from 1995 to 1999 contradicted Brown's claims of financial distress.

The Hamilton County Board of Commissioners eventually was substituted as the plaintiff in the case.

Fans supporting Portune cited what they felt was the broken promise that the Bengals would "be more competitive" with a new stadium.

(Modell eventually, and controversially, moved the Browns to Baltimore and renamed it to the Ravens, but a new Cleveland team resumed the Browns' history.) In 1996, Hamilton County voters passed a one-half percent sales tax increase to fund the building of a new facility for the Bengals and a second new facility for the Major League Baseball Cincinnati Reds.

The Bengals filed suit against the county for the right to manage it in 2000.

County commissioners agreed to let a Bengals' subsidiary run the stadium, and it opened later that year.

In 2007, Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune (a former Cincinnati City Council member, though not Commissioner at the time the parties executed the lease), filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the NFL, the Bengals and the other 31 NFL teams.

A 2008 Forbes survey suggested the team's rankings in direct revenues had dropped since the stadium's construction (placing the team 21st in total value at the time at $941 million).

The organization's lease is due to expire in 2026.

In 2008, the Bengals set a record for the most games needed under one specific owner to attain 100 wins (288).

In 2010, the team set a record for the fewest games needed to lose 200 (both considering and not considering playoffs) under one specific owner (314).

The Bengals hold a number of distinctions for the time frame of Brown's ownership: It is the only team with three nine-game-or-more losing streaks.

It also holds six of the twenty-five 0-6 starts (24%) and four of the thirteen 0-8 starts (31%) in that time.

The Bengals have gone winless in October nine different times in twenty-two years under five different head coaches (Sam Wyche, the first under his ownership, was originally hired by his father).

The Bengals have had only eight winning seasons out of 22 since the stadium opened, with five of those seasons occurring from 2011 to 2015.

His brother, Pete, was the senior vice-president of Bengals' player personnel until his death in 2017.

In 2020, Hamilton County and the Bengals agreed to split costs on an architectural needs assessment of the stadium.