Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown is the defacto General Manger of the team and his brother Pete Brown serves as the Senior Vice President for Player Personnel. They make the decisions good or but we may see a small change in that as it is believed that along with his new contract head coach Marvin Lewis will have more say over personnel decisions. Brown has been criticized a lot for his handling of the football operations of this team, and on draft day he has had a very mixed bag of results.
His 2010 class looks to be pretty good, and still has a tremendous amount of upside, but the classes delivered in 2006 through 2008 were pretty bad. The main issues seem to be a lack of taking character and work ethic into consideration when making draft picks. The Bengals have had a slew of players get into off the field trouble and ones unwilling to work hard and that is a big problem for them.
Brown does not have the assets in place in the Front Office or the scouting department other NFL teams have, and his record on draft day speaks to a lack of qualified decision makers. Brown constantly defense this practice, but since his team has not had back to back winning season in the last 29 years I think we can call this way of drafting a bunch of hooey.
Related Links:
- Cincinnati Bengals War Room
- Joshua Lobdell.com