I'll give the Bengals this: 2011 has been one hell of a season.  It's only fitting that the last week of the season promises to be a dramatic blow off top on a couple of levels.  The first level is on the field, where the team needs to beat the holy-crap-when-will-it-end Ray Lewis era Ravens. I don't have much to add there except to say that the Bengals are perfectly capable of winning and as 2.5 point dogs at home I'd even consider putting money on them.

The second level of interest is fan attendance.  Listening to local talk radio, it seems to be the main focus in fact.  Make that national media too.  See Pro Football Talk, Shutdown Corner at Yahoo!, ESPN and National Football Post for more.  I expected many of these outlets to get this story completely wrong, and call out the city for having "bad fans".  Instead, they get it kinda sorta correct and highlight the souring relationship between the fans and the ownership.  Gregg Doyel actually comes down harder on ownership than we probably do here at WDR.

With paid attendance seemingly fluctuating more or less in the 40,000s, essentially the Bengals have about 20K+ season tickets available for future seasons they would love to sell.  Another way to put it is that they are operating at 75% of the stadium's capacity.  I wanted to take a look, using the best data I could find with some basic searching, to see exactly what is going on here in Cincy.  We all have our own opinions and narratives we want to use to explain this story, but a little hard data goes a long way.

For starters, I'm working off of ESPN.com's attendance database, which is only good from 2006.  Not perfect, but good enough because it captures the growth just before the Great Recession, the Great Recession, the Lockout and some of the economic recovery.  For those interested, here's a spreadsheet of the data: Download Attendance Trends

In short, here is what has happened in Cincinnati:  Since 2006, paid attendance in capacity terms has fallen roughly 27%.  This happened in steady drips from 2007-2009 and then accelerated in 2010 and 2011. 

ESPN doesn't provide data in 2006 and 2007 for Indy, Minnesota, Oakland and Miami unfortunately, so I cannot tell you if that is the worst decline in the NFL, but it is definitely the worst of the measurable teams.  It is a shame too because Oakland and Miami, in particular, are teams that have shown large drops in attendance.  Though when you do look at the data available for Miami & Oakland, I am not sure it would change the conclusions about Cincy anyway.

According to ESPN, here is the capacity trend at PBS since 2006: 

• 2006 - 100.7% full v NFL Avg 99.74%
• 2007 - 100.4% full (-0.3% drop) v NFL Avg 99.71% (-0.03% drop)
• 2008 - 98.6% full (-1.79% drop) v NFL Avg 97.05% (-2.66% drop)
• 2009 - 97.7% full (-0.93% drop) v NFL Avg 95.39% (-1.71% drop)
• 2010 - 92.1% full (-5.73% drop) v NFL Avg 94.54% (-0.89% drop)
• 2011 - 73.6% full (-20.09% drop) v NFL Avg 95.31% (0.82% gain)

One thing I will note is these stats do not factor in COST.  I do not have good data for that.  So if the almost flat attendance in the NFL during the Great Recession and the Lockout was propped up by collapsing ticket costs, that would make the paid attendance figures misleading.  However, based on my understanding, the all-in cost of going to live games in the NFL and at PBS has not changed much or even increased on average during this entire time. 

For example, in 2008, see this article which shows the "Fan Cost Index" rising over 6% in 2008 for Bengals fans.  In 2009, the offseason during which the full recession effects would be hitting, Bengals all-in costs decreased only -0.9%.  These same measures indicate the NFL raised prices in 2010 about 4% and kept things flat in 2011.  You can argue about the exactness of these figures but the point is this:  demand for the NFL is INELASTIC.  People just don't cut their spending all that much on the NFL.  Thus, the NFL hasn't been playing games with the cost to attend games and so this hasn't biased the attendance figures. 

The reasons people generally cite to explain attendance trends for the most part come down to 1) Winning/Losing, 2) Economy 3) General fan interest and 4) Attractiveness of alternatives to attending live games (i.e., watching at home).  These factors obviously don't work in isolation and their effects can be muddled, especially for the Bengals in the past 5 years.  So let's take a look and see if the data really fits nicely into those explanations.

To begin with, factor #3 or "fan interest" is sky high and growing.  You can see this from TV ratings.  They are sick.  For televised Bengals games, for example, roughly 65% of local tv's are tuned into the Bengals games when they play.  Even with a lockout, fans haven't lost interest or held a grudge, as paid attendance for the entire NFL will climb this year for the first time since 2007.  So let's just eliminate fan interest in football as explaining any of vagaries of attendance from year to year.  People are addicted to it like crack.

Back to the Bengals.  From 2006-2008, there was a general downtrend in performance as the Bengals could not sustain the success of their breakthrough 2005 season.  During this time, at least, when most season ticket buying is done (the offseason), the economy was also not in recession.  Thus, you see a slight downdrip in paid attendance.  Nothing seems too strange here, and performance coupled with HDTV awesomeness could easily explain the drop in attendance over these years.  You might expect a bigger drop in 2008 or in 2009 because the team was terrible in 2008 and the full force of the recession hit towards the end of 2008 and into 2009.  However, there was a nice built in excuse for the poor performance of the team, Carson Palmer was out basically the whole year in 2008.  Attendance declined only slightly for 2009 as fans may have viewed 2008 as worse than it would have been with Palmer healthy.

Indeed, the Bengals did rebound in 2009 with a division title, however, this did not translate into increased attendance in 2010.  In fact, a sharp drop occurred of over 5%.  It was the 3rd largest drop in the NFL that year.  This is where things get interesting.  Certainly performance cannot explain it.  People do their season ticket buying in the offseason, so a good year on the field on average tends to drive attendance the following the year (for example poorly attended Tampa Bay won in 2010 and saw attendance climb over 14% in 2011). 

Let's move onto the economy. By early 2010, the economy had bottomed and started to climb again.  Why would people suddenly not be able to afford tickets in 2010 after making those payments in 2008 and 2009?  Perhaps people tried to maintain some of their lifestyle through the recession but after it turned out the recovery was also weak they realized their prospects were still dim and they finally capitulated.  I am sympathetic to this argument but economic factors should manifest themselves league-wide unless you are willing to argue that Cincinnati had a uniquely different economic experience in 2010 than the other NFL markets (hint:  it did not).  I do not see conclusive evidence that 2010 attendance was worse than the other recession years of 2008 and 2009.  In fact, it appears to be slightly better on average for the league (though certain individual teams had a real nasty time like Tampa).

Beyond that, you would expect to see other sports entertainment in Cincinnati experience poor attendance trends.  Reds, Bearcats and Xavier attendance records do not indicate any effect from the economy in 2010.  Even the Freedom Center appears to have had flat attendance. Therefore, I cannot truly endorse this explanation, there just isn't any evidence.

Certainly each year, as more people play fantasy football and become more interested in ALL NFL teams and as HDTVs become cheaper and better, many fans are opting for the home or bar viewing experience instead of going to games.  However, this is a multi-year trend that should act as a consistent drag over time in a league otherwise gaining in popularity.  It is not a 2010 specific trend so that explanation doesn't seem right either.  Traditional factors, therefore, don't really offer compelling explanations of the 2010 drop.

In 2011, stated clearly, Bengals attendance collapsed.  Similar to 2010, it's tough to think the economy explained this drop as we're now into another year of the weak recovery and paid attendance will increase this year in the NFL for the first time in 3 years.  And again, viewing at home didn't get suddenly so attractive 20% of fans abandoned season tickets.  But performance, oh boy, that could certainly explain some things.

As I mentioned before, ticket purchasing takes place in the offseason and the 2010 offseason felt like the apocalypse while it was happening.  With the awkward Marvin resigning, the lockout, letting JJoe walk despite him wanting to stay (ask @JohnThornton about that on Twitter), Carson retiring and hiring Jon Gruden's brother...fans were wondering what the f*** was going on?  Coupled with a terrible on the field performance and the 2010 offseason was probably worse in Cincinnati than anywhere else in the NFL.  My guess is this triggered the attendance collapse this year.

However, a fall this big is extremely rare.  There are only 3 other teams that showed falls this large in the past 5 years.  Two were in 2009, when the offseason ticket buying should theoretically have been hardest hit by the Great Recession.  Those teams were Jacksonville and Oakland.  Jacksonville has a reputation of being a market simply not capable of supporting a NFL team coming off of a miserable year and Oakland is a notoriously poor city where I would expect the recession to have an outsize affect and they coming off a long stretch of total futility. I can plausibly explain why those teams saw such a huge drop. 

The other collapse was Tampa Bay in 2010 (down almost 22%).  They were coming off of a 3 win season but many teams have awful years and don't see attendance fall THAT much.  Traditional factors don't explain it and perhaps it was random.  After all, Tampa attendance rebounded this year by 15%.  I am not very familiar with that franchise but would curious to know if anyone could provide a narrative that made any sense.  Regardless, the Tampa drop appears to be the best comparable drop to the Bengals, in that it happened outside the peak of the Great Recession window.  Therefore, we might expect a large rebound in attendance next year if you believe in that the Tampa situation mirrors Cincy.

That's the data, limited as it is. The summary:  the Bengals have had a huge attendance collapse but it's something with precedent and they can expect to gain some but not all fans back in the offseason.

However, something kind of smells about the 2010 drop.  It's as if there was a forewarning that the Bengals were primed for a large attendance fall.  I think a couple of narratives may help shed light on the Bengals attendance trend and predict a slightly different result than we have seen with Tampa.

The first narrative is this:  fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me. 

After the Bengals could not sustain winning after 2005, fans started to feel like they had again been duped into trusting Mike Brown.  They had been fooled once by Mikey, and they were suspicious yet again.  So in 2009, even though the Bengals won the division, the fans remained circumspect.  After all, they didn't exactly impress in the 2nd half of 2009, limping to the division title, and they were crushed twice in a row by the Jets to end the regular season and the playoffs.  The fans would not be fooled twice and stayed away.

When in 2010, the team performed miserably followed by the offseason apocalypse the fans decision not to be fooled appeared vindicated and this sent attendance into freefall.

That is where we are at.  In the face of fan resistance, the Bengals have made some promising moves.  Not enough for fans like us at WDR to remove our prejudice but they are certainly encouraging.  First, they have had a good string of drafts, particulary the most recent.  Second, there are stories Mike Brown was talked out of Mallett for Dalton, which, regardless of whether Dalton had performed as well as he did was encouraging because it shows a flexibility we had not previously seen.  Third, they fired long time "friend of the family" Brat and brought in a guy who really seems to know how to call a game.  Fourth, even Mike Brown demonstrated his principles do have a price and he dealt Carson.

Fan dissatisfaction has appeared sticky though.  Despite holding the #1 seed in the AFC through 8 weeks in 2011, fans did not respond by buying tickets.  Not until the recent BOGO deal did fans come back and start filling seats.

This leads to the second narrative that may explain what is going on:  Bengals fans have reset the price at which they are willing to pay for tickets.

Note this is subtely different from saying the bad economy means tickets are too expensive.  No, what it really means is that Bengals fans have decided they get an inferior product here in Cincy and it needs to come down in price.  If the Bengals were a good product, people could pay the $65 for the cheapest ticket...they did in 2008 and 2009 after all.  But the Bengals are a bad product and so people want it for less.  It turns out that less may be anywhere from 25%-50% lower.  Yikes.

Therefore, I think perhaps the Bengals may actually revisit their pricing given the success of BOGO.  Lowering of ticket prices coupled with a good offseason means many fans will likely come back.  However, the current state of Bengals fans is very fragile.  The Brown Family has a small margin of error with their fanbase, who is ready at a moment's notice to shed their season tickets.

At WDR, the boycott remains.  The Bengals remain guily until proven innocent and while they are doing some marginal things to make their case they have not yet provided smoking gun evidence of change.  As Bengals fans though, we will not let that stop us from enjoying the conclusion to this refreshing regular season.  As I have said before, this season has been the best of all worlds here:  the team is doing well on the field and fans are sending Mike Brown a message.

If you haven't yet heard the news, brace yourself: after 21 groundbreaking years as Bengals director of football ops, Jim Lippincott has decided to "retire" (ie. move back to his old job as Moeller High School defensive coordinator).

Devastating news, I know. It's uncertain how in the hell the Bengals can fill the gaping hole left by Lippincott's departure. Who else will preside over the drafts that have yielded two (or maybe three!!!) playoff teams over more than two decades? Who else will, as Hobspin so lovingly writes, show up "with a gleam in his eye or a quick in his step"? Few personnel executives in the NFL today look so alive, so full of life and passion as that man to the right. But most importantly, who will wake fringe players up at 5:30 in the morning to inform them of their release? Who can ask for playbooks with such grace?

This quote by Lippincott about Mikey Boy truly says it all:

“To me, Mike is the living example of what a man should be. He’s honest, sincere, loyal, intelligent, gentlemanly. He made that part of the job easy."

As we all know, Jim Lippincott was grossly unqualified for the job he held with the Bengals; someone without any NFL experience cannot competently serve as one of the few scouts and personnel men for an organization, a fact that partially accounts for all of the losses we've witnessed throughout the years. But because he and Mike Brown have a good relationship -- because Lippincott apparently thinks the world of Mikey Boy -- he was fit for the position under Brown's standards. How insightful or talented Lippincott was never mattered; as long as Brown liked working alongside him, and as long as Lippincott never challenged Brown's authority over the team as its de facto GM, he was as good a director of football ops as could be found. This will certainly apply to whomever Brown gets to fill the position once Lippincott leaves.

People who wonder why we at WDR still protest the Bengals despite this 2011 season can look at Jim Lippincott for some enlightenment. The Bengals continue to be run less like an NFL organization than a pet project with which Mikey Boy can feed his ego and greed. Until the front office is packed with experienced, knowledgeable executives who have professional, not personal, appeal, the Bengals cannot reach sustained success. We all realize this, as well as how far away such a scenario is--the head of football ops without anything on his resume except 20+ years of failed drafts leaves, in the Bengals organization, due to a retirement and not a firing, to fanfare and not regret.

After waking up from the post-Christmas haze on Monday morning, the Bengals ticket office was innundated with season ticket holders lining the plaza at PBS and jamming the phone lines.  Their purpose?  To take advantage of a buy one, get one free ticket offer (no limit) to pack the cobweb filled upper decks of PBS for Sunday's win and in season finale against Baltimore.  The pro-shop is even cutting the prices of Bengals replica jerseys - from $80 to $50.  Profit is only now $45 per jersey, instead of $75.  (Don't expect a Valentine's Day present next year, Mrs. Brown)

Here's WDR's question - where was this ticket offer 6 weeks ago? 

Following the Pittsburgh game, the Bengals had four games left:  Cleveland, Houston, Arizona and Baltimore.  Ticket numbers ranged from low 40's for Houston, Arizona and Baltimore and high 40's for Cleveland.  The family KNEW that selling that many tickets at full price (cheapest ticket is $65) would at the very least a miracle, if not impossible.  Not to mention that three games fell directly around the holidays (Sunday after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and New Years Day).  Plus the weather would likely be crappy outside. Despite the fact the Bengals won a huge game in Tennessee to move to 6-2, very few tickets were sold over the next few days - a telling sign.

They could have, and should have, done some kind of promotion earlier.  Instead, it was typical Bengals - only reactionary, keeping their head in the sand...not looking ahead and attacking the problem head on.  They did offer a family four-pack for the Indianapolis game - where you received $65 in stadium bucks for buying 4 tickets - but Season Ticket Holders were rightfully not thrilled about being screwed once again.  No ticket deals with the lockout looming, no deals once the lockout ended, and next to nothing the entire season - where there have already been 6 blackouts. 

Do you think the Reds would ever sit back and do nothing?

At the end of the day, they have almost no incentive to offer ticket deals to the most loyal fans in the NFL.  Scrooge McDuck-like TV revenue and the NFL's socialist ways take care of that.  The eyes of the league are now on the Bengals, however, and we wouldn't be surprised if there was a little nudge from Commissoner Goodell's office to make an effort to fill the stands on Sunday.

Will the Bengals sellout?  What seemed impossible last week is certainly a possibility now.  They will need four more days like today to come close.  The biggest single week of ticket sales for a specific game likely came before the Kansas City game in November 2003. 

It's hard not to like the players on the field for the 2011 edition of the Cincinnati Bengals.  However, ownership still makes it very hard to financially support this organization - a fact supported by acres of empty seats for 6 of the 7 home games this season.

One thing I hope the distinguished local media, Ken Broo, and the nation realize is this:

The reason the Bengals are not already sold out for a playoff-clinching game is not because of the economy, not because Cincinnati doesn't like football, or because we get too drunk on New Year's Eve.  It's solely because the Brown family and their ownership has beaten us down - and 2011 was finally the first full season where we collectively stood up and said:  NO MORE.  More than 120,000 people over six games were no longer financially supporting an ownership that had delivered exactly zero playoff wins in two decades, not to mention a century's worth of embarassment.  This was despite a young team in playoff contention.

Make no mistake, it is their fault that PBS might not sell out this game. 

Only one question remains:

Will Bengals fans bail them out?

Santa always knows what I want.

Bengals have taken care of every team they were favored against (I'm guessing) so look them for to do that today despite the limp towards the finish line.  If the Bengals are to win out though, the D needs to find a way to step up despite key missing bodies (same for O line) and Dalton needs to elevate his game another notch.

Have a merry Christmas (Eve) everyone.

OH MY GOD, SO INTENSE.

Must win game of the week of the century.

2nd half of the season has been a slow bleed out with tougher schedule and injuries...here's hoping they can stop the flow before it's too late.

Who Dey.

Hi.

Good news, bad news.  Good news is we actually wrote something at WDR!  Bad news is that it's for another site...it's cool, though, follow the link to go to Texanschick, a blog run by the excellent Steph Stradley about Houston footbaw.  It's a Q&A type post where I elaborate a little on my take of the broader narrative of this season.

Blackouts, I remind everyone, are a good thing.  Doc's cooking something up that should help those of you looking to watch the games locally find some relief.  Check out this blog post and look for a follow up column.  Spoiler alert:  Slingbox is pretty sweet.

Last, please read both this Joe Reedy article on stadium attendance and Cincy Jungle's poll results on why Bengals attendance has COLLAPSED in 2011.  I'll weigh in with my own take later but the drop in attendance is truly staggering when compared to underlying trends across the rest of the NFL.  Something unique is brewing here.

Assuming Bengals take care of Rams & Cardinals, they need to take 1 of 2 from Texans and Ravens to get to that magical 10 win number for a wild card berth.  It's not a must-win per se, but a headless Texans team on the surface might be more realistic to beat than the Ravens.  Personally, I'm not particularly sanguine because I don't see a lot of points coming on offense and our defense is wearing thin. 

Fortunately both are home games.

Who Dey.

When Steelers have the ball:
The DL needs to get to the college rapist and prevent those extended plays that Ben kills the Bengals with. Even though the Steelers have one of the worse OL's in the NFL, without Dunlap in the lineup again, it is difficult to slow down Ben.

Now that Ben will have the ability to extend plays more frequnetly, Brown and Sanders should cut up the weakened secondary. 

The Steelers come out throwing and Brown may have a 100+ receiving yards by the end of the first half.

Advantage: Huge advantage for the Steelers

 

When the Bengals have the ball:
Polomalu is active, but is one good shot to Benson's knee away from dying on the field. The OL needs to cancel out the Steelers pass rush again, and control the LOS in the running game, which is very difficult to do. Last game Benson had over 100 yards rushing, which they can possibly repeat again today.

With AJ Green in the lineup and Polomalu hurt, the passing game possibly opens up. If Gruden can creat matchups like he has been doing the past couple of weeks, build upon the plays they ran against the Steelers last time, and Green can play all 4 quarters, there is a chance they could keep the pace and turn this into a shoot out in the second half.

Advantage: even

 

Prediction:
This game is like going into a gun fight with a knife. It will be tough to win in Pittsburgh, but they have the stamina to pull it off in the second half if they can keep it close in the first and not get down by more than 14. In the end, this will be a live again to fight another day type of game, and hope that we get to face the Steelers in week one of the playoffs with the defense almost fully loaded.