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Rams Week - Superbowl news/thoughts thread

Jamie_B

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HOF dan Pro Bowler

HOF dan

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Really excited to hear this has been "their best 2 weeks of practice".

That's encouraging as hell.

 

One thing that really strikes me as I have watched, listened to and read all the hype this week (awesome....right?)

Everyone is harping on the Rams defense, their defensive line,

Jalen Ramsey, blah....blah...blah....blah.....

I don't think I've heard anyone talking about this Bengals defense.

These guys have been pretty damn good this season.

They've been the reason we've won a number of games.

THEY ended every playoff game with an interception.

I think people are sleeping on our defense and I think these guys will show up big time.

Damn I'm stoked!!!!!

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I_C_Deadpeople Hall Of Fame

I_C_Deadpeople

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On brink of Super Bowl, Bengals’ Katie Blackburn is one of NFL’s best-kept secrets

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Among the many differences between the NFC champion Los Angeles Rams and AFC champion Cincinnati Bengals entering Super Bowl 56, there are the executive bios.

The Rams dedicated seven pages and 6,377 words of their 2021 media guide to bios for team owner Stan Kroenke and their top three execs. The Bengals dedicated eight lines and 18 words to theirs:

President
Mike Brown

Executive Vice President
Katie Blackburn

Vice President – Player Personnel
Paul Brown

Vice President
Troy Blackburn

That’s it. You’d never have any idea from the outside that Katie Blackburn has, over the past 35 years, evolved from Bengals founder Paul Brown’s granddaughter to owner Mike Brown‘s daughter to a highly regarded NFL executive, independent of her forebears.

Blackburn, 56, serves on five league committees, including the same competition committee her grandfather served on with luminaries Al Davis, Vince Lombardi, Tex Schramm, Don Shula and others. A lawyer by training, Blackburn has negotiated most of the Bengals’ player contracts over the past three decades. While her father, now 86, remains atop the organizational flow chart, he long ago ceded control of day-to-day operations.

Katie Blackburn is the Bengals as much as anyone is, but who is she, really?

“We were friends because we were in the same dorm, but she was always just so quiet,” said Nicki Demakis, who played hockey with Blackburn at Dartmouth in the mid-1980s. “We thought it was cool as freshmen because we knew her grandfather was a bigwig in the football arena. We had other kids that we went to Dartmouth with, like Willie Stargell’s daughter, so we had a lot of professional athletes that would come and see their kids. We just thought Katie was different because she was just so humble.”

Another former Dartmouth teammate, Karin Clough, couldn’t recall Blackburn ever mentioning she came from football royalty.

“I just remember her being super kind, super nice, very unassuming,” Clough said. “I think about it and I probably wouldn’t have followed football back then, but then I just read that she was like the daughter of the owner, the granddaughter of the founder — I had no idea. I think she does have that quiet, Midwestern demeanor of just kind of nothing showy, nothing braggy.”

“You would never imagine the football legacy family that she came from,” Demakis said.

Paul Brown coached Ohio State to its first national championship in 1942. He co-founded the Cleveland Browns in 1946 and won seven championships in his first 10 seasons as their coach, pioneering film study to prepare for opponents. He helped found the Bengals in 1967 and coached them for eight seasons, going 36-20 over his final four.

Shula, Bill Walsh, Chuck Noll, Weeb Ewbank and Blanton Collier coached under him. Brown and Walsh collaborated on what grew into the West Coast Offense, the NFL’s dominant system for three decades. Paul Brown invented the facemask and the draw play. He developed the first system for evaluating college players and was the first to use classroom instruction, the first to hire year-round coaches, the first to house players in hotels the night before games. In 1978, Brown and the competition committee recast the NFL as a passing league via revolutionary rules changes.

“I definitely remember my grandfather being on the competition committee because when I first started going to league meetings, he was on the committee at that time,” Blackburn said. “My dad was on the competition committee and I was fully aware of everything he was involved in when he was on it. And I’m honored to have a chance to follow in their footsteps.

“The one thing about my dad and my grandfather is, at heart, deep down, No. 1, they care first and foremost about the game of football on a league-wide level, not just what is best for the Bengals. It’s what they think will make the sport best for everyone in the long run.”

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Blackburn with her father Mike at a Bengals practice in 1993 when she was the team’s general counsel at age 27. (Sporting News via Getty Images)

NFL executives Paraag Marathe of the San Francisco 49ers, Chris Ballard of the Indianapolis Colts and Rich McKay of the Atlanta Falcons independently said almost exactly the same thing about Blackburn, that she always has in mind what is best for the league. Each serves with her on a committee.

“Before I knew her even, a lot of agents would talk about her very positively, just about how she is a great negotiator, very understanding, empathizes both positions, has always been somebody who just has great perspective, having grown up in the business,” Marathe said. “That is a rare thing. A lot of people just see their side and only their side. As I got to know her a little more on this committee, same thing. The best way I can say it is, she is just very true north. She is always looking at what she thinks is best for the league and independent of whatever opinion is being put forward at the time, she is just always thinking about perspective.”

Cincinnati reached two Super Bowls in the 1980s with Paul Brown as general manager and Mike in the assistant GM role. Between those Super Bowls, Katie followed her father’s path by enrolling at Dartmouth and then pursuing law school. She was 15th in her class at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and spent most of two years at the firm Taft, Stettinius and Hollister before joining the Bengals.

“She is so doggone smart,” former Bengals coach Marvin Lewis said. “Once I joined the competition committee, they would start talking about different rules changes regarding the cap and how bonuses were counted and, shoot, Katie had explained it to me about two weeks before.”

Blackburn arrived at Dartmouth when women’s hockey had developed into a competitive sport, but at some programs, there were still a few roster spots available for adventurous souls willing to put in the work, despite not having the most refined skills. When one of Blackburn’s first friends at Dartmouth mentioned she was trying out for the team, Blackburn decided to join her.

“Katie, she tried out and I’ll always remember, she had a great attitude, she soaked up coaching like a sponge,” said former Dartmouth assistant coach Bob Ceplikas, who recently retired as deputy athletic director. “We thought, gosh, we’ve gotta put her on the roster, see what happens.”

Blackburn scored a goal for the first time as a sophomore and was earning more ice time, but with the team desperate for goalie help the next year, the coaches sought volunteers.

“God bless her, Katie was the one who was brave enough to strap on the pads,” Ceplikas said. “And I say brave because women’s hockey at that time had developed to the stage where the best players on most teams, including our own in practice, could really fire the puck. And she wasn’t the biggest kid in the world. And yet she was willing to get in there and face those shots, hundreds of them in practice.”

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Blackburn embraced the tougher aspects of playing goalie to help boost her ice time. (Courtesy Dartmouth University Athletics)

Final stats for the 1985-86 season show Blackburn with 199 saves, 24 goals against and a 4-4 record.

“The full story, I was a wing for the first two years and I finally scored a couple goals,” Blackburn said. “I was finally making some progress. Definitely still not great, but I was making some progress. Then the goalie graduated and I was like, ‘Hey, the goalie gets to be on the ice all the time, right?’ So they didn’t have a goalie, so I volunteered to be the goalie. I made it through probably two or three games before they went to the field hockey team to find other options.”

Dartmouth coaches found Demakis, who had enrolled as a tennis recruit, migrated to field hockey and wound up sharing time in goal with the future executive vice president of the Bengals.

“The coaches are like, ‘Here, put some goalie pads on, it will be fun — stand in the net, have 100 mph slapshots hit at you, but, oh, let me remind you where you don’t have pads, on the underside of your arm and on the insides of your thighs — yeah, that will be fun,’ ” Demakis said. “I had no idea Katie was a hockey player. I just thought, ‘Oh my god, there is that really quiet, shy girl Katie from my dorm who always kept to herself. She is a freaking goalie! How badass is that?’ ”

It was about as badass as Blackburn negotiating NFL player contracts in the early 1990s, on her way to overseeing much more, in a league that is still overwhelmingly male in the football operations realm.

“I think the world of her,” said agent Peter Schaffer, who first negotiated a player contract with Blackburn in 1991, when the Bengals drafted his client, Alfred Williams, in the first round. “She did such a great job and did her work so properly and professionally that no one even thought of her as a woman. She was a football person.”

Football people do more than negotiate contracts. They also study game tape, which is fitting in Blackburn’s case, since her grandfather invented the practice.

“She can be sitting in there looking at players with you in our scouting meetings, and then she can be over there managing the salary cap or weighing in on how to run the pep rally or whatever,” said Bengals player personnel director Duke Tobin, who has been with the team since 1999. “She is very versatile. And she is football, through and through. That is her life. That is the great thing about the organization. Everybody is football, through and through.”

Some owners fly into town on game days. The Bengals’ ownership — led by Mike, but also including Katie, her husband Troy and younger brother Paul — generally doesn’t miss a practice.

“They eat with the players,” said former Bengals defensive tackle John Thornton, who is now a Cincinnati-based agent for Roc Nation. “If the food was bad, they were eating bad food with us. I live in the same neighborhood with them. I see them walking around, in the coffee shops. My youngest goes to school with their granddaughter. Normal people. Katie is Dockers, polo shirt, very, ‘Hey, I am here to do my job, not here to look a certain way.’ ”

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Blackburn talks with former Bengal and now Los Angeles Ram tackle Andrew Whitworth during a 2015 minicamp. (Gary Landers / Associated Press)

A 1991 Cincinnati Post profile on Blackburn noted that she owned two cars. One was a Buick Regal, the other a Chevy Lumina.

“You go to Indianapolis (for the combine), you are not going to see Katie and Troy and Mike at Morton’s,” said Schaffer, who represents current Bengals running back Joe Mixon. “If you want to meet them for dinner, it is going to be at Steak ‘n Shake. That is what makes them happy. Just regular, solid people.”

Lewis had worked for two other family-run organizations before coming to Cincinnati as head coach in 2003. The time he spent with the Art Modell-owned Baltimore Ravens and the Rooney-owned Pittsburgh Stealers prepped him for a decision-making process that can be more deliberate than what exists elsewhere.

Lewis would sometimes confer with Katie and Troy regarding decisions before approaching Mike for final approval. If Mike were outvoted 3-1, he might grin and remind the group that he had three additional votes, or however many were needed to sway the decision.

“I have so many stories, but my first year there, we were trying to get players signed in free agency and everybody basically had gone home except for me, Katie and Troy,” Lewis said. “And literally, we are on the phone, they are talking to agents, I’m talking to the players, and Katie was literally typing contracts. Troy and I were faxing contracts and I’m talking to players and it was just the best. And I think we signed two or three players that night — John Thornton, Kevin Hardy. Mike came in the next morning and he was like, ‘What the hell happened?’ Hey, we got better.”

The Bengals went to the playoffs seven times in 16 seasons under Lewis, but never won in the postseason, partly because of terrible luck with injuries. Carson Palmer’s blown knee against Pittsburgh after the 2005 season and Andy Dalton’s broken thumb late in the 2015 season derailed two of the Bengals’ best teams.

Luck fell the Bengals’ way more recently when they landed the first pick in the 2020 draft, just as LSU quarterback Joe Burrow was becoming available. Led by Burrow, receiver Ja’Marr Chase and an opportunistic defense, the Bengals are in the Super Bowl for the first time since the 1988 season.

“It’s just special,” Blackburn said. “I mean, you feel so much pride for the team, the players, the coaches. Obviously, since it’s a bit of a family thing, my dad. And just feeling like you have a little piece of making there be so much excitement in Cincinnati. It’s, it’s awesome. I don’t know what else to say.”

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TigerJ@w Super Bowl Champ

TigerJ@w

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4 hours ago, membengal said:

This is awesome...

 

 

That is beautiful!  I saw the Mecum Auction plate, so I had to do some research and this car was sold at the LOT S224  KISSIMMEE 2020  JAN 2-12 Auction.  It was original sold brand new in 1968 for $2,588.00.  Like it says, there were only 50 built and they were built to celebrate the first season of the AFL.  It was estimated going for $280K-$320K, but someone got a steal and bought it for $80K as what it was Sold for.  There was no reserve on this auction.

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