Mike Brown Moves Between The Eras To Open Another Bengals Training Camp   

Most mornings he’s at his office by 6 a.m., when director of football operations Jeff Brickner makes sure there’s a Cincinnati Enquirer, a Wall Street Journal and a USA Today on his desk. He gets updated a few hours later by executive vice president Katie Blackburn, his daughter who runs the day-to-day operations. During the season, a group that, among others, has Brown, Blackburn and director of player personnel Duke Tobin meets pretty much daily with Bengals head coach Zac Taylor.

“Everyone here is involved with what we’re doing,” Brown says. “We meet on it. We talk about it. We make our calls on what we’re going to do. It’s going to be a time of challenge for us. We’ll have cap challenges. That’s an administrative thing. We’ll have on-the-field challenges. We have tough teams to play. It’s the way the NFL is.”

In season and offseason, he tries to get in a daily jog. “Only I would call it a jog now,” he says. Last week as the stadium transformed into the Cincinnati Music Festival, he did his running across the street on the practice fields.

When the stadium is open, he’ll lap the field for a half-hour or so and that’s symbolic of a man born in the Great Depression who keeps moving into the 21st century. The building, even one named after his father, is about to have a new title as he continues to wage the small-market financial battle in the name of naming rights.

Paul and Mike waged that battle together before Paul died a few days before Mike’s 56th birthday in 1991, so he thinks Paul would understand.

“His belief was the team is first and this will help service the team and give us a better chance,” Mike Brown says. “That would have overrode any other thought he might have had.

“It’s hard in the National Football League. About 30 teams sell the naming rights to their stadiums and the others that don’t sell them sell aspects of the building. They have revenue streams that we haven’t had and the way the cap is looking for the future we’re going to need to keep up to…