Cincinnati Bengals

• 1. A Grudge and a Franchise

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  Paul Brown founded the Cincinnati Bengals in 1967 with ten million dollars and a grudge. "I didn't pay ten million dollars to be in the AFL," he once said.

  Brown had been dismissed as Cleveland Browns head coach in January by Art Modell, who had purchased a majority interest in the team. He considered starting fresh in either Cincinnati or Columbus. Cincinnati won out. A deal between the city, Hamilton County, and the Cincinnati Reds created a path to build a shared multipurpose stadium. The Reds needed to replace Crosley Field, their home since 1912, and a joint facility addressed both teams' needs.

  The AFL expansion slot was not what Brown wanted. He had openly called the AFL an inferior competition. The expansion fee of ten million dollars was 400 times the twenty-five thousand dollars each of the original eight AFL owners had contributed when the league formed in 1960. But the AFL-NFL merger, already agreed upon, included a guarantee that changed Brown's thinking. The expansion franchise was promised full NFL membership once the merger took complete effect in 1970.

  The AFL formally approved the franchise on the 23rd of May 1967. Brown named the team the Bengals to give it, in his own words, "a link with past professional football in Cincinnati." A Cincinnati Bengals team had already played in the city from 1937 to 1942. Brown also packed up the equipment from his Cleveland Browns tenure when he departed. The orange on every Bengals uniform since 1968 came directly from Cleveland.

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• 2. Tiger Stripes

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  In 1981, Sports Illustrated compared the Bengals' newly redesigned helmets to "varicose pumpkins." The tiger-stripe design those helmets introduced is still in use today. A striped prototype had been considered and rejected when the team was founded. That earlier version featured stripes of more uniform width. The 1981 design used a tapered pattern that became the team's trademark.

  For the preceding thirteen seasons, the helmets had carried only the word "Bengals" in black block letters with a white outline. The team had also gone without secondary jersey numbers on the sleeves, called TV numbers, until 1980. They were the only NFL team that lacked them before that season.

  In 1997, a leaping tiger logo was added to the uniform sleeves. A second alternate logo depicted a Bengal's head facing left. The orange-and-black striped helmet remained the team's defining image.

  In 2004, a more elaborate tiger-stripe pattern was added across both jersey styles. Black jerseys received orange tiger-striped sleeves. White jerseys adopted black tiger-striped sleeves and orange shoulders. A new logo, an orange "B" covered in black tiger stripes, became the primary mark.

  The Bengals announced their most recent major redesign on the 21st of January 2021. The new set removed the side and shoulder panels, altered the shade of orange, and placed the team's wordmark on the chest. TV numbers were dropped from the sleeves. Three pants configurations accompanied the set: black with orange stripes, white with black stripes, and white with orange stripes. The white pants with orange stripes were worn with the black jersey in Super Bowl LVI against the Los Angeles Rams.

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• 3. Inventing the Modern Game

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  Bill Walsh was a Bengals assistant coach from 1968 to 1975. During those years, working under Paul Brown, he developed what the football world would come to call the West Coast offense.

  Bengals quarterback Virgil Carter was the system's first successful practitioner, leading the NFL in pass completion percentage in 1971. Ken Anderson replaced Carter as the starter in 1972 and proved even more capable. In 1975, Anderson threw for 447 yards in a nationally televised Monday night game against the Buffalo Bills. O. J. Simpson gained 197 yards on the ground for Buffalo. Anderson's arm won the game. That contest offered a vivid contrast between defense-minded, run-first football and a precise aerial attack, and the passing game won clearly.

  The 1975 Bengals finished 11-3, the best single-season winning percentage in franchise history at .786. Pittsburgh's 12-2 record denied them the division title. They lost to the Oakland Raiders 31-28 in the divisional playoffs. Anderson went on to win four passing titles and was named NFL MVP in 1981. In 1982, he set the NFL single-season record for completion percentage at 70.66 percent. Bengals tight end Bob Trumpy once called him "the team franchise." Anderson finished with a career record of 91 wins and 81 losses as a starter.

  Walsh departed for San Francisco in 1975 and eventually built the 49ers into a dynasty. Cincinnati reached the Super Bowl twice in the 1980s, in Super Bowl XVI and Super Bowl XXIII. Both times, Walsh's 49ers were waiting for them.

  Head coach Sam Wyche began deploying the no-huddle offense as a full-time strategy in 1984. Rather than using the full 45-second play clock, his team typically set up within 5 to 10 seconds of the previous snap. Opposing defenses had no time to substitute players or recover between plays. The strategy grew effective enough that the NFL changed its rules to guarantee defenses time to substitute when the offense made personnel changes.

  Rival coach Marv Levy of the Buffalo Bills threatened to have players fake injuries to slow the Bengals down. Before the 1988 AFC Championship Game, a league official told Wyche just two hours before kickoff that the no-huddle had been declared illegal for that game. Wyche asked to speak directly to the commissioner. Word came back: the no-huddle would stand.

  Dick LeBeau, then the Bengals' defensive coordinator, invented the zone blitz in the 1980s. He built it as a direct counter to high-percentage passing games like the one Walsh had developed in Cincinnati. LeBeau later served as the Bengals' head coach from 2000 to 2002.

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• 4. The Bungles

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  Myron Cope, the Pittsburgh Steelers' radio broadcaster, coined the nickname "The Bungles" for Cincinnati. Paul Brown had died at age 82 in 1991, and fourteen consecutive non-winning seasons followed his passing. His son Mike Brown inherited controlling interest in the team. A 2011 survey rated the younger Brown among the worst owners in American professional sports.

  A 2-14 record in 2002 was the worst in franchise history. That finish led to the hiring of Marvin Lewis as head coach the following year. Carson Palmer, drafted in 2003, did not play a single snap that season. Quarterback Jon Kitna started and won the NFL Comeback Player of the Year award. When Palmer took over as starter, he led the team to its first playoff appearance since 1990, during the 2005 season. They lost to Pittsburgh in the Wild Card round, 31-17.

  In 2009, the Bengals recorded the franchise's first-ever division sweep. Two of the teams swept, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, had played in the AFC Championship the prior year. Marvin Lewis was named NFL Coach of the Year for the accomplishment.

  From 2011 to 2014, the Bengals qualified for the playoffs in four straight seasons, the first time that had happened since 1982. They lost in the first round each time. In 2015, the Bengals posted a 12-4 record, tied for the best in franchise history. They lost the Wild Card round to Pittsburgh again. That defeat made the Bengals the first franchise in NFL history to lose five straight opening-round playoff games.

  In the 2013 Wild Card game against San Diego, Andy Dalton threw two interceptions and fumbled. The final score was 27-10. That loss made the Bengals 0-5 in playoff games since Mike Brown had taken over as owner.

  Marvin Lewis and the Bengals parted ways on the 31st of December 2018, after three consecutive losing seasons. In 2019, the team hired Zac Taylor as head coach and went 0-11 through November before winning two games late. The Bengals finished 2-14, equaling the worst record in their history. With the first overall pick secured, the Bengals chose Joe Burrow in the 2020 draft.

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• 5. Who Dey

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  George "Red" Bird had known Paul Brown for more than 30 years before he joined the Bengals. The two met at Massillon Washington High School, where Brown coached football and Bird directed the Massillon Tiger Swing Band.

  Bird had served as the Cleveland Browns' music and entertainment director starting in 1946. Brown brought him to Cincinnati in 1968. His first assignment was to write a fight song. The result was "The Bengal Growl," modeled on the Browns' own fight song, "Hi! O-Hi-O for Cleveland!"

  In 2015, Elizabeth Blackburn stopped at a Bengals backer bar in San Francisco during the playoffs. Fans inside were singing "The Bengal Growl." Blackburn was working on overhauling the team's public image at the time. She later wrote publicly that the song was not going anywhere.

  "Who dey, who dey, who dey think gonna beat dem Bengals?" The answer, shouted in unison by the crowd, is "Nobody." The chant's origin is genuinely contested, and more than one story claims credit.

  One origin traces back to Hudepohl Brewing Company. Hudy, a leading Hudepohl product from 1978 through the late 1980s, sounds phonetically similar to "Who Dey." Beer vendors climbed the steep upper stairs of Riverfront Stadium calling out brand names. Fans chanted back. Through the 1980 season, that exchange solidified into the chant.

  A second theory points to a 1980 commercial for Red Frazier Ford of Cincinnati. The ad ended with the tagline "Nobody!" after asking who could offer a better deal. Fans familiar with the commercial may have adapted the line for stadium use.

  The team's official mascot is a Bengal tiger named Who Dey, who wears jersey number 1. In 2012, more than 1,000 Bengals season ticket holders voted to name a Malayan tiger at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden after the chant. In 2015, Carol Motsinger reported that the zoo's Who Dey had been traded to a facility in Kansas.

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• 6. The Burrow Era

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  Joe Burrow arrived in Cincinnati as the first overall pick in the 2020 NFL draft. In Week 11 of his rookie season, he suffered a season-ending knee injury. The Bengals finished 4-11-1.

  He returned for 2021 to play his first full season. Ja'Marr Chase, a wide receiver who had played alongside Burrow at LSU, arrived as a rookie. The Bengals won the AFC North with a 10-7 record, the division title for the first time since 2015. A Week 17 win over the Kansas City Chiefs, 34-31, clinched the title.

  In the Wild Card round, the Bengals beat the Las Vegas Raiders 26-19 for their first playoff win since the 1990 season. The following week, kicker Evan McPherson hit a 52-yard field goal to upset the top-seeded Tennessee Titans 19-16. Then came the AFC Championship Game against Kansas City. The Bengals fell behind 21-3 before mounting a comeback. McPherson kicked a 33-yard field goal in overtime to complete it. The final score was 27-24. The Bengals had reached the Super Bowl for the first time since 1989.

  They lost Super Bowl LVI to the Los Angeles Rams 23-20. The 2022 season brought another deep run. In the Wild Card round, defensive end Sam Hubbard returned a fumble 98 yards for a touchdown in a 24-17 win over Baltimore. A week later, missing three starting offensive linemen, the Bengals beat the favored Buffalo Bills 27-10 on the road. They reached the AFC Championship Game for the second straight year, the first time in franchise history. Kansas City won again, 23-20.

  In the 2023 season, Joe Burrow suffered a wrist injury in Week 11 against Baltimore. Backup quarterback Jake Browning kept the Bengals in playoff contention. The team finished 9-8 but missed the playoffs.

  Ja'Marr Chase won the receiving triple crown in 2024, leading the NFL in receptions, receiving yards, and receiving touchdowns. Burrow led the league in passing yards. Defensive end Trey Hendrickson led the league in sacks. The Bengals finished 9-8 for the second straight year and missed the playoffs again.

  As of the 3rd of April 2025, the Bengals had not settled a new lease with Hamilton County for Paycor Stadium. The team proposed a $120 million renovation with 90 percent of the cost covered by taxpayers. Executive vice president Katie Blackburn noted that the team pays $158,526 per year in rent. She expressed hope that the franchise would remain at its downtown location.

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