THE BROO VIEW with Ken Broo

I’ve been thinking about this, a lot, the past couple of days. Maybe it’s because as a kid, one of my best subjects was math. Hated math but was good at it. And after all, math is nothing more than problem solving.

I think I’ve got a way for the Bengals to solve a lot of their problems. And as I worked the math, I don’t think it’s going to take much. Certainly not as much as it took the Bengals to dig themselves a hole and bury themselves under 18-years of joke punchlines. The free agent feeding frenzy is upon us. I think your Cincinnati Bengals can start down the road to recovery by signing one player. Just one.

In business terms, since 1990, the Bengals have been a box office sensation and an artistic failure. It’s Broadway backward. They stink, you continue to buy tickets. In a real business, they’d have been out of business a long time ago.

We see a lot of business failing right now, for a lot of reasons. It may seem to the people who own those businesses that i a laundry list of circumstances have done them in. But really it isn’t, and it’s not a laundry list of things that’ve done in the Bengals. It’s two or three bad decisions or cataclysmic events that doom anything. Those usually lead to the laundry list.

So what’s done in the Bengals and who’s this player that can start making things better? Think about this. Three things have torpedoed this team since that glorious Super Bowl season of 1988.

One, lack of championship talent. The Bengals have had a lot of serviceable players in the last 20 years, a sprinkling of some truly outstanding players, and a lot of spare parts. They’ve had players who were long on unfulfilled promise. They’ve had guys that turned out to be flat out busts. I’d put Carson Palmer in the unfulfilled bin. I’d put Akili Smith in the file marked busts.

The Bengals have whiffed, badly, in free agency. Sam Adams ate his way to NFL unemployment. Kendrick Allen, Michael Myers, Ed Hartwell, you know the rest of that sad tune. The Bengals have whiffed in the draft.

David Pollack? Bad luck. Odell Thurman and Chris Henry in the next two rounds of that same draft? Just dumb. We won’t even get into Chris Perry.

Bad scouting, or lack of sufficient scouting, (the Bengals front office is so small it’s hard to tell which it is) and coaches who are forced to become scouts after the season ends can be blamed for a lot of that.

The outstanding players, like Takeo Spikes, Corey Dillon, Lorenzo Neal, they got on the first bus out of here, the minute they could. They didn’t come here with bad attitudes. Bad attitudes are acquired, you’re not born with ‘em.

Here’s the second thing that’s set the good ship Bengals adrift without a rudder: lack of locker room leadership. You ever notice what happens in Bengaldom when a player tries to become the voice of the team? Willie Anderson might be able to fill you in on that, Brian Simmons too. And if you want to get old school, find Boomer. These are smart guys, who came from winning collegiate programs. They know what it takes to win and they weren’t shy about sharing it. This guy I have in mind has great leadership skills. Yeah, he’s got a mouth and he’s not afraid of letting it run a bit. But he speaks the truth. And if you begin your rebuilding process with him, you’re going to win again. Guarantee it.

And now, to complete the mythical trifecta of losing, the third thing that has submarined this team: character. You think everyone around the NFL has forgotten that garbage that went on here three years ago? Really? You think the howling has stopped from Mike Brown giving Chris Henry his fifth chance, tossing his coach under the blocking sled along the way? Get real. All of those arrests and suspensions still stick with this team. They will, until the team starts winning again and can write other headlines. This guy I got in mind who they should pick up, he can go a long way in ending this national perception of the Bengals and our town. He’s a model citizen.

He’s all three: talent, leadership and character.

And if Brown is as smart as I know he is, he gets on the phone, today, this minute and he tells this guy he knows he’s all of that. He tells him he knows his franchise has got trouble, on the field, off and in this economy at the ticket window. He tells him he should have made this phone call a long time ago, last year, maybe the year before. Because he knows this guy and he knows that there aren’t a whole lot like him in professional football.

It’s an easy call to make.

The Bengals have played football in Cincinnati since 1968. But they haven’t been much of a team in the last 20 years. They’ve got a chance to finally get it right. Palmer is apparently healthy again. If they play it right, the draft can go a long way to fixing their offensive line problems.

But it starts with the guy I'm talking about, TJ. Houshmandzadeh It’s not too late. Make the call Mike. Do the right thing.