THE BROO VIEW with Ken Broo

To me, football has always been the ultimate team game. Rarely do you see one player carry a team for an entire game, let alone a season. In baseball, you can ride behind a hot hitter. In basketball, does anyone doubt that the Lakers are where they are today because of Kobe Bryant. In Cleveland, take away Lebron, and you’ve got a team that would struggle to win 25-games a season.

But in football, you can often extract one player from a championship team and chances are, it would continue to compete at that level. Oh, yeah, there are exceptions. Take Tom Brady away from the Patriots, Peyton Manning from the Colts, you’ve got problems. But by and large, football is a game that’s won or lost on how well eleven players execute a game plan.

You can run 50 plays in an NFL game and if only one player messes up on each play, the team has 50-botched plays. But if all eleven players execute all 50 plays perfectly, you’re probably winning, and big.

Football is a game where coaches, more than any other sport, want control. It’s why you see these OTA’s and mini camps. It’s a game where authority matters above all else. You don’t see it in the NBA, that’s anything but a coach’s league. And in baseball, the high school kid drafted in round one may make more in bonus money than a manager will make in ten years. Money always trumps authority.

The Bengals have had trouble embracing the team concept. They haven’t been a collection of renegades. But they’ve had a few too many go off the reservation. Carl Pickens was a trailblazer. Corey Dillon perfected that act. And when you mix in the garden variety of arrests, we have what we’ve had around here for far too long.

I raise that today, because Ochocinco is back in town. He didn’t come riding down Vine Street like John Wayne, or even like Mongo in Blazing Saddles. Ochocinco slipped into Cincinnati Monday night and by nueve o’clock on Tuesday was at Paul Brown Stadium. Forget that he missed all of the voluntary workouts up until now, Ochocino was in town and open for business. He arrived after an appearance on the NFL Network where he said, he was in tip top shape, something he wasn’t in this time a year ago because, well, he really wanted out of here. Now, he doesn’t. He ran, caught passes, went to the gym and boxed on his own this winter and proclaimed himself ready for the upcoming NFL season. And while some of us, who’ve heard things like this from the artist formerly known as Chad Johnson before, a lot of us said OK, finally. It’s 2005 all over again. Except…

By early Wednesday night, Chad was twittering. And he was claiming to have gone quasi-Tyson. He had pictures of tattoos that were put on his face by somebody who had just left his house. A map of Florida on one cheek. Couple of crosses on the other and the initials OC on the bridge of his nose.

We had to investigate. I sent a crew from channel 5 to track Chad down at a restaurant in Kenwood. He also twittered that he’d be eating there. We found him. He didn’t want to talk on camera. And we were cool with that. But the pictures we took clearly showed the artwork on his face. A big deal, considering that this is a guy who reportedly fancies himself as a television or movie star when his playing days are over.

But by Thursday morning, that tatts were gone. Or almost. Some of the magic marker, or whatever it was, was still on his face. It all played out, in front of the cameras and reporters gathered around his locker, our first chance to talk with Ochocinco since the end of last season. The rest of the Bengals had been working up a sweat for most of the spring. But on his first day back, it was all about Chad. He said that he had punked his twitter followers and the media. The media gets punked all the time. The eight thousand or so people who were following Chad, well, welcome to our world.

And I wonder. Did we simply feed the beast? Or does the beast demand feeding. And in the ultimate team sport, how did the guy who always likes to break from the team (this is the same guy who said on Thursday that of course the HBO show Hard Knocks will feature him big this summer. What other story lines are on the team)….I wondered, how did this guy come off to the rest of his team mates? We don’t know. They gave us a half an hour in the locker room to collect interviews. Chad consumed 25 minutes.

In the small but vocal world of “look at me” athletes, Ochocinco is right up there. But it’s all harmless, to you and to me. We never get hurt. I like the guy. I don’t know him well. But I know that when he’s serious about playing football, there is no tougher wide receiver to cover. He is the provider of great fodder for radio, television stations and newspapers. In this business, in these days, you can’t get enough of that.

But I wonder if Marvin Lewis didn’t cringe, or do something worse, when he got wind of the tattoo tale this week. He’d never say it, would probably deny it, but my guess is his reaction was something along the line of , here we go again. He better get used to it. There were only four cameras in the Bengals locker room Thursday. HBO is bringing ten to Georgetown next month.