PT: "Good afternoon. I don’t have any formal remarks. As Mike said, I was invited earlier this year by the leadership of the Commercial Club and the Commonwealth Club to come to Cincinnati and talk about the state of the NFL at the beginning of the new century and reflect on the past and look ahead to the future. That’s the type of thing I like to do with the businesses who support our teams and the communities that support our teams. I agreed to come in, and as Mike said, I also wanted to see the stadium. I haven’t been down here since earlier this year and I’m going to get the quick tour. I’ll be glad to take questions you have or discuss any subjects that are of interest to you."

Q: "Certainly the biggest subject in this town is how badly the Bengals have been playing. From the NFL’s standpoint, are you disturbed by the lack of competitiveness this team has not just shown this year, but in the past several years?"

PT: "First of all, we take pride in being a very competitive league and you have to recognize that in this business, at any point in time, only half the people are winning. So I’m sure the person who is most disappointed and the most frustrated is Mike and the coaching staff and the players. They’ve made clear their frustration but also their commitment to turn it around. It’s something you have to deal with in sports. The worst thing you can do is start to feel sorry for yourself. The worst thing you can do is give up. You have to recognize that during tough times you have to get tougher. One of the business people I was talking to said to me that an important part of sports is that you learn that in life you don’t just have fair-weather friends. You have fans that stick with you through thick and thin and it’s sometimes hard for fans who like to see winners to see that, but I’m sure that’s how the Cincinnati fans will be. They have been great fans for more than three decades and they will speak their peace as fans do, but when the team comes back they will be here. When the team goes through the tough times, they’ll be supporting them even though they will do what they are entitled to do, which is to voice their opinions."

Q: "In today’s NFL, parity is the name of the game. But the Bengals haven’t made the playoffs in ten years. Are you surprised the way things are set up today that this team isn’t more competitive?"

PT: "First of all, I don’t think we have parity, I believe we have very tough competition. I was with Gene Upshaw this morning, the head of the players association, and we were talking about trying to expand our collective bargaining out to the middle of the next decade. We also spent a little time talking about what’s happened under this system. From the players’ standpoint, it’s something that they wanted to happen. It gives the player who is an outstanding player, or let’s say a good player, outstanding by comparison to others at his position, a chance to move to a team where he can start. So you have lots of tough competition. There are no weak opponents who can be taken for granted in the National Football League. In that kind of environment, everyone is going to hope to get their chance to grab the golden ring. I know from talking to Dan Reeves that they were frustrated in Atlanta. I know from talking to Jimmy Irsay that they were frustrated in Indianapolis. But you just have to stick to your conviction and hopefully get those two or three players that become team leaders and have the superior talent that can engineer a turnaround. A lot of people think that the Rams were turned around overnight. I don’t really share that point of view. Go back and look at their roster as I did when I attended one of their recent games. Isaac Bruce was drafted in 1994 and has been on the team since then. Other players like Orlando Pace were drafted with a cruel purpose in mind. What appears to be an overnight turnaround actually is a six-year period of building the talent that is on the team, starting with Isaac Bruce. The same goes for Tennessee. Tennessee appeared to be stuck where the Bengals were just a few years ago. The Bengals were 8-8 just a few years ago and Tennessee seemed to be stuck at that 8-8 point. Then, all of a sudden, they managed to get a few players such as Eddie George, whom we saw last night can kind of take it to another level. So it doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t happen by waving a magic wand. It happens by getting good players, retaining them, getting players that compliment each other, and then trying to get a system that works and comes with an offense and a defense. This team has been very successful at times. With two Super Bowls in one decade, I talked about that while I was down at training camp last year. And it’s just a question of getting some of the magic back. You don’t do it by waving a magic wand. The system brings a little bit of an advantage. The system enables you to turn around and jump to the top real fast. It’s a process of building, a process of maybe one lucky trade for a Marshall Faulk or identifying a Kurt Warner, and probably taking some liberties."

Q: "Do you think that the biggest obstacle for the Bengals becoming winners is Mr. Brown?"

PT: "No I don’t. I’ve read the stories. Mike and I have talked. We go back many years. For me, Mike represents in many ways the most potent thing about the NFL. That is an appreciation for tradition, an appreciation for continuity and a willingness to change. Mike was one of the leaders on our Management Council group and helped revise the current system. He doesn’t like every piece of it - nobody likes every piece of it. He’s demonstrated to me over the years that he’s got a good sense of continuity but a willingness to integrate and change, and I think that’s what it takes to be successful. You know the game is not only won and lost by the players on the field. You’ve got to have a little luck to get the right ones in the first place and to keep them healthy. You’ve had some issues here with some players getting injured so you’ve just got to stick with it. The worst thing you can do in life is to start to second-guess yourself too much."

Q: "Are you satisfied with the abilities and the conditions of this organization to try to put a competitive team on the field?"

PT: "Yes. Mike Brown and the organization have their own philosophy. And their philosophy is time-tested. They won two Super Bowls with this philosophy. They’ve been a successful organization over time and Mike will be the first to tell you he is not satisfied with where the team is today, but that doesn’t mean you try you go out and try to reinvent yourself. Most people who reinvent themselves find out that doesn’t stand too well in life."

Q: "Do you still feel that this new stadium will get this team turned in the right direction?"

PT: "Absolutely. What we said then was perfectly clear and remains the case. If you don’t have a good facility, you are going to be missing one of the critical things that is needed to make you competitive in the free agency and salary-cap system. Everyone here in this community worked extremely hard and a lot of people deserve a lot of congratulations and appreciation for the hard work done. It was done well, in a difficult environment to get the new stadium built in order to keep the Bengals here, and to avoid what happened in some other communities where the community leadership was not able to pull together. I was in Houston recently and they are still in the process of trying to put together an expansion franchise. So there has been a lot that has been accomplished. Is there a lot more to be accomplished? Absolutely. Mike will not sleep well until he wins a division, wins a conference, and wins a Super Bowl game. Or at least gets back there, where the team was in the late 80’s. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s me, because before I arrived as commissioner, this was a hell of a football team. Then I came in 1990 and they haven’t won since. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s something I did. The community has a lot to be proud of. The Bengals and the Reds are both great assets in this community. Would people be happier and the press be more positive if they were winning? Absolutely. But the way you turn things around is not to start getting down on yourself. The way you turn things around is to redouble your efforts."

Q: " ???"

PT: "Well, the current system does have some problems. They are not huge structural problems. I would say the main structural elements of the system are sound. The concept of the hard cap would be nice if it was a little harder. The concept of limited free agency and unrestricted free agency for some players, restricted free agency for other players is a sound concept. Maybe it would be better if there were some additional elements that would build in more continuity for certain types of players, unless free agency just results in the sharing of comparable talent without really benefiting any team or the players in the long run. So there is fine turning that needs to be done. Many of us, including many players, feel that if there was some bigger component of compensation that was geared to performance and winning, then that type of incentive system would be good. Players would appreciate it because they would be paid and at least a portion of their pay would be based upon evaluation of the season instead of their potential. Those are the kinds of things I would expect we would be talking about with the players association as we try to keep this agreement extended out through the middle of the decade and hopefully through the entire decade."

Q: "People were hoping you could lean on Mr. Brown to make this a better team. Are they wrong?"

PT: "I was over in Washington this morning for a United Way event and a lot of the questions had to do with what I could do with Dan Snyder to make their offense better. At this time last year they had 256 points, but this year they only have something around 141. I’m going to Philadelphia on Sunday, and I’m sure they are going to have a lot of questions about what I can do to accelerate Donovan McNabb’s coming of age as a quarterback. But that’s not really my job. Like I said before, I have a lot of respect for the people who run our teams, including Mike Brown. Ownership has demonstrated that it knows how to put together the best football league, the best sports league and the best sports entertainment. That’s why we are number one in professional sports. But at any given point in time, some teams are going to be on a winning cycle and some teams are going to be on a losing cycle. Mike knows that more deeply and I’m sure more disappointingly than anyone in the room. He’s played the game, he’s been around the game his whole life and he’s the owner of the team."

Q: "…What is the possibility of extending the playoffs?"

PT: "I don’t see any real significant interest in extending the playoffs. There was some talk about that but it comes back to what we’ve been talking about - keeping the league really competitive and continuing to have a regular season which is demanding and which results in teams being eliminated from the chase. In other words, keeping the value of the prize of winning. Right now I feel we’ll keep the number of teams in the playoffs where it currently is. The one thing that will be discussed about the playoffs is the possibility of doing seeding of teams that we don’t do now because of the increase of number of divisions from six to eight. That could be an interesting discussion about how you would seed, whether you would seed from the onset, or whether you would seed after the first round of the playoffs. On realignment, you could look at some concepts of realignment that would be fairly easy to accomplish if there is a willingness on four or five teams to move from one division to another. It will be a lot more complicated than that when you finally get down to it because no matter who moves, you’ll be giving up some rivalries. You’ll be in a position where you’ll have to generate some new rivalries. We’ve done that in recent years with expansion and the creation of new teams, and Houston will be the fourth. We’re going to start discussing it in November and December. We’re having two special owners meetings - half the league at one time and the other half at another time to start talking about specific issues. And just starting with the whole idea - if you have four divisions what do you call them. Do you call them North, South, East and West? How do you balance the interest in some geographic rivalries? On one hand with interest of not getting too parochial, and on the other hand one of the things that has been very powerful for our fans is that teams are not parochial attractions, they are national attractions. Even small cities can produce national sports icons. The Packers the Bills for example. Those would be the most difficult issues. How do you balance traditional rivalries with some interest in making the competitions still a national competition? We had a tremendous rating for the Tampa Bay-Minnesota game just as a recent example on Monday night. And neither one of those cities or communities is a huge community. Tampa Bay is a team that has struggled for decades on the field and has now been able to turn it around, at least getting to the point when they can turn it around. We had a tremendous national audience for that game and we want to keep that kind of appeal in the National Football League and not have it dominated just by big markets or a few perennial champions "

Q: "Do you have a deadline for….?"

PT: "Well I think our deadline under our resolution is June 1 of next year. We are going to get as much done as we can by the March meeting and then if we have to have a special meeting after that, we would have a special meeting."

Q: "Would you say that Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Cleveland will stay in the same divsion or are there no chances at all?"

PT: "I would say that’s likely, but you can’t say anything is a given. We just had a staff meeting last week and we had some people, including George Young, who have been in some well managed teams and in a higher competitive division. In George’s case, it was the NFC East, and you say it’s a given that it will the Giants, Eagles, Redskins and Cowboys. You start the discussion that way and then you look at some other possibilities and pretty quickly realize that maybe there are not too many givens. When you have to have 32 teams fit together in eight divisions, you almost have to draw on a current slate. You have to address two questions maybe coming in right up front. One is do we want to have a limited amount of movement from the AFC to the NFC? If the answer to that is yes, then a certain number of approaches start presenting themselves and certain number of possibilities become eliminated. And I’m sure people like Lamar Hunt and others will want to do as much as they can to preserve the integrity of the AFC, which was the original American Football League, from the NFC and not have too much switching across conference lines. Another idea that has been put out, which will have an important impact, is that should the teams agree the visiting team’s share for divisional games would be equalized. Therefore the economic element of your immediate divisional games would be neutralized because whatever division you were in, your division games would involve equal payment for the visiting team. What it does is it neutralizes short-term lows and short-term highs. And it would focus on some of the longer-term considerations that would be important to the fans."