Bengals Fan is not a demanding guy. He is the fraternity pledge in the movie Animal House, taking whacks to his rear. Thank you, Mike Brown. May I have another?

        Historically, Bengals Fan has made Gandhi look like a whiner. Just give him the seat he pays for.

        After months of legal gymnastics, he's getting it. If you have seats at Paul Brown Stadium and were part of the lawsuit, you can move if you like, without a refund. You can bail out entirely for a full refund, helping your bank account and your blood pressure. Or you can stay where you are, get a little money back and look forward to another season of exciting Bengals action.

        The question now is, what does it matter?

Slap in the face

        The Bengals have done it again. They've stumbled into another public relations mess. They're the Inspector Clouseau of PR. It's not all the Bengals' fault their fans sued them. Hamilton County owns equal blame. But it is the Bengals' problem.

        If you are the Cincinnati Bengals, you don't simply bend over backwards to befriend J.Q. Customer. You practice yoga. As Greg Cappel said Thursday, “The Bengals would have been better off being nice to the people who originally called with a concern.”

        Maybe you remember Greg. He called in September, to say he was not sitting in the seats he'd requested and paid for. I went to PBS and sat in Cappel's seats with Bengals director of business development Troy Blackburn. Cappel was right. From that column came the lawsuit that apparently was settled Wednesday.

        Cappel already had decided to give up his seats. His impression was the Bengals were “arrogant with nothing to be arrogant about.”

        “Just show you care and give us the difference (in price),” said Cappel, who figured it came to about $140 a seat. “We would have gotten what we paid for. That's all we wanted. Now we feel we've been slapped in the face.”

Opting out

        Fact is, Hamilton County was holding Cappel's money. The Bengals said they wanted to get people better seats, but playing musical chairs during the season was difficult. Then the fans filed the lawsuit, and everything stopped but the anti-Bengals rhetoric.

        Nothing matters so much as perception. In person, Mike Brown is a likeable, decent man. To a Cincinnati public exhausted with his team's defeats and his perceived greed, Mike Brown is the Grinch Who Stole Football.

        The perception remains that the Bengals look at customer service like they would a hair in their soup. That's not a big issue if you're winning. The Bengals aren't.

        As Cappel put it, “If we thought they were going to be better this year, we'd have kept the tickets and gotten the partial refund.”

        The Bengals sold out just twice last season. They keep season-ticket figures as guarded as the crown jewels. But the numbers are down. Greg Cappel isn't the only one tired of dealing with the Bengals.

        Does the team understand? It doesn't need angry fans. It needs to wipe fans' windows, check their oil and pump their gas.

        “There might be a day in September when it's sunny that we'll tailgate, walk up and buy a ticket,” Cappel said. “But we're out of the season-ticket game.”

        The suit has been settled. The fallout will linger.

        E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.

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