While Brown stumps on his small-town background, he covers up his extended family owning a multibillion-dollar NFL franchise and helping fund his numerous political campaigns

Happy NFL Sunday to … the Cincinnati Bengals? MAGA extremist Sam Brown recently said if he could start over and do something different with his life, “I would own the Cincinnati Bengals.”

New reporting reveals that in fact, Brown’s extended family literally does own the Bengals – an Ohio-based NFL team worth $4 billion. Sam Brown’s great-grandfather Paul Brown is the founder of the Cincinnati Bengals, and his great-uncle Michael Brown is the current owner of the team.

While Brown frequently touts his small-town roots, he has failed to mention that he’s related to the billionaire owners of a professional football team, who have bankrolled every single one of his failed political campaigns – including this one. 

Brown’s NFL dynasty family has contributed $13,200 to his 2024 campaign and nearly $50,000 overall to every one of Brown’s political endeavors – for Texas legislature, his previous run for U.S. Senate in Nevada, as well as his shady scam PAC.

For a guy whose family owns a multi-billion dollar NFL team, you might say he fumbled covering this one up. 

Daily Kos: GOP candidate is just a ‘small-town’ guy—whose family owns an NFL team 

Joan McCarter

September 1, 2024

• Sam Brown, the Republican challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen in Nevada, first introduced himself to Silver State voters two years ago during his failed bid to unseat the state’s other Democratic senator, Catherine Cortez-Masto. He did it with an ad called “Duty.”

• “I wasn’t born into power. I’m from small-town America,” he said in the 2022 ad. 

• What he didn’t say is that his extended family owns the Cincinnati Bengals, an NFL team worth $4 billion, and that his relatives have been supporting his political ambitions for a while now.

• To hear Brown talk, he comes from the most humble of backgrounds. His was a “sort of working-class family,” he told radio host Ken Wall back in 2021 (at about the 22-minute mark). That same year, he told a local news host that he comes from “salt of the earth people,” not from a “dynasty” (at 23:48). 

• Speaking of dynasties, Brown’s great-grandfather, Paul Brown, founded the Bengals and his great-uncle, Michael Brown, is the current owner of the NFL team. So maybe a little bit of dynasty?

• Just last quarter, Brown netted $13,200 from great-uncle Michael and his son-in-law, Bengal executive Troy Blackburn. They each donated $6,600—the maximum allowed. The Nevada Globe reported that during his 2022 race, Brown received “$10,000 from current owners of the team and their spouses, including a double max contribution ($2900 x 2 = $5800) from team owner Michael Brown, $2900 from his wife Nancy, $1000 from his aunt, Bengals Executive VP Katie Blackburn (Paul Brown’s granddaughter) and another $2900 from his uncle Paul Brown Jr., who is a Vice President of the team.”

• His relatives even booked him as a motivational speaker for the Bengals at one point. It’s not clear how much of an honorarium he netted through this gig with “Speakers of Substance,” but the maximum fee is $10,000.

• It’s all sounding less and less working class and a lot more dynastic, isn’t it?