Johnathan Joseph left Cincinnati to sign a five-year, $48.75 million contract in Houston last year, so it’s not surprising that Joseph views the Texans as a more generous team than the Bengals. But Joseph says that goes beyond players’ salaries.
According to Joseph, Texans owner Bob McNair cares about the players’ families and is willing to provide whatever is needed to make the players comfortable, while Bengals owner Mike Brown nickel-and-dimes them about everything from sports drinks to road trips.
“The first thing about Houston is it’s an organization run from a different perspective,” Joseph told HeraldOnline.com. “In Cincy, the team lives off money it earns from football. Houston’s owner has other business interests and he controls the money. Numerous things that go on such as the way Houston interacts with my family; we’re treated in a first-class way. They helped us when my wife lost our baby daughter in a miscarriage. But they help with anything you ask of them because they are a very caring organization with positive attitudes about its players. In Cincy, we’re told how much Gatorade we could take home. In Houston we get what we request. You get soap and deodorant at your request. You don’t have a roommate on road trips.”
Joseph is far from the first player to complain about the Bengals’ spendthrift ways, but he puts it in particularly stark terms: Sometimes there’s more to how happy an owner can make a player than how big a paycheck the owner will sign. Sometimes it’s about showing consideration for a player’s family, or not making an issue of it if the player says he’ll sleep better on the road if he has his own room. That’s what Joseph says he’s getting in Houston, and what he says he didn’t get in Cincinnati.