Who Dey, and what’s going on Bengals fans? The Cincinnati Bengals have beaten the Tennessee Titans. We are playing the Kansas city chiefs for the AFC championship and a trip to the super bowl, let’s go! My name is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams Realty and team Sztanyo.com, where we are helping you find your home and strengthen your family. We’ve got the number one real estate YouTube channel in all Cincinnati, but I also love talking about Bengals talk and I promise you that you are not gonna find this take about the Cincinnati bangles and the city of Cincinnati anywhere else. So stay tuned.
Bengals Won The Play Off After 31 Years! How Cincinnati Reacts?
So the Cincinnati Bengals have beat the Tennessee Titans. What a game, a lot of you guys maybe saw this channel for the first time, cuz my wife happened to post or my wife took video of my friends and I who were watching the game celebrating-long story, fun story. But I didn’t get to see the Raiders game live. And so I actually missed that. I was flying and I had to watch it later. And so I didn’t get that, that release of all the relief of 31 years. But the Titans game was awesome. We posted that video. So maybe you guys saw that. I hope you guys had similar reactions.
So I’m filming this on Monday. It’s gonna be posted on Thursday. I know probably all week. There’s gonna be talk about how the Bengals O line is trash, how we’re seven point underdogs. I think that’s where we opened up. How we can’t go into Arrowhead. How burrows not ready yet to de throw Patrick Mahomes. Whatever we’re gonna get to all that. We’re gonna talk about the spirit of Cincinnati and a different take on this. What sports mean to a city and how they’re embedded with kind of the attitude and the feelings and the history and the experience of a city.
But what I wanna do because this is not an Xs and O channel. I’m not like a football guru. But I do have a good feel for this city. I’ve lived here 30 years. I listened to a lot of the Xs and O guys probably like you do. Like Paul Dehner Jr and Jay Morrison and Jake Liko and Dan Hoard. And this weekend I got into Zim Who Dey and his podcast and his Twitter cast, which were unbelievable. That guy’s amazing. I actually think Dehner Jr and Jim both have some of the best takes about this city as a whole and what this team means and how it’s kind of interwoven into the city. And that’s what I wanna talk about.
So let’s go back to what has happened. Let’s recap a little bit, cuz I know it’s a little bit of a whirlwind Bengals fans and I know it’s hard to put your brain around this. I talked to my wife the morning after the Titans game. So Sunday morning. She’s not like she hasn’t followed the season a lot, but she got into that game and her inner cheerleader came out of her and she was like, we didn’t dream that like that actually happened. And she’s like, I was looking at Twitter and last night and the reaction from the first game with the Raiders was seemed to be like relief. Like people are like, “oh my gosh” we did it. And the, but the reaction of this one seems to be a little bit of disbelief. Like people are like, “holy crap, like we’re going to play to get to the super bowl. Like, is this really happening right now?”
And so I wanna kind of reset that stage and talk about what’s happened right now. So if you haven’t gotten a chance to read it, you’ve got to check out this article that Kevin Huber wrote.
But Kevin Huber Cincinnati’s long time punter. You may have seen him out at bars the last few weeks, handing out game balls and celebrating because this guy is pure Cincinnati. He’s like me. Like literally he grew up here. He grew up in Anderson township. He went to MCNicholas high school on the east side of Cincinnati. He went to the university of Cincinnati and Putin for them. And then he was drafted by Marvin and played through all of the Marvin Lewis games playoff losses.
He was there, he was on the field. So this guy, you get to read this article and know the story from his perspective, which is amazing. And he goes into it, he goes into the curse. He’s like, “I don’t know. Maybe we were cursed.” Like we didn’t know how to handle this. After the Indianapolis game, we didn’t know what feelings to feel. We felt them all, like we didn’t know what to do. There was nothing else we can do. Maybe we were curse. And he even goes back further and talks about Cincinnati growing up, how bad the nineties were. He said he used to go to the games at riverfront. He calls riverfront, having an industrial feel to it, which is maybe a polite way of saying what that stadium was. If you’re from here, if you’re from Cincinnati, you’re like, yeah, that was our industrial concrete donut that had no personality and was AstroTurf.
That was ours. And we love the blue seats and the green seats and the yellow seats and the red seats like that was ours. But he talks about that and he talks about how those teams were so bad. They punted a lot. And so he started watching punning, which is just hilarious, the articles hilarious. So he talks about the playoff losses. And then he talks about the fifth one when they lost to the Steelers. And he like, the shock, the disbelief, the sadness, like the confusion, like that team was so good. They were legitimately good now. And we lost our quarterback going into the playoffs, but we had that game one. There’s not a worse feeling in all Cincinnati sports that’s think than the 2015 lost to the Steelers. 05 sucked with Carson. 2015 was a gutting of our insides. Right?
We were like, “how did that just happen?” It was just the worst. And so he talks about that from the player perspective and going through that even says, I think in the article, ” what did we do to deserve this?” Are we literally cursed? And so then he goes on to talk about the Raiders game. Like all of that was just gone, like all the relief. He says, he looks out into the crowd and for every fan he saw jumping and dancing and cheering. He saw another fan with their hands on their head. Just kind of like staring off into the distance and smiling because Cincinnati, you guys know if you’ve lived here, if you haven’t lived here, I’m trying to give you this backstory. 31 years of not advancing in the playoffs an entire lifetime!
Like we heard myths and legends from our parents and grandparents talking about the playoffs and the Bengals winning and going to the super bowl. We’ve never experienced it. And that losing has been ingrained in us for 30 years. Like, it’s so interesting. find this fascinating as a sports fan. I don’t wanna worship sports. I don’t wanna make them my identity. I always tell only my friends watching the Titans game. Like I did that with the 2012 reds. I read every article. I like listened to everything. There was, I invested so much time. I listened to the games and I went to two of the five. I went to game three in game five. We went up 20 against the giants. And we came home for three games. We lost three straight games, 2012 reds.
I was at that game with a friend of mine, a wiser friend of mine who said (I was crushed). I’m like, I don’t know what to do. I just spent way too much of my time in life into this. And he was like, “You need to take sports like out of the this is gonna fulfill your life category and you need to place them in the like entertainment category.” And since then, I’ve been able to do that. If you guys have listened to some of my YouTube lives, you’ve heard me talk about that. And I think that you got to be careful with that cuz sports, when you’re looking at it, you’re watching biblical principles play out. You’re watching worship happen. I mean you guys may or may not believe that, but you see that happen. And so you got to be careful.
So I try to play least in this entertainment category in my life. But I am interested in the fact that these principles get interwoven and the spirit of the city, I feel like actually gets interwoven with the team, with the coach, with the players. And this is what I find really interesting about this Bengals team. So go read that Kevin Huber article, it’s amazing. Watch them when he talks about with Joe Burrow, cuz he’s like “this guy is different. This team is different. This guy doesn’t care about the curse Jamarr Chase doesn’t care about the curse they weren’t here. They didn’t feel that they just want to knock your teeth in” is what he says. He says, “you look at Joe Burrow’s eyes in the locker room and he wants to beat you by a thousand points.”
And every Cincinnati fan is like “Yes! Give us Joe Burrow, like inject it into our veins.” Like we are like so happy to have this guy. Cuz we had Andy Dalton for years who was good and competent. And you rooted for him cuz he was a good likable guy. But he shrunk in the big games and Joe Burrow steps up in the big games, which is why right now Cincinnati it’s like, “holy crap, what do we do with this?” We’ve got the guy. Yeah. There’s Patrick Mahomes. Yeah. There’s Josh Island. Thank God. We didn’t have to play both of those guys. We just got one of them and yeah there’s Lamar Jackson and who else? Like we got the guy! Rogers is out. Brady is out. We got the guy. And so that’s why we’re kind of like, we’ve moved now from relief to kind of disbelief, to like we’re taking on the personality of Joe Burrow, which is we want it all.
Well it’s not why not us? It’s us. We want it all. We’re a good team. Don’t disrespect us. And now I wanna move into what I think is the true heart of this team. This is the interview that I watched this weekend that I just keep playing on replay cuz I’m like, “oh my gosh, that’s it. That’s the spirit of the city right there.” And I’ll tell you who it is. It’s big. Number 98, plugging up the gaps, stopping king Henry Mr. DJ Reader. So if you haven’t watched this, just stop. Just watch this press clip right now of what DJ reader says.
You hear that? this guy gets it right? This is Cincinnati. If you live here, you know this. If you’re thinking of moving here, cuz you want to get on the Joe Burrow train. Hey, come on.
I I’ll be your real estate agent. Come on. I’m not afraid to plug myself right now. On a Shameless plug. I’ll be your real estate agent. Jump on the Joe Burrow bandwagon train. Move to Cincinnati. Let’s go. A few of you guys are texting me during the game. I love it. You’re like who Dey let’s go. Let’s go Bengals. And I love it. And if you wanna move here, great, come on. I’ll have to get a house, but not talking about that right now. Enough shameless plug.
About is DJ Reader. And that guy said “You guys see the clippings? You guys are reading Twitter? You guys saw NFL? Good morning, NFL. Everyone’s picking against us. Everyone’s disrespecting us. He said, you are a man. And then he like catches himself cuz it’s 2022. Way to go DJ Reader.
I mean you’re a human. You could be a woman too. that cracked me up. Good job, DJ reader, way to catch yourself. But he’s like “Do you want someone disrespecting you? Do you want somebody telling you, you can’t do your job as a journalist?” Oh guys, this is Cincinnati. What he said right there. That is Cincinnati. Some people get frustrated because we do get disrespected all the time. Right? We beat the chiefs and we’re seven point underdogs. And he’s like “I get it. I get it. I get it.” And if you live in Cincinnati, you know, you’re like “you get it.” We’re not the coast. We don’t get New York press. We don’t get LA press. We don’t get San San Francisco press. We don’t get Chicago press.
NFL has crown Patrick Mahomes. They’re riding the Patrick Mahomes train and he’s great. Don’t get me wrong. He’s great. But they didn’t build up the Joe Burrow storyline. They’re not vested in that. You look at that Tennessee game. I’m not gonna get into the reps and all that, but the storyline is there. The NFL is just slow to get on it. But Joe Burrow’s gonna make them get on it. I’ll tell you that Joe Burrow’s gonna force them to get on it. But DJ Reader gets it. DJ Reader says “I’m a grinder, man. I put on trash bags as a kid to make weight for Peewee football. Are you kidding me?” That is Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a grind city where we get up, we go punch the clock. We put in a good days of work.
You may notice it or you may not. You’re probably not gonna notice it. That’s Cincinnati. I talked to someone the other day from San Francisco. And they’re like “tell us about the city?” They’re like “Is it cool? Like, is there gonna be a lot of appreciation? Are a lot of people gonna move there?” I’m like “Look, no”. That could happen because we have the fundamentals to do that. I’m like “You look at what we have with the cost of living, with the arts, with our parks, with the culinary scene, with the beer scene, with the bourbon and Kentucky, the professional sports team with the beauty and the hiking that we have around here, with the centrality in the nation and how you can travel anywhere you want quickly, with the four seasons. Go watch our pros and cons video. I’ve talked about all these things.
But most importantly. What we have is a city that’s accountable. We have people that work their butts off and we have people are humble and we have people that love each other. And this is a place where you can raise a family. You wanna know why we don’t get hype from national press because national media doesn’t care about family. Boom! hot take. Hot take. Coming from the family real estate guy. Hot take coming that the national press, no press is gonna wanna say “Yeah, go to the city where you can raise your family.” That’s not fun. That’s not sexy. That’s not exciting. Changing diapers. You kidding me? I’ve got five kids Y’all. I changed a lot of diapers because I believe that my family and what I’m doing and investing in my kids is the best thing I can do to change the world. That’s what I believe.
Cincinnati is full of families who believe the best thing they can do is get married. Love their wives. Have children. Train their kids and make the world a better place through the generations. Hot take y’all, Mike Brown believes in family. The NFL world does not like Mike Brown. Mike Brown is passing on this business to Katie Blackburn. Katie Blackburn and Troy Blackburn have brought in Elizabeth Blackburn. Who’ve brought back the fans this year. It’s a family business who is Zach Taylor. Zach Taylor is a family man. He’s got four kids. He’s about my age. I think he might be one or two years younger than me. He’s got four kids. He’s a dad. He believes in family. You look at how this team interacts. You look at what DJ Reader said. We don’t have an indoor facility to y’all. We’re going out there. It’s four degrees and we’re grinding.
And no one’s complaining because we wanna go earn it. I am in love with this team right now. I’m not gonna lie. Because whether they win or lose, I mean, going into Arrowhead and winning, that’s a tough task. We need a better O line. We need more depth on the defensive line. We could take some more corner debt. We’ve got areas to plug, which they’re gonna get better in this off season. Cuz people go to wanna come play with Joe. I tell you that right now. And we got cap space. Who Dey. So we may or may not win, but I’m telling you what I’m watching right now with this team. It’s Cincinnati in that they are grinders, but what’s weird. And what Cincinnati hasn’t had in a long, long time is it’s also grinders with talent. Because the Andy Dalton, Marvin Lewis teams were grinders. Like you loved Whitworth. You love Gino Atkins. You love Carlos Dunlap, AJ green, Eifert, Sanu when he was here. You love those guys. And they were talented, especially that 15 team, man, they were talented.
Right now. We’ve got a young core of talent. Burrow who is the chief competitor. Chase, who is Uber talented. And the last time the city has seen this, the last time we earned respect, well maybe two times, but the biggest one. The Reds won in 90. We won the world series then, but go back to the big red machine. And Pete Rose , he’s another embodiment of the city. I actually grew up not liking Pete Rose because my dad didn’t like him. We were from Michigan. The gambling scandal happened. My dad was very core values, honesty type of guy. So he put it in my mind that like, this is this, guy’s a bad dude. Don’t like emulate yourself after him.
So that was when I was a kid. I moved here in 88 and the whole fiasco. But as, as I’ve watched Pete Rose, I still think he’s kinda like not the great dude, but he embodies Cincinnati in a way of heart and hustle, like nothing else. And that’s why Cincinnati loved him so much. And that’s why they kind of stuck with him through all of his moral failures was like, you are us. You’re Kevin Huber, but more so like you’re the west side grinder. Push your hard hat on, go to work. I’m gonna out hustle everybody. I’m gonna outwork everybody. And it might not look pretty, but you cannot overlook me. That’s Cincinnati. And I think if you get too far, Cincinnati is now, this is where I wanna go back to Zim Who Dey, who I heard this week.
Shout out Zim Who Day !He’s like “They’re gonna overlook us. It doesn’t matter. Just do your own business. Go earn it.” That’s what DJ Reader was saying. They’re gonna overlook us. It’s Cincinnati. Don’t worry about it.
Team Sztanyo! Your Trusted Guide In Finding Homes In NKY and Cincinnati
All right. That’s my take guys. I told you, you weren’t gonna get that take anywhere else. But I just find it fascinating that this team, this coach is embodying Cincinnati. Cincinnati fans are taking a little bit of time to catch up to the fact that like how talented this is. But Hey, we’re jumping on the bandwagon. They’re coming now. And they’re coming from all over the country now. And like I said, Hey, I’ll plug it one more time. You wanna move here and be a part of this for the next 10 years. You wanna be a part of the Joe bro, train. Give me a call. Guys. Email me directly. Eric.Sztanyo@kw.com. Guys! like, subscribe to this channel for more content. I’ll promise to you. I’ll be bringing more real estate content soon. But these Bengals, they got me hyped right now. So Who Dey let’s go Bengals. Let’s beat the chiefs and let’s go to the super bowl. Thanks so much. We’ll talk to you next time.