By then, she had already spent a decade around the team. Listening to her father during training camp conduct negotiations over the phone in his Wilmington College dorm, mesmerized by the numbers on his negotiating charts. Spending high school summers working in the Bengals ticket office before heading to Dartmouth College at age 16. Then law school summers helping with the numbers.
“This is it,” Blackburn says. “There’s my signature.”
Thirty years later her signature, like her grandfather’s, is flowing into history. Last offseason Elizabeth Blackburn made Paul Brown’s autograph a piece of the team’s new uniforms and branding. Now this offseason her mother makes a signature statement at the NFL owners’ annual meeting that begins Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla., the first where a woman sits on the league’s powerful competition committee.
“She’s spent her entire life proving she’s a football person. I don’t think of her as a man or a woman. She’s a football person. That’s the biggest compliment I can give her,” says Peter Schaffer, the Colorado-based heavyweight agent who has slugged out many 15-round decisions with Blackburn, ranging from Rudi Johnson’s 2005 extension to last weekend’s quick-strike singing of La’el Collins.
“What’s impressive is the type of reverence she has around the league. When you talk to general managers or other owners and who people are listening to at the owners’ meetings, at the competition committee meetings, all that stuff, when she talks people listen. That comes from respect. It’s not how much you talk, it’s what you say.”
Blackburn has said enough that Troy Vincent, the Pro Bowl cornerback turned NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, senses a new voice emerging in the league’s hallways of power.
“I love people that have grinded their way to the top, worked their way to the top,” says Vincent, the seventh pick in that 1992 draft.
“You have an appreciation for Katie and the body of work. Sometimes with legacy, family, you don’t have to go through that path. But she worked and earned it and, frankly, the competition committee is The Committee of the National Football League. You get to that level and you are driving the game and she’s earned that right.”
Larry Ferazani, the NFL’s deputy general counsel of labor, cut his teeth in the league a decade and a half ago on player fines and grievances and even then he was struck how rare it was for an owner like Blackburn spending time on perhaps the most obscure and tedious part of the business. Now, he agrees, she’s on the game’s blue-ribbon commission known as the competition committee
“Of the next generation of ownership starting to assume leadership in this league,” Ferazani says, “she has a foundation that is really unparalleled.”
Blackburn has no time for history, although clearly she is making it. Buoyed by her daughters at her side in key business areas and a talented young roster coming within 39 seconds of Super Bowl championship, she has the Bengals on a roll. They’re one of the NFL’s most engaged teams on social media and another raft of free agent signings has the pundits raving about the potential of back-to-back AFC North titles and another deep run.
“There are a lot of people here doing the job,” Blackburn says. “I like to check in on everything, but we really do work together and it all ties in together.”