It's Hard to Love the Browns. It's Even Harder to Hate Them.
Part 1: How it started vs how it's going.
Joe Haden, a former cornerback for the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers, has decided to sign a one-day contract with Cleveland so he can retire with the Browns. During his seven years in Cleveland, the Browns did not have a single winning season, but Haden went to two Pro Bowls during that time.
Joe Thomas, who played his entire season with the Browns, shared the significance of recently being added to the Browns Legends Program, a special honor for the team’s greatest players throughout the years. “When you look at all the Ring of Honors and Legends clubs throughout the NFL, the Browns are almost incomparable,” Thomas said. Even though he lives in Wisconsin with this family, he has made sure his four young children are Browns fans.
For a team that is so beleaguered, so easy to make fun of, why do players and fans stick with them?
Tradition. Loyalty. Insanity.
Half the people alive today don’t know that the Browns are one of the winningest franchises in the NFL. That’s because they won all of their titles before there was a thing called the Super Bowl. Their first coach, Paul Brown, and their most famous running back, Jim Brown, made the team the envy of the league.
The ‘70s and ‘80s didn’t yield any Super Bowls, but they did reveal a lot of grit on the field. The “dawg pound” was created in the mid-80s, which put the fans directly into the game. The mettle of the players and the fans matched the grit that spewed from the steel mills near Municipal Stadium. Even when the mills closed, the Browns kept fighting for their team and their city.
Until 1995, which we will gloss over, only to quickly mention that the only good thing about owner Art Modell leaving Cleveland after that season was that Baltimore finally got paid back for their team’s middle-of-the-night departure to Indianapolis in 1984.
Patiently, Browns fans waited. Three long, suffering years without a professional football team. A new stadium was built. The love of football only grew, although it had to be vicariously instilled in the younger generation. A person who shall remain nameless created a year’s worth of post-it notes and excitedly ripped them off day by day until the first time the team took the field again in 1999.
A couple dozen quarterbacks later, Browns fans still wait for that championship season in their lifetime. Each fall, they arrive with their dawg masks and their bone hats and their orange-and-brown attire (see the Bone Lady above), hungry and hopeful. By late-November, the diehards remain, even if they know any wins at that point are for pride rather than the playoffs.
Then comes a season of despondency as Browns fans watch yet another city celebrate a Super Bowl. But when draft day draws near, hopefulness rises from the ashes. Maybe next season. Yes, definitely next season. You can already feel the momentum in April for the next season.
And so it goes. The endless circle of hope and misery. Oh, and mix in some embarrassment while you’re at it. Following a ridiculous loss to the Jets on Sunday with 1:44 left on the clock, the mood around Cleveland this past week has been sadness and embarrassment.
And there’s another emotion that isn’t usually felt around Cleveland: anger towards the team. After that loss on Sunday, the fans booed the team as it left the field. One fan took it a step further and threw a water bottle at owner Jimmy Haslam. (The fan has been banned from the stadium for life, by the way.)
But maybe the anger is good. Maybe the fans need to be mad and the players need to be even madder. Because here come the Steelers for some Thursday night football. (I hope Amazon Prime has worked out all the kinks from last Thursday’s broadcast.) The good news is that the Steelers are off to a so-so start as well, but that never means anything in a rivalry game.
So strap on the dawg pound gear and commence barking because we’ve got a big game tonight. And no matter what happens, there will be a lot of emotions tomorrow morning, as the saga of the famed Cleveland Browns continues.
Check back tomorrow (Victory Friday?) for Part 2: Why fans feel so connected to the players. (It has to do with how things used to be.)