The Cleveland Browns haven’t had a winning record since 2007 and enter the 2019 season with the third-longest streak of losing seasons in NFL history, just one behind the 1967–’78 New Orleans Saints, and three behind the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of ’83 to ’96. The last time the Browns won a playoff game was in 1995. Despite two decades and counting of cosmic incompetence that have rendered the franchise’s name synonymous with failure and have caused its stadium to become known as The Factory of Sadness, a couple years of apparently deliberate tanking provided draft picks and salary-cap space to fill the roster with some seemingly decent players, some of whom managed to win a few games down the stretch against subpar competition to finish 7-8-1. A few months later, they traded one of their best offensive linemen for star receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and now folks are either acting like the last 20 years never happened or that the run of spectacular soul-crushing failure is somehow over. Incredibly, the Browns were the fifth-most expensive Super Bowl bet at the sportsbook as of April after they added Beckham Jr., behind only last season’s four NFL semi-finalists. And last week in Cleveland, people lined up around a city block at 4:30 in the morning to buy Bud Light branded commemorative mini-fridges in honor of the longest losing streak in league history.
All of which might be less alarming if there were any tangible reasons left for anyone to tie their sense of well being to this organization in any way. Maybe if NFL franchises were owned by the public instead of a handful of predatory billionaires who sell football, bad beer, pickup trucks, and of course endless war to the same working-class folks they wage war on themselves in every legislative body in the U.S.A. while also exploiting their own players and plundering and polluting a rapidly dying planet—maybe if the entire notion of NFL fandom, especially in Cleveland, weren’t such a barely concealed fraud—one could at least feel a bit better about the widely predicted resurgence of the Cleveland Browns.
As it is, cripes, even the Detroit Lions have made the playoffs a couple of times recently. And yet here they are, still the damn Lions. The Browns, too, are still the damn Browns until proven otherwise. Nobody should really begin to think anything to the contrary at least until they win a damn playoff game.
Happy NFL Sunday, folks, and thank you for reading Cleveland Frowns.
