The Defunct Browns Fan

I remember being a couple years old and listening to my dad and grandfather talk about Brian Sipe and Sam Rutigliano in the early 1980s. When my dad was a kid, there were the likes of Jim Brown, Lou Groza, Frank Ryan, Gary Collins, Leroy Kelly, Dick Schafrath, and Paul Warfield. Those guys went 10-3-1 in 1964 and won an NFL Championship, demolishing the then-powerhouse Baltimore Colts 27-0. From their inception in 1950 through 1969, those Cleveland Browns appeared in 12 NFL Championship games, compiling an overall record of 180-71 in the regular season, and winning four championships. Those teams were hall-of-famer producing machines.



And then I was born in 1979.





We're all familiar with the 1986 - 89 teams who won during the regular season and came "this close" in the AFC title games before losing to the Denver Broncos. We won't go there. It's too disgusting for me to think about. But those were my teams when I was a kid: Bernie Kosar, Kevin Mack, Earnest Byner, Reggie Langhorne, Ozzie Newsome, Webster Slaughter, Brian Brennan, Clay Mathews, Frank Minnifield, Hanford Dixon, Mike Baab, Matt Bahr, Chip Banks, Bob Golic, Carl Hairston, Gerald "The Ice Cube" McNeil, and Felix Wright - just to name a few that stick out in my mind. Those guys played a damn good game of football. They won games, they made believers out of us in Northeast Ohio, they attracted national attention, and they believed in themselves. Marty Shottenheimer was one bad-ass coach and he got the job done.



Fast-forward to today. There are talks of Cleveland trading Brady Quinn, their former first round quarterback out of Notre Dame. All bias aside, the kid is intelligent, reads the field, plays a smart game, and can throw a decent football... especially when he isn't limited by the bullshit 3-yard short-pass game plan of a certain "Mangenius" coach from New York. The Browns have already unloaded their top receiver in Braylon Edwards. They dumped Kellen Winslow in the off season. Tim Couch was ruined so many years ago. Josh Cribbs isn't allowed to do anything that will highlight his talents. I look back on the regimes we've experienced in this city since the 1989 firing of Marty Shottenheimer and I wonder - was it always just Art Modell? Or is it the team itself?



Because you have to realize that since I've been following these guys since I was old enough to hold a football, all I've ever seen them do, in spite of a few good seasons, is trade, release, and fire all their best players and coaches. And with recent talks of trading Brady Quinn, much like the Indians just traded their ace Cliff Lee last year (again... after CC Sabathia and Bartolo Colon were traded previously), I have wholeheartedly come to believe that the sports teams of Northeast Ohio, those heroes of my childhood, are simply meant to be sustained - and not meant to win.



I suppose at 30 years old it's time for me to admit it. It saddens me really. When I was 7, 8, 9 years old, I wanted nothing more than to see my Browns win something, to see Bernie and Webster and Kevin out there beating people and carrying trophies, like the tradition of the teams before them in Cleveland. But by the time 1990 rolled around, everything collapsed. Marty was fired. Bernie was benched (I still hate Bill Belichik with a passion). Everyone was traded. And in 1995 Modell just up and left with "his" football team, moving to Baltimore. Nothing has ever been the same on the football field on the south shore of Lake Erie.



So go ahead Browns. Trade your number one draft pick again. Hire your demolition football coach from New York. Limit your best players. Uphold that mantra: it's the town where talent comes to die.



At least I'll always have Notre Dame - where the kids come to play for the love of tradition and the game - and the Pittsburgh Penguins - where Mario and The Kid know how to build a team and win championships. Is it any wonder I've defected?