Kermit the Frog famously said that, “it’s not easy being green.”
While that might be true, Kermit has nothing on being a fan of the Cleveland Browns.
The franchise was one of the league’s original dynasties, steamrolling through the NFL in the 1950s behind innovative head coach Paul Brown. But unless you are nearing the age of 70, you really don’t have much more than hazy memories of the team’s last NFL Championship in 1964.
The Browns had a nice run under head coach Sam Rutigliano and quarterback Brian
Sipe in the late 1970s. They went to three AFC Championship Games with quarterback Bernie Kosar operating a talented offense in the late 1980s. But this season marks 40 years since the first of those conference championship game appearances.
For fans who have only known the Browns since their return in 1999, they have a handful of talented players – Josh Cribbs, Phil Dawson, Nick Chubb, and Joe Thomas to name a few – and that one playoff win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Other than that? A seemingly never-ending list of quarterbacks, head coaches, general managers, and seasons of double-digit losses.
So why would anyone want to be a fan of this team?
That question came to mind while reading about a man in Michigan named John Sparrow who is adopting the Browns as his team, and wrote to cleveland.com columnist Terry Pluto asking for advice on what to expect.
Pluto’s response, at least in the written article as he may have expanded on the answer on his Terry’s Talkin’ podcast, was short and to the point:
“It teaches you not to have great expectations out of life. Keep those expectations to a minimum.”
To be a Browns fan is to have recalibrated your definition of success, Pluto said. A winning season feels like a championship. A playoff appearance is cause for a street celebration.
Not to channel Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, but it does feel like you have to be born into being a Browns fan. Because otherwise, why would you sign up for this?
That has defined being a Cleveland fan overall for a good part of our lives. The Cavaliers had their “Miracle of Richfield” moment in 1976 before almost moving to Toronto seven years later under the disastrous ownership of Ted Stepien, who makes the Haslams look like the geniuses. Michael Jordan derailed the resurgence in the late 1980s before hitting another dark period that was only interrupted by LeBron James. (Perhaps not a name to be bringing up this weekend.)
The Indians were a “3,000 fans on a weeknight game” for all of the 1970s and 1980s, but have evolved into the town’s gold standard, despite having the longest current drought without a World Series title in Major League Baseball at 77 years and counting.
But this is a Browns site, so let’s get back to the question at hand. We would never want to discourage someone from joining the family, so what advice would we give someone thinking of signing up for this?
Try your best to enjoy those three hours on a Sunday afternoon and don’t let the losing, the sometimes comical play, the things you see that you can never unsee, get you down. Go with the flow, cheer, but understand that, for now, things are going to remain bad.
And try to get to a game before the team moves into its new indoor stadium in 2029. The new stadium will be nicer, but the tailgating experience will likely not be the same.
But the good news is, with a young core built off the past two drafts, and the prospect (as always) of the next franchise quarterback being just one draft away, the Browns may be nearing the end of the beginning of this current rebuild.
If you think about it that way, this could be one of those opportunities where you can buy low as a fan, suffer for maybe a year or two, then get to reap the rewards as the team finally figures out how to stop losing games and learns to start winning them.
OK, enough from me. Time for everyone else to have their say. What advice would you give Mr. Sparrow or anyone else thinking of booking a seat on the Browns bandwagon? Let us know in the comments.
