Will the Browns Ever Be Good Again
The Cleveland Browns are the worst team in American sports but this wasn't always the example.
And no, this is not hyperbole. The trouble started back in the mid-eighties when the Browns were nevertheless a respectable franchise. Their owner, Art Modell, was having some financial issues. Back when he was making money, Modell bought $625,000 worth of country, a plot for a newly renovated stadium. He purchased this land via his visitor Stadium Corp, which endemic the Browns' arena at the time.
Unfortunately for Modell, his fortune took a turn for the worse and to ameliorate his debt, he sold the country back to Stadium Corp for $3 one thousand thousand. Then, he sold Stadium Corp itself to the Cleveland Browns, which he besides owned, for $6 million. His partner later sued him, and Modell was forced to contrary the deal. With a damaged reputation, Modell and his team absconded to Baltimore in 1996, leaving a football game-starved Cleveland backside. After a three year hiatus, the Cleveland Browns were resurrected in 1999, but the new team was, in a discussion, horrible. While Modell'south Baltimore Ravens went on to win the Super Bowl in 2001, the new Cleveland Browns started an era of unprecedented struggle.
Since their reintroduction to the league 19 years years ago, the Browns are a deplorable 88-216 in the regular season. They've just had a winning record twice and have only fabricated the playoffs one time (they lost in the first circular to Pittsburgh) during that span. Over the past few decades, the team has get something of a running joke, the expectant last identify finishers in a league that's specifically designed for parity, giving weaker franchises an advantage during the draft and imposing the aforementioned salary cap on every squad. Realistically, over the course of two decades, the Browns should have lucked into a decent team, but while they've had some standout players like Josh Gordon and Peyton Hillis, the latter of which suffered the full ramifications of the Madden Curse, the Browns oasis't been able to put together any sustained success. Here are some numbers to put things into perspective:
-xiii of xvi NFC teams and 10 of 16 AFC teams accept fabricated it to their conference championship since 1999.
-There are nine teams that haven't made their corresponding conference championship since 1999 (Cowboys, Redskins, Lions, Texans (have only been in existence since 2004), Browns, Chiefs, Dolphins, Bengals, Bills).
-Of these nine teams, all but 4 have fabricated information technology the divisional round of the playoffs. The Bills, Bengals, Lions, and Browns have not.
-Of these iv teams, only the Bills and Browns have made the playoffs less than iv times since 1999.
Is this DeShone Kizer, Baker Mayfield, or Johnny Manziel? I genuinely have no idea. The Browns accept had 14 starting quarterbacks in v years. At that place's no indicate in memorizing what they look like.
If you looked at the Bills and the Browns from 1999 to 2015, it'd exist difficult to pick which team had been worse. Yes, you could go dorsum to the mid-nineties and betoken out that the Bills went to the Super Bowl four years in a row, but that's cheating. Strictly speaking, the Bills and Browns were neck and cervix in their contest to get the nearly embarrassing NFL franchise of all time. From 1999 to 2014, the two teams were 4-4 confronting one another, and this race to the bottom seemed destined to proceed forever. Cue Hue Jackson.
In 2016, the Cleveland Browns were in disarray. They'd just released their meth-fond starting quarterback and someone, in their space wisdom, chose to replace him with the perennially injured Robert Griffin III. Hue Jackson was chosen in to supplant Mike Pettine, who had gone an abysmal x-22 in his short tenure as head motorbus. From an internal perspective, what happened next tin can only be speculated on, just from the outside, it looked as the Hue Jackson managed to turn a team that was tied for worst NFL franchise of the 21st century into the worst team in NFL history. Over the past ii years, the Browns are 1-31. They've won one game. The Browns are the second squad in NFL history to go 0-16, and they virtually did it in dorsum-to-back years. Despite the fact that no coach in the history of the NFL has gone ane-31 over two seasons, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam has decided to stick with Jackson, giving him one more than chance this twelvemonth.
It'southward not as if the team doesn't look different at present. Josh Gordon has stopped smoking pot, Tyrod Taylor and Bakery Mayfield are competing for starting quarterback, Jarvis Landry, in perhaps the worst location bandy of all time, simply arrived from Miami, and Carlos Hyde is gear up to first at running dorsum. The question is, is Hue Jackson the person to lead this retooled squad, and if then, what was behind Haslam making that decision? Hue Jackson was 1-fifteen his first year. He's really gotten worse since he started with the team.
After the disastrous 2017 season, most Browns fans would probably consider iv or five wins in 2018 a victory, just with the corporeality of money the team has shelled out in the offseason, information technology doesn't seem like the front function is aiming for deadening growth. That said, whether or not the addition of a few offensive weapons makes a difference depends largely on the head coach, and right at present, Cleveland'south head coach is the guy who took them from the bottom of the league to the bottom of the NFL history book.
No thing who they put on the field, the Browns' playoff chances don't await good if Hue Jackson is on the sideline calling the shots. Perhaps the team is cursed. Possibly Art Modell siphoned all of Cleveland's mojo and gave it to Baltimore. It would make sense. The Ravens have had two Super Bowls in the terminal twenty years. The concluding fourth dimension the Browns fabricated the playoffs, Lose Yourself by Eminem was at the peak of the charts. If Fine art Modell's ghost is preventing the Browns from winning, they accept no take a chance. The guy sold his own stadium to himself in gild to become out of debt. If Modell laid downwards a curse, it's probably irreversible. Merely hey, Cleveland did only win their first preseason game. Then maybe this is their year. If non, Cleveland fans can take solace in the fact that the original Browns team is playing in Baltimore, and they've been quite successful there.
static01.nyt.com
Matt Clibanoff is a writer and editor based in New York City who covers music, politics, sports and popular culture. His editorial work tin can exist found on Popdust, The Liberty Project, and All Things Go. His fiction has been published in Forth Magazine. Website: https://matthewdclibanoff.journoportfolio.com/ Twitter: @mattclibanoff
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