Backing Up on Browns Backing

As another Cleveland Browns season draws near, I can hardly contain my excitement. No, not really. For the entirety of the last decade, save two outliers of seasons, the Browns have sucked. The three years before that, they did not exist. This does not mean I do not love the Browns; rather, it underscores the dismay I have when one considers that a once proud franchise has rightfully become a league laughingstock.
This perpetual putridity is even more disturbing set against the backdrop of the Pittsburgh Steelers ongoing stability and success. Since the Browns began being terrible, right before they left town, the Steelers have appeared in three and won two Super Bowls. They have an identity borne of toughness and consistency. They are to be, as a child of Northeast Ohio, the hated rivals.

The only problem is I can’t hate them anymore. They also can’t be considered rivals, unless you’re in the camp that considers the Washington Generals a rival to the Harlem Globetrotters because they play each other a lot. At some point, one has to throw their partisan die-hard feelings aside, and respect the superiority of the opposition. Once you acknowledge this unchallenged superiority, the rivalry is over, until it is once again challenged.

This moment, the death of the rivalry, with the benefit of hindsight’s razor sharp vision, occurred on January 5, 2003. I was a 23 year old punk (much different than now, as I am a 30 year old punk), visiting Heinz Field to watch my beloved Brownies take on the Steelers in the wild card round of the playoffs. This was the Browns first (and as we know now, only) dalliance with postseason play since they were resurrected in 1999.

A little background for this seminal moment may be in order; the 2002 season was my NFL season of dreams. I was making roughly eleven dollars a week, but managed to attend eleven NFL games that season. I made a trip to Cincinnati to watch the Browns, a memorable journey with two friends who shall remain nameless that included induced hallucinations, a freestyle rap session on interstate 71 at eight o’clock in the morning, scalping 40-yard line tickets ten rows up for twenty bucks a pop, a Browns victory, at least fifteen draft beers, a midnight footrace on the campus of UC, and vomiting. Yet I remember that day very clearly.

In November, a group of Lakewood guys made a trip to New Orleans, the Browns won again, and I reached into a reservoir of rhythm to that point undiscovered and to this point absent and unreachable (my only regret is that my interpretive dance session was not recorded). The boys and I happy-footed around the crescent city, turning the French Quarter and Superdome into a playground of Lakewood debauchery. I will never forget proclaiming, shirtless, to a section of Saints’ fanatics, that “N’awlins… is a Browns Town!”

The last home game of the Browns season was a culmination of unlikely events, as the Browns scooted by the Falcons and their electrifying young quarterback, Mike Vick. The Falcons, driving the field on the last possession, received news via the PA system that another NFC game had ended, a game that solidified Atlanta’s position in the playoffs. With nothing on the line, the Falcons did not unleash nor expose their wunderkind, and were content to run the ball into the Browns’ defense, ensuring the Cleveland victory. The Browns that day needed three other games to go their way in order to secure the tiebreakers that would enable a playoff berth, and wouldn’t you know it, everything fell in order.

Earlier that year I attended two non-Browns games in Pittsburgh, an exciting Monday night tilt against the Colts, and an epic tie against Vick’s Falcons, in which Vick led his team to 17 points in the final quarter. That game was the first tie in years, and the last until a season or two ago, a game in which Donovan McNabb notoriously admitted to not knowing the NFL’s tie rule.

Back to January 5, 2003; the Browns were piloted by Kelly Holcomb, the journeyman backup with a propensity for putting up big numbers in limited opportunities. He threw for a ridiculous 400 plus yards that day, and the Browns led the Steelers 24-7 with about four minutes left in the third quarter. I sat in the upper deck that day, flanked by three similarly clad Browns’ backers, orange and brown drunken needles in a black and gold haystack. We taunted the home crowd as we built our lead, absorbed the thrown peanuts and beers, and homo-erotically celebrated most innocuous of moments, like a first down on second and one or a holding penalty on the home team.

And then the karmic tides changed. In a little more than a quarter, our egos were deflated and the rivalry was over. The Steelers won. The Browns have not won squat since. They’ve tried everything in the interim, but with less than a modicum of success. One aberration of a winning season in 2007 (although they lost to Pittsburgh twice), and a bunch of unwatchable football.
This bothers me immensely. The Browns are, and will always be, the most popular team in town. Unfortunately, we are entering a huge demographic shift, as the median Browns fan no longer loves the team because of its tradition and identity (the tradition has become losing, the identity is a lack of one), and is merely there because it is the thing to do, to tailgate and drink and put on a jersey and be seen. The beer swilling Dawg Pounder of the 1980’s is fifty-something, the orange pants Kardiac Kid is sixty-something, the Otto Graham fan is probably dead. The kids that are left, the present and future of the fan base, has no recollection of Cleveland success.

I’m on the edge. I lived and died with Bernie and the mid to late eighties Browns, read up on the juggernaut of the fifties and sixties, and studied the lean but generally competitive teams of the Ryan’s, Alzado’s, and Sipe’s. Between their founding in the All American Football conference until Modell picked up and left in 1995, they were at minimum, relevant. Let’s tell the truth; since the loss to Pittsburgh in that fateful playoff game, they have become irrelevant.
We’re losing the connection to success, and the tradition is slowly following. Let’s contrast this to our former rivals, the Steelers, a team that has had three head coaches since 1969, and Mike Tomlin ain’t going anywhere for another decade or two. The Browns have had five coaches since 1999. There is no comparing these two teams any longer.

And so the season begins anew this Sunday, and I’ll definitely be watching. I’ll give their latest supposed savior, Eric the Mangenius, a chance. But my expectations are not that high, and at the end of the season I’ll be begrudgingly rooting for a blue-collar, Midwest team that always finds a way to win. It will hurt, and it will feel like adultery, but I can’t help but respect that team. Yeah, I said it; I like the Steelers. I will always love the Browns, but my masochism has its bounds. Until proven otherwise, these teams play in the same division but operate in separate universes.