One of the great humiliations of being a sports fan is discovering just how much bullshit you’ll put up with from your favorite team.
Every fanbase imagines their experience to be uniquely tortuous. No one else understands the pain of blowing that game, of trading away that player, of that missed call that everyone in the stadium could see except the ref. I’m sure even fans of the Golden State Warriors and Real Madrid would tell you they have it rough; a friend who grew up a Boston fan once told me with a straight face that the mid-to-late aughts were a hard time to root for the Red Sox. In my experience, the surest way to shut other people up about their own sports misfortunes is to reveal that I root for the Cleveland Browns.
There are many points in recent years when I could have, and probably should have, turned in my fan card. There was the infamous 0-16 season in 2017, the nadir of a dramatic and ultimately failed tanking process. There was the drama of 2021, when team brass threw the best quarterback they’ve had since the franchise’s reincarnation under the bus while he played through injuries — after leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a second straight division title, it’s becoming increasingly hard to accept that Baker Mayfield was the problem with that roster — and from last year, when the front office was so committed to the glaringly mediocre signal-caller they’d overpaid for that they intentionally downgraded their roster by letting his popular backup walk so there would be no competition for the starting job.
Worst of all was 2022, when they traded for Deshaun Watson, who has been accused of sexual assault and harassment by at least 30 women, and signed him to a record-breaking $230 million contract. This would have been appalling enough as a grotesque compromise of moral decency even if it weren’t the most-boneheaded deal in the history of professional sports, and vice versa. I ultimately decided that rooting for another team to beat them on the field felt like a triflingly small response to their condoning sexual assault, but suffice to say I have not felt proud to be a Browns fan since that day. (Not that that happened very often before anyway.)
Yet each preceding pathetic season at the Factory of Sadness featured something that’s missing as we await this year’s first Browns kickoff: a reason for hope.
When I first started following the NFL in earnest, around 2014, it was the dawn of the Johnny Manziel era. I remember watching the trick play where he pretended to argue with a coach on the sideline. If Johnny Football had enough self-awareness to use his diva reputation as a strategic diversion, I thought, maybe he had the temperament to succeed in the pros after all.
When Paul DePodesta, who was then one of my idols for his trailblazing work in baseball, took the reins in 2016, the Browns kept losing. In fact, they lost more than ever before: they went 1-31 in DePodesta’s first two years at the helm. But at least there was some intentionality behind the ineptitude. The vision he outlined combined unapologetic tanking with an aggressive investment in analytics, allegedly setting the Browns up for a spate of high draft picks selected by a world-class team of next-generation player evaluators. At least this time sucking was part of the plan.
No one expected the young core to click instantly, so another sub-.500 season was still a win in 2018 when the Browns took home Rookie of the Week honors 11 times in one year. A step back in 2019? Well, growing pains are part of the process. An early playoff exit in 2020? That one was on the refs, and just making it to the second round meant it was the most-successful Browns season I’d ever seen. The wheels coming off in 2021? Disappointing, but we were still coasting off the good vibes from the first postseason win of my living memory.
Then came the Watson trade. No, I did not want that person on my team, and yes, Cleveland cashing in all their chips for a quarterback facing a lengthy suspension was an odd fit for a team that was in win-now mode. But in 2022 we were told that Deshaun Watson was the kind of star who could lead this roster to the promised land once he got on the field. Then in 2023, the line went that you couldn’t judge Watson by a single subpar partial season. And we made the playoffs!…thanks to a backup quarterback who signed off his couch at midseason and filled in for Watson after he first sucked and then got hurt. By 2024, it was apparent that our QB1 was one of the worst QBs in the NFL, but at least we had recent precedent for scraping together a hot streak in spite of the albatross under center.
As the grass is mown at Huntington Bank Field ahead of the Browns’ 2025 opener, I’m struggling to articulate a similar reason to care about their upcoming season.
No one thinks the Browns will play well. Vegas expects Cleveland to go something like 5-12 this year. If that happens, their combined eight wins between this and last season would be their fewest in this millennium for a two-year stretch in which they were not overtly tanking. You can find them near the bottom of every list of power rankings and Super Bowl odds. I have yet to see a single prognosticator project them to finish higher than last place in the AFC North.
Looking at preseason single-game spreads, the Browns were favorites in nine of their 17 games last season. From 2019-23, they were initial favorites in somewhere between 10 and 13 of their matchups each year. In 2017, coming off a 1-15 season and on the precipice of going 0-16, the initial spreads favored them in two games. This year, the Browns are measly 1.5-point favorites for one single matchup: Week 14, at home against the Tennessee Titans.
There will be some addition by subtraction in the quarterback room, with Watson presumed to be out for the year with a torn Achilles tendon. Starting under center this weekend is Joe Flacco, whose return to Cleveland is the football equivalent of Robert Downey Jr. coming back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: he may be the best casting for Doctor Doom given the current state of the franchise, but that’s an indictment of the (lack of) vision that led us here. Especially when Flacco described the internal QB competition as neither “ideal” nor “the best thing for myself.” And especially since it underscores the folly of declining to re-sign him in the first place a year ago.
Behind Flacco are two rookie QBs, Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders. In other circumstances this would be exciting, though Cleveland fans surely know not to get their hopes up over new quarterbacks. Franchise QBs don’t often come from the late third round, where the Browns drafted Gabriel, nor the fifth, where they picked Sanders. The likelihood of either making a splash for Cleveland this year depends on how much you trust this front office (who traded for Watson, ran Mayfield out of town, and chose Jameis Winston over Flacco) to evaluate quarterbacks, and this head coach (who failed to build successful offensive scheme around two separate ostensible franchise QBs) to help them develop. And they may not have much runway to prove themselves, given the considerable smoke that the Browns are already planning to take a new signal-caller in next year’s draft.
There’s no sign of this changing anytime soon. In an organization that had previously averaged a high-profile firing a year for over two decades, head coach Kevin Stefanski and GM Andrew Berry are entering their sixth seasons on the job. Stefanski has a .414 winning percentage over his last 70 games while overseeing more-talented rosters than the one he has now. He has repeatedly shown himself to be an inept leader of the clubhouse, and his players hold him in lower esteem than any other still-employed head coach in the NFL.
Meanwhile, Berry’s legacy is inextricably tied to the Watson deal; no amount of shrewd draft-pick shuffling can outweigh his shelling out three years of first-round picks, $230 million, and the organization’s soul for a player so awful (on and off the field) that their own paying fans reveled in his injury. Even the kindest read of Berry’s tenure, in which one assumes that the Browns’ most-consequential decisions have been made by the meddlesome owners over his objections, is not flattering. Together he and Stefanski inherited a young core strong enough to make the playoffs in their first season at the helm — and have watched it all go down the drain.
And somewhere behind the curtain, Paul DePodesta is closing in on a decade in his nebulous yet influential role as the team’s chief strategy officer. The architect of the botched tank is now overseeing a rebuild for the second time — a rare feat for a front-office leader, and one that suggests he may possess the greatest job security of any employee in professional sports.
What are the Browns playing for? The team is going nowhere this year, they have no apparent path to turn things around, and the Haslams seem perfectly content to let the leadership team who steered the franchise into this rut keep digging a deeper hole. Even the trite rebuilding-year boilerplate let’s see how the young kids do! is a tough sell when the two biggest rookie storylines are pitting a pair of freshly drafted quarterbacks against each other (and benching them both), and second-rounder Quinshon Judkins being charged with domestic violence charge while he holds out for a guaranteed contract.
Odds are, this won’t be the worst season in the Browns’ miserable history. It won’t even be their biggest humiliation of the last decade. But finding an angle to be optimistic about this team is harder than it’s ever been in my adult life, and perhaps since football returned to northeast Ohio. To steal a phrase from Charles Schulz: Of all the Cleveland Browns in the world, this year’s team is the Cleveland Browniest.