The Five: Mistake By The Lake (2019)

Cleveland, the Browns, and how to dig a very large hole.

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I.

Back in 2019, I wrote a story for The Ringer about the Cleveland Browns’ endless parade of quarterbacks over the course of 20 years. At that moment, I assumed the parade was over, at least for the short-term. This was the opening of that story…

(…we’ll get to the present in Section III.)

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II.

If you want to pinpoint the moment when the title “Quarterback for the Cleveland Browns” devolved from a distinguished vocation into a running joke, it’s best to start by talking to Tim Brokaw. One September afternoon in 2007, Brokaw, who runs an advertising agency in downtown Cleveland, borrowed a Browns jersey from a friend to wear to that Sunday’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Then, using nothing more than duct tape and a Sharpie, he created perhaps the most effective concept of his career.

At that time the Browns were 0-1, having lost their first game of the season to the reviled Pittsburgh Steelers. That 34-7 final did not exactly come as a shock, given that the Browns had beaten the Steelers only once over the past seven years. A young quarterback named Derek Anderson was set to take over after the previous week’s starter, Charlie Frye, who played college ball at the nearby University of Akron, had been traded to Seattle for a sixth-round draft pick five days earlier. Anderson had lost all three games he’d started for the Browns in 2006; in the last of those, against Tampa Bay, he’d gone 10-for-27 with four interceptions.

In other words, things seemed especially bleak in Cleveland, a city that has long channeled its inferiority complex through sports, and particularly through its football team. The Browns had returned to the NFL as an expansion franchise in 1999, and since then the team’s casualties at quarterback had piled up like Spinal Tap drummers. Anderson became the 10th starting quarterback for an organization that had turned in only one winning season since then-owner Art Modell stole off to Baltimore in 1995, leaving behind a decaying wreck of a stadium on Lake Erie (which had since been replaced) and deflating what was left of the city’s ego. The Browns were already on their fourth head coach (Romeo Crennel) and seventh offensive coordinator (Rob Chudzinski) since being reborn.

Brokaw’s jersey was meant to reflect the angst of that perpetual churn. On it, he crossed out the original name on the back of the no. 2 jersey—that of Tim Couch, the no. 1 pick in the 1999 draft—and using nine pieces of duct tape, he wrote the surnames of each of the Browns quarterbacks who came after him. They trailed down the right-hand side like a Biblical verse:

Couch
Detmer
Wynn
Pederson
Holcomb
Garcia
McCown
Dilfer
Frye
Anderson

All of the names were crossed out except Anderson, who threw for 328 yards with five touchdowns in that day’s 51-45 win over the Bengals.

“I wore it to the tailgate, and the attention I was getting—it was almost a little too much attention,” Brokaw says. “This was back in the flip-phone day, and I’m taking pictures with people while I’m going to the bathroom. This was at the start of social media, so those pictures started to go around over email, mostly locally. It was just a quick visual of the suffering.”

At that moment, Brokaw says, Anderson seemed like yet another temporary answer to the larger existential question: What is this team even trying to be? The Browns wound up going 10-6 that season, barely missing the playoffs. But concern lay beneath the surface, from fans and writers covering the team (and perhaps even the front office itself), that no permanent fix was forthcoming. Anderson was not a franchise quarterback, and everybody knew it. Nor were any of the other QBs who preceded him, including Couch, who had been beaten down and sacked repeatedly until the Browns released him in 2004.

The feeling among Browns fans was all too familiar: Their city had once again been hexed. It was the same type of curse that had led to a more than 50-year championship drought for their baseball team, that had caused Michael Jordan to bury their best chance at an NBA title in the 1980s, that had resulted in the Cavaliers getting swept in the previous summer’s NBA Finals, and that had triggered the heartbreak of Red Right 88 and The Fumble for the 1980s Browns. And now it had seemingly concentrated its wrath on this renewed franchise’s quarterbacks.

Brokaw decided that perhaps he’d struck a little too close to the city’s nerve center to literally bear this burden on his back. He couldn’t handle actually wearing the jersey again, so he draped it over a mannequin in his agency’s storefront, assuming it would become an outdated curio when the Browns finally stumbled upon their franchise QB a year or two down the road.

Instead, Brokaw says, “it felt like Groundhog Day for 20 years.” Every time the Browns signed or drafted a new quarterback, local media would flock to his window to film the new name being scribbled on the jersey. People began to wonder whether the jersey itself was responsible for the curse. A local sports-talk radio host threatened to fight Brokaw. Somebody hurled a rock through the window.

In 2016, after the Cavaliers won the NBA championship and ended the city’s half-century-long title drought, Brokaw figured he had reason to take the jersey down. But the curse—or whatever it was—lingered, even as the jersey lay in a cardboard box in Brokaw’s storeroom: The Browns went 0-16 in 2017. Finally, in April 2018, the most hapless franchise in the recent history of professional sports drafted Baker Reagan Mayfield out of the University of Oklahoma, the Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback who seemed built to turn the page and bring the Browns into the future. That it took 20 years to get here still boggles Brokaw’s mind.

“It’s insane,” Brokaw says. “There is … you know … a sense of … you know … um … confidence?”

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III.

And yet five years later, here we are again. I did not imagine things could possibly go even more sideways for this franchise, but somehow things are arguably worse than they’ve ever been.

The Browns rode Baker Mayfield for two additional seasons before deciding he wasn’t the answer and letting him go. Mayfield went to Tampa Bay, where he’s now an above-average quarterback on an above-average team. More names back of the Biblical quarterback jersey ensued in Cleveland: Case Keenum. Nick Mullens. Jacoby Brissett. And then, in a fit of desperation, the Browns placed their hopes in DeShaun Watson, signing him to a five year contract worth $230 million and completely ignoring his dark legal history. By signing Watson, the Browns alienated a considerable segment of fan base that had been jaded by decades of mistrust; now, it appears clear that Watson has become one of the starkest failures in their long history of failures, but owner Jimmy Haslam refuses to let go. Watson remains the starter, no matter what. The Browns are 1-5. Another season is lost.

But wait, there’s more!

This week, Haslam announced that he would move the Browns to a domed stadium in suburban Brook Park, near the airport, because we all know how well it works out when a team decides to move far away from a city that actually bears its name and out into a faceless plot of land with no character…

The Five: The Suburbs (2014)

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IV.

A number of knowledgeable people in Cleveland are saying that Haslam is actually doing the right thing by moving his team to the suburbs, because it gives him the space to build a domed stadium and an entertainment complex surrounding it, and because it affords the opportunity to bleed more public money from the situation, and because people now seem to judge these things based more on business sense than on common sense. Back in April, a pair of smart Cleveland-based writers for The Athletic, Zac Jackson and Jason Lloyd, discussed the potential of a domed stadium in Cleveland, and Jackson mentioned a friend who had recently visited Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. The friend, Jackson said, was a traditionalist who couldn’t imagine the Browns playing in a dome, but once he visited Allegiant, he came back and said, “We need one of those.”

I don’t think he meant this part, but here is a shot of Allegiant Stadium during the Raiders’ game last weekend against the Pittsburgh Steelers:

Never mind the score. The point is, those are pretty much all Steelers fans.

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V.

I know that’s a product of Vegas being the least soulful city in America—a city with no there there—and I know that the same exact thing won’t happen in Cleveland. But it seems we’ve lost the thread here; it seems we’re so concerned about what makes good business sense that we’ve forgotten common sense. I don’t care if you’re building a McMansion out there. What is this team even trying to be? Why would you further suck the lifeblood out of an already doddering franchise by relocating to an Applebee’s near the airport?

What will happen to the Cleveland Browns is exactly what’s happened to the San Francisco 49ers. They will build a bland stadium in a bland suburb, and it will be “state of the art” for a while, and then it won’t be trendy and won’t have anything going it for anymore, and it will be like playing football in a fondue restaurant that was featured in Bon Appetit 18 years ago. It will be good for the bottom line, and bad for the team’s actual identity.

What’s worse is that the Browns are not the 49ers, who could weather their awful move through the sheer fact that they’re a winning franchise. The Browns are a fan base already conditioned for perpetual disappointment, and this move will reinforce that sense of perpetual disappointment, because a stadium in the middle of nowhere is, and will always be, a stadium in the middle of nowhere, cut off from its own lifeblood. And the fact that the franchise itself is hopelessly lost only makes it that much worse.

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