Cleveland Browns

The Cleveland Browns are the most important franchise in the history of professional football, and the most tortured one in its present. This is not hyperbole. The Browns, founded in 1946 by Paul Brown — the man who invented the playbook, the film study session, the face mask, the modern passing game, and arguably the concept of professional football coaching as an intellectual discipline — dominated their sport in a way that no franchise has replicated since. They won seven championships in their first ten years of existence, four in the All-America Football Conference and three in the NFL, playing a brand of football so sophisticated and so ahead of its time that opponents routinely described the experience as demoralizing. Jim Brown, the greatest football player who ever lived by almost any measure, spent his entire career in Cleveland. The Browns weren't just a football team. They were the standard.

And then Art Modell moved them to Baltimore. On November 6, 1995, Modell announced that the Browns would relocate, and the city of Cleveland experienced something that went beyond sports grief into genuine civic trauma. The Browns were Cleveland — not just a team the city supported, but an institution that was woven into the identity of the place. The Dawg Pound, the Sunday rituals, the generational bonds between fathers and sons and daughters — all of it was ripped away by an owner who wanted a better stadium deal. The NFL, in an unprecedented move, allowed Cleveland to keep the Browns' name, colors, and history, and promised the city an expansion team. The Browns returned in 1999, but the team that came back was a hollow version of what had been lost — an expansion roster playing in a new stadium that felt like a memorial to something that had died.

The expansion Browns have been, by any objective measure, one of the least successful franchises in modern professional sports. From 1999 through the mid-2020s, the Browns have cycled through quarterbacks, coaches, and front offices with a velocity that would be impressive if it weren't so depressing. Tim Couch, Brady Quinn, Brandon Weeden, Johnny Manziel, DeShone Kizer — the quarterback carousel became legendary, a symbol of organizational dysfunction that transcended individual failures. The 0-16 season in 2017 was the nadir, a winless campaign that paradoxically produced a kind of dark solidarity among the fan base. Browns fans paraded through the streets in a mock funeral procession and then showed up the following season louder than ever. Suffering, in Cleveland, is not a reason to leave. It is the price of admission.

The Deshaun Watson trade in 2022 — a fully guaranteed $230 million contract for a quarterback facing dozens of civil lawsuits — was supposed to be the franchise's boldest move since its return. Instead, it became another chapter in the Browns' ongoing saga of choices that seem destined to go sideways. Watson's struggles on the field, combined with the off-field controversy that surrounded the trade, left the franchise in a complicated place both competitively and morally. And yet the Dawg Pound endures. Cleveland fills its stadium, wears its orange and brown without irony, and maintains a faith in this franchise that defies rational explanation. The Browns invented professional football. They are still waiting to be rewarded for it.