Imagine Being A Browns Fan

 

Wrap your mind around this scenario. You’re a native of Cleveland, minding your own business in the late 90s (no, I’m not going to look up the exact year that the Browns moved, bite me), possibly in a good mood, maybe even eating a hoagie on a park bench taking in a nice sunset out over Lake Erie, when you find out that Art Modell has absconded to Baltimore with your beloved NFL team. You then have to wait a couple years to get another team, while your ex, rebranded as the Ravens, almost immediately started shitting out super bowls when they landed in Baltimore. Ed Reed could have been on your team. Instead you were adding failed QBs to an overcrowded t-shirt.

Fast forward 25 years, not only are the Ravens still good, but now they have one of the best QBs in the NFL and go to the playoffs every year. And your expansion team, still named the Browns (a quick aside: y’all coulda changed the name! You didn’t have to stay named after your in state rival’s fail family. Mike Brown is the human extension of your franchise!), trades a bucket of picks to the Texans (quite the mystery how they got so good so fast) to debase yourself by signing noted sex criminal Deshaun Watson to a hilariously large and rather naive guaranteed contract. Now the reasonable thing to do would be to walk away from your Browns fandom for a couple years. Or……you could root for a sexual predator. Should be an easy choice. And yet, it wasn’t for a lot of Browns fans. Not only did they root for him but some also defended him and a select few even went so far as to make light of why he had to settle over 20 lawsuits against him. All that just to watch him stink it up every game he played for you. It’s telling that when Deshaun got hurt yesterday it made me sad, not because of the injury, because he can fuck off, but because I wanted him to continue playing to essentially guarantee that the Bengals would win. The Browns hitched their wagon to his dying star, and now he is so untradeable because due to him sucking at football, and his contract is so unwieldy that he’s basically marooned your franchise on the loser belt in the trash nebula. Right where the Browns belong.