The Cleveland Browns haven’t had a winning record since 2007 and enter the 2019 season with the third-longest streak of losing seasons in NFL history, just one behind the 1967–’78 New Orleans Saints, and three behind the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of ’83 to ’96. The last time the Browns won a playoff game was in 1995. Despite two decades and counting of cosmic incompetence that have rendered the franchise’s name synonymous with failure and have caused its stadium to become known as The Factory of Sadness, a couple years of apparently deliberate tanking provided draft picks and salary-cap space to fill the roster with some seemingly decent players, some of whom managed to win a few games down the stretch against subpar competition to finish 7-8-1. A few months later, they traded one of their best offensive linemen for star receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and now folks are either acting like the last 20 years never happened or that the run of spectacular soul-crushing failure is somehow over. Incredibly, the Browns were the fifth-most expensive Super Bowl bet at the sportsbook as of April after they added Beckham Jr., behind only last season’s four NFL semi-finalists. And last week in Cleveland, people lined up around a city block at 4:30 in the morning to buy Bud Light branded commemorative mini-fridges in honor of the longest losing streak in league history.

69632030_10157611557879390_4955376358084575232_n

All of which might be less alarming if there were any tangible reasons left for anyone to tie their sense of well being to this organization in any way. Maybe if NFL franchises were owned by the public instead of a handful of predatory billionaires who sell football, bad beer, pickup trucks, and of course endless war to the same working-class folks they wage war on themselves in every legislative body in the U.S.A. while also exploiting their own players and plundering and polluting a rapidly dying planet—maybe if the entire notion of NFL fandom, especially in Cleveland, weren’t such a barely concealed fraud—one could at least feel a bit better about the widely predicted resurgence of the Cleveland Browns.

As it is, cripes, even the Detroit Lions have made the playoffs a couple of times recently. And yet here they are, still the damn Lions. The  Browns, too, are still the damn Browns until proven otherwise. Nobody should really begin to think anything to the contrary at least until they win a damn playoff game.

Happy NFL Sunday, folks, and thank you for reading Cleveland Frowns.

{ 5 comments }

A good number of the draft parties from last year’s Cleveland.com list of 25 of them will likely fall off this year given that the Browns, barring a trade, won’t be picking in the first round for the first time since 2008. You can, however, count on your friends here at the Village Brown Preservation Society to be in the Map Room basement for the first round as always, from 6PM until the picking is over, for our annual gathering that might this year, despite our best efforts to keep everyone from getting all carried away, be more celebratory than commiseratory.

Icarus' Fall

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or something you probably already knew this, but [click to continue…]

{ 8 comments }

526 Years (and Counting) of Dignity and Resistance

by Cleveland Frowns on April 2, 2019

The annual Native American protests at yesterday’s home opener for the Cleveland “Indians” MLB team were quiet, if otherwise typical. Most typical being the constant sneering and shouting at the protesters by the (mostly Caucasian) fans of the team who were upset that anyone would question their right to make a mascot out of a largely exterminated race of people.

“You already won! Chief Wahoo is gone! Why are you still out here complaining?”

Bozo #3
Of course, Chief Wahoo having finally been removed from the team’s uniforms at MLB’s insistence didn’t stop thousands of its fans from displaying the plainly racist symbol at the ballpark yesterday, many of whom reacted to the protesters’ presence by performatively displaying their attachment to the caricature. Nor, of course, has it stopped the organization from selling Wahoo merchandise.

But more to the point … Click here to continue reading at Cleveland Scene

{ 0 comments }

Fifth consecutive Browns coach fails to last three seasons

by Cleveland Frowns on October 29, 2018

When Hue Jackson was hired as the Browns head coach in 2016 it was widely hailed as a “huge coup” for Cleveland and team owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam. Jackson was the hot assistant coach that everyone wanted, having turned down a chance to interview for the Giants job and a guaranteed spot as Marvin Lewis’s successor in Cincinnati.

From there, the Browns proceeded to strip the roster down for a rebuild that was so extreme that Jimmy Haslam said that 2018 was Jackson’s “first season,” reflecting that this was in fact the first season in which the Browns could reasonably be expected to compete to win some games. If you were one of those people who was pleasantly surprised by the Haslams’ patience here and thought a Browns coach might finally last longer than the cabin air-filter in your car, well, here’s some bad news, as Jackson has been canned with a 2-5-1 record after the eighth game of his “first” season, or, technically his third. This makes him him the fifth consecutive Browns head-coach to fail to last three seasons, the fourth such coach fired by the Haslams since 2013, and now the fourth consecutive head coach to take over since Eric Mangini was fired in 2010 who has failed to exceed Mangini’s win total of 10. He’s also the sixth Browns head coach to be fired immediately following the second Steelers game of the season, which is another bummer of a data point for those who’d prefer not to be able to predict what their NFL owner is going to do based on how mad the sports radio guys are.

bill-murray-groundhog-day

Popular opinion widely supports the move to fire Jackson, as it does almost every time the Browns fire their coach. This time, folks are saying that the Browns finally have a good GM in place with John Dorsey and finally have a quarterback in Baker Mayfield, and that it was Hue who was holding everything back. While there is little to no data to support this opinion, it seems to be something people just know, which, knowing the Cleveland Browns, will probably turn out fine.

{ 6 comments }

Chief Wahoo’s last stand on Columbus Day is just perfect

by Cleveland Frowns on October 8, 2018

If one were to have guessed back in April how the curse of Chief Wahoo would do its thing this season—in which the Cleveland MLB team announced its agreement that “the [Wahoo] logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball,” but also that it would give the racist symbol a year-long farewell tour anyway—this would have been a good guess: Spend all summer inflating fans’ hopes by making the most of MLB’s unbalanced schedule to beat up on a historically weak slate of divisional foes only to immediately flame out in the playoffs in a three-game sweep that ends with a loss in front of the home crowd on Columbus Day, a national holiday—honoring a child-rapist, mass-murderer, and founder of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—which owes its continued existence to the same structural ignorance and ahistoricity that allows the “Cleveland Indians” to maintain their racist branding in 2018.

Screen Shot 2018-10-08 at 8.49.46 AM

If there were such a thing as a sure bet, Chief Wahoo’s last stand on Columbus Day sure seems like it.

{ 1 comment }

Only four other people besides LeBron James have ever made it to eight consecutive NBA Finals series, and all of them were members of the Bill Russell-led Celtics dynasty of the late fifties and early sixties when most of the league’s players were white.

With LeBron’s Cavaliers set to tip off as overwhelming underdogs in a fourth straight Finals matchup against the Golden State Warriors tonight, the most amazing thing about it is that there’s hardly anything the Warriors could do in this series that would outshine the greatness of King James or diminish his status as the most dominant force in the NBA.

img_3705

So if the Warriors end up steamrolling the Cavs like everyone in the world expects them to? … Click here to continue reading at Cleveland Scene

{ 2 comments }

Eighth annual Cleveland Frowns NFL draft party: Thursday, April 26 at Map Room

April 12, 2018

With the eighth annual Cleveland Frowns draft party shortly upon us, it’s only right to have a ceremonial look back on the legacy of the greatest coach in modern Cleveland Browns history, Eric Mangini. You’ll recall that when Mangini arrived in Cleveland as head coach in 2009, the roster was in such bad shape that […]

7 comments Read the full article →

The Cleveland Indians remain a national disgrace

April 8, 2018

To no surprise, opening day in Cleveland brought crowds of white people downtown eager to express their right to wear a racist caricature of Native Americans. Despite Major League Baseball’s conclusion, reportedly shared by the Indians organization, that Chief Wahoo is “no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball,” the symbol was all […]

7 comments Read the full article →

Indians cave to MLB pressure on Chief Wahoo

January 29, 2018

Today, the New York Times reported that the Cleveland Indians will stop using the Chief Wahoo logo on their uniforms in 2019. According to a statement from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred that cited “Major League Baseball’s commitment to building a culture of diversity and inclusion,” the Indians organization “ultimately agreed with [Manfred’s] position that the logo […]

8 comments Read the full article →

Baseball’s greatest curse wins again

October 12, 2017

Now that the Curse of Chief Wahoo has done its thing yet again—and as brutally as ever with such an unceremonious first-round bouncing of such a historically great regular season team—hopefully more people will realize that the curse is something better to root for than an organization that engages in, enables, and encourages open racism […]

0 comments Read the full article →