Every few years I have a convo with myself about the futility of following this stupid team from the city I grew up in but don’t even visit anymore. I always come back like a battered spouse.
This time feels very different. It’s bigger than just garden variety poor football decisions. It’s poor value systems, terrible big picture thinking, it’s treating the fans, your family, like crap in a very dismissive, low value way. Like they’ll accept that you sling meth as long as the money is flowing. Yea, a lot of fans will continue to root, but a lot won’t.
I love watching football but I feel like if this goes the way it’s looking, the Browns are going to be in the toilet for years to come. Maybe they should be. Finger pointing, firings and players not re signing and scattering like birds and blah blah blah. Same old story in the face of so much promise squandered.
I can’t really put my heart into another team. I was actually happy for Cinci this year and was rooting for them in the SB but I couldn’t be persuaded to care about them long term. And I lived in Cinci for a few years! My inlaws are all Giants fans but… I just can’t care. I don’t want a sleeper cabin on the pity train but this debacle is maybe just too much. Too much ill will, bad faith, horrible decision on top of horrible decision, humiliation, destructive people, drama dram drama… everything I hate.
And to think, they could have just gone into next year with Baker, who I don’t believe is any messiah but is good enough when healthy to marshal an otherwise good team deep into the playoffs. All this crap would be some other team’s:city’s problem and we’d be arguing about Baker’s ability to see the field, talking playoffs, and receivers and camp and all the stuff we should be talking about.
What makes me the maddest is that this was all predictable. The second I heard about that contract and nothing immediately after it about settlements I thought “oh no… brace yourselves Cleveland”. I’m no genius. But you don’t give an embarrassingly historic reward to a guy with 22 people suing him (and many dozens more in the wings) for salacious reasons and expect the intensity to go DOWN. While we’re at it, let’s give the lion tamer a suit made out of bloody meat before he walks in the cage!
And yet… I’ve been fantasizing today that maybe the browns can find some point where the Texans withheld info and maybe if Watson gets exempted the league might also go ahead and void the whole trade and we’re back to just dealing with a Baker fiasco. Total fantasy land. But part of me thinks… you know what, no. If this goes the way it’s looking, this FO and ownership, who ever pursued this poison fruit should have to eat it. And that’s what’s different this time. I’m angry enough with my own team to kinda want to see them kicked. Hard. For stupidity but also for going so far off the rails of basic guiding principles.
/rant
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