We have said many times that our favorite sports are baseball and basketball, making us a minority in a city that presents itself as a football city.
That doesn’t mean we don’t follow and root for the Browns, we certainly do, and find it crazy that there are people in town who are die-hard followers of the brown and orange, but pay no attention to the Guardians or Cavaliers.
We are lucky to live in a city with three major league professional franchises and we don’t take that for granted.
Our question though is why do the Browns get so much love and loyalty in northeast Ohio, and do they deserve it?
For older fans like us, it could be because the Browns were the only winning team in our youth, that being the late 60’s. The Cleveland Browns were one of the premier franchises in the NFL from the time they entered in 1950 until basically 1970.
At that time, there were no Cavaliers (started in 1970-71) and the Indians were just starting a malaise that lasted from 1960 through 1993.
After pretty much a dormant period in the 70’s and early 80’s (excluding the Kardiac Kids season of 1980), the Browns reemerged as Super Bowl contenders in the late 80’s, led by Bernie Kosar, Hanford Dixon, Frank Minnifield, etc., coming up just short in some of the most excruciating ending to seasons you could imagine.
However, if you were growing up in the 90’s, the Guardians and Cavaliers have been far more successful than the Browns have since returning to the league in 1999.
And maybe that’s it. Perhaps the loss of the team for a few seasons has created a fear that if people aren’t zealous in their support of the Browns, they will move again.
Or maybe we are just grasping at straws.
Since 1995, the Indians/Guardians have made 12 post-season appearances (likely to become 13 with this season) and have played in the World Series three times, losing twice in heartbreaking circumstances.
That shouldn’t be held against them, see our earlier comments about the Browns of the late 1980’s.
The Cavaliers have played for the championship of their sport five times in this span, and cashed in 2016, the only professional title in a major sport the city has seen in the last 58 years.
The Browns? They made the playoffs twice since 1999.
That’s why we don’t understand the undying loyalty of sports fans in this area.
What about ownership? We understand baseball fans here don’t like the Dolan family because they rarely go “all in”, but it’s not like the Haslams or Gilberts are on the same par as Bill Veeck.
Haslam has had business issues and is very impulsive. How many regime changes have the Browns gone through since he bought the franchise? Gilbert inherited LeBron James, but he did everything he could to bring a championship to the city.
We understand the midwest is by and large a football haven. The NFL has it’s roots right in Canton, which is why the Hall of Fame is there. High school football is a big deal in Ohio, so the leaning toward the pro football team is understandable.
Again, we aren’t saying to not root for the Cleveland Browns. We would love nothing more than a Super Bowl berth for them. But, they certainly don’t give fans here a great deal to be proud of, instead they have given us a tremendous amount of anguish.
We guess the heart wants what the heart wants, even if it doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
Cleveland Sports Perspective 
It is a shame, I don’t understand why more time is spent discussing who the Browns should draft over what the other two teams are actually doing. I think attendance is driven by the fact that people like the whole party scene and the 17 games are “events” that are excuses to tailgate or go to bars. For the other teams you only see that level of enthusiasm for later rounds of the playoffs.