With the Cleveland Browns going through another difficult season (and that’s putting it mildly), it brings to mind how sports are covered in northeast Ohio.
The best part of the Browns’ organization is probably the public relations department and whoever makes the decision on the broadcast rights. There are two sports talk stations in the city and the team decided to partner up with both of them, so both the AM and FM entities can claim to be “Home of the Browns”!
It is difficult to find a radio station on a Sunday morning that doesn’t have some sort of football programming on air. And because both stations are tied to the team, they dedicate airtime every day to the Browns, at least when Kevin Stefanski conducts his daily press conferences, in which he says pretty much nothing.
The question is why does the franchise with the least success in the area get talked about the most?
The Cleveland sports fan hasn’t had a lot of reason to puff out their collective chests over the last 60 years. The 2016 Cavaliers have the only league championship since the Browns won in 1964.
That’s a long time without a title parade in downtown Cleveland.
Because the basketball team had the best player in the sport in this century, the Cavs have played for the league championship five times in the last 18 seasons. They lost in the conference finals twice more, meaning they’ve been in their sports’ final four seven times since 2006-07.
And after James left, the organization has rebuilt and put themselves in a position to compete for another shot at a title in a relatively short amount of time.
As for baseball, the Indians/Guardians have been to three World Series in the last 30 years, getting to a seventh game twice in 1997 and 2016.
In a sport that is the toughest to get to the post-season (12 of 30 teams make the playoffs in MLB-40%, compared to 44% in the NFL and depending if you count the “play-in round”, two-thirds of NBA teams make it), the team on the corner of Carnegie and Ontario has made it to the playoffs 14 times since 1995.
They’ve reached the post-season six times in the last nine seasons.
As for the Browns, we understand the attachment for the team because it was ripped away from the city in 1995, but the team has never played in the Super Bowl, one of four teams that have never been there, and two of them (Jacksonville and Houston) weren’t in existence 30 years ago.
The other franchise, the Detroit Lions, may reduce that number to three after this season.
The Browns haven’t played for an NFL championship since before the merger in 1970, and that occurred in 1965. Since their three AFC title appearances in four years (1986-89), they’ve won two playoff games.
However, those two playoff wins are more games that they won in the 2016 and 2017 seasons combined, when they famously went 1-31 and 4-44 over a three year period.
Someone asked me once if it is easier to write about a team when it is winning or losing. Without a doubt it’s a losing team. More things to complain about.
Perhaps that’s why the Browns dominate the sports media in northeast Ohio. Based on the recent past, there are umpteen things to be dissatisfied with.
Cleveland Sports Perspective 