What if The Browns Were Forced to Stay in 1995?

Sometimes, the best blogging material just happens out of casual conversation. Happens to me all the time.

A friend of mine mentioned something on his Facebook about how the current Cleveland Browns shouldn't have been allowed to maintain the former records of the team that was allowed to move to Baltimore following the 1995 season. And he has a very good point because that team bears no resemblance to the team currently know as the Cleveland Browns and probably won't for quite some time, if current trends persist.

The rest of this post is the response to my friend (edited here for clarity):

When the Washington Senators moved, both times, the records went to Minneapolis and Arlington with them.

But, the NFL, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the Browns were too sacrosanct for the records to follow them to Baltimore. Really? If they were that sacrosanct, why would the NFL allow Cleveland to hang in limbo for 3 years while Baltimore got what amounted to an expansion, yet fully established, team?

If the NFL ever had any actual brains, they would have told Art that he was going to suspend his operations and that he was guaranteed an expansion team in Baltimore for the 1999 season. And they would have told Cleveland that the Browns were theirs, but that a new stadium was going to be built or the city would forfeit the team if construction hadn't commenced before the team in Baltimore started playing. This would have been beneficial to all parties involved because it would have:

1) Lit a fire under the City of Cleveland to build the stadium that Art Modell should have built or arranged to have been built in conjunction with the city.

2) It would have kept Art Modell in as the owner in Baltimore. He went belly up because he ended up having to defend his actions in court and he had to maintain all the overhead of running a team right after moving to Baltimore, instead of not having to pay player salaries and operating expenses for three years while he got his new team up and running. Modell would still be the Ravens owner had he been forced to do this by the league.

3) It also would have forced the City of Cleveland to build their stadium somewhere other than where it is right now. The city has been complaining for years about lakefront development. Well? One of the largest single pieces of real estate in Cleveland that could have been used for lakefront development happens to have a very huge monolith on it that gets used only about a dozen times a year. The rest of the time, it sits there... empty and useless.

4) If the city had been pig headed enough to insist that the new stadium be built on the same site, it would have forced the team to move temporarily. The only logical place to have done that would have been to Columbus. That would have been a boon to the market share of that club in that town. That would have been particularly true if the same front office that went to Baltimore had stayed in Cleveland. What was it that the Ravens won in 2000. Now I remember... they won a Super Bowl. That team, quite frankly, should have been the Cleveland Browns.

Bottom line is that there was more than enough stupidity in the Browns move to go around.

Art didn't want to lose his team. Very well. He got his team and his Super Bowl ring... and lost everything eventually anyway. And there are some who think this moron should be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall Of Fame. Holy crap, would that be a mistake.

The City of Cleveland should have insisted that that Browns team be legally enjoined from playing anywhere other than Cleveland or in any other uniform other than the Browns uniform. Instead, they allowed Art to leave and take his toys with him and took the chances at starting new, but with the old colors and records in tact. The reality is that the product that is parading around as the Cleveland Browns in 2010 has no actual connection to any team that was the Cleveland Browns from 1946 to 1995 when the real Cleveland Browns were allowed to die by the NFL. The ones out there now are impostors, plain and simple.

And the NFL should have forced Art Modell and the City of Cleveland to play by its rules. In the end, it is their team, their property and they allow those who want to be involved in their league to play by their rules ultimately. Don't think so? Ask Jerry Jones or Al Davis.

They should have forced Art to accept an expansion franchise if he wanted to own a team in Baltimore. The reality with that is that the league would have ended up doing Art a favor in that he'd probably still be the owner of the team he was forced to sell after he got his Super Bowl ring.

And the league should have forced the City of Cleveland to build a new stadium as a condition of keeping their football team, as I had mentioned before. In return, the league could have taken over operation of the club until a suitable owner could be found (Major League Baseball later set the precedent for this when they took over the operations of the Montreal Expos until a new owner was found, who then moved the team to Washington, DC under much different circumstances that the move that involved the Browns). If the team had to temporarily relocate while the new stadium was being built, it would have saved the real Cleveland Browns while it would have allowed the team to take over the Columbus market at a time when the team was in a ascendant period.

Alas, none of this happened.

Cleveland got the colors and name and records. Is it really the same team?

Paul Brown's Browns are long since deceased and have been since his firing in 1962. Sure, his players managed to remain competitive through the '60s as proof that a Doppler Effect exists in sports when one coach is replaced by another. But my own father's allegiance to the Browns faded away after Paul Brown was no longer there and no team after that recaptured his interest.

And the "Dawg Pound" teams of the '80s, the last consistently good Browns team? That team failed three times to bring Cleveland the prize of a Super Bowl and it was the best they could do. And the "Dawg Pound", as the physical structure of the old Cleveland Stadium bleachers was so dubbed at the time, is now a reef in the middle of Lake Erie where the fish population happily go to spawn.

Instead, the Browns today are a laughing stock. The team hasn't come close to earning the fan base they have and they appear to be in a state of perpetually arrested development.

Browns fans are throwing out their hearts and souls, but for what? It's a team they love that isn't loving them back and doesn't appear to have any inclination to doing that any time soon.