Cleveland Browns: World Is Laughing At Us, Not With Us

The time for the Cleveland Browns to succeed in now!  However, to achieve success, they will have to do it differently than any other team.

If you’re from the Cleveland area, and you have an iPhone, ask Siri “Where can I find sadness in Cleveland?” If it’s still working, Siri should say “Here is what I found…” and display the address to First Energy Stadium.

That’s right Cleveland Browns fans, an automatous search engine like Siri is making fun of our team. The world is no longer laughing with us, they’re laughing at us.

Now maybe the joke doesn’t affect you any more, or maybe you’re used to it, but the jokes about our beloved local sports team keep rolling out. It’s a constant reminder that the Cleveland Browns are one of the worst teams in the history of professional sports. Do we need the reminder? Definitely not.

We see the pathetic results every year on the field, hear about it at the draft, and shake our heads in disgust when someone mentions the number of quarterbacks who have started for the team since 1999.

Newly appointed chief strategy officer Paul DePodesta recently got a taste of what the Cleveland Browns are up against. Last month, at the 2016 NFL combine he reportedly  overheard fellow NFL executives whispering jokes behind his back about the management structure and direction of the franchise.

With near two decades of losing, owner Jimmy Haslam made a bold move of hiring a front office of analytical thinkers versus football guys. There’s no general manager in the front office. Instead, CFO DePodesta, vice president of football operations Sashi Brown, and player personnel director Andrew Berry will work uniformly with head coach Hue Jackson to make all the football decisions.

It’s an entirely new front office structure. In a league where what worked in the past always works, Jimmy Haslam and the Cleveland Browns deserve skepticism, but the jokes are a low blow.

As Cleveland Browns fans, we have all become numb to the feeling associated with these jokes. We find ourselves sharing the Siri revelation with our fellow Browns fans while drinking the tears that have fallen into our beer. We sit back and take the punchline, and absorb the pain.

After all, what can we offer in rebuttal? This team is the definition of sadness. Poor drafts, bad free agent signings, and regime after regime of head coaches and general managers. After 17 seasons, it’s time to get this thing right. What once started as a great joke has worn itself thin. It’s time to bury the sadness.

Next: Where It All Started