Being a Cleveland Browns fan takes courage. Most of you were born into this fandom and have tried your hardest to stay faithful to your favorite team. But as the moments, days and years go by, the joy of that fandom is being put to its biggest test.
There is no sugar coating what is happening right now for Browns fans. The support for the organization is at a real crossroads for many who have loved this team for years. As for the young fans, they haven’t seen anything positive and the negativity on a daily basis could continue to separate them from cheering for them over time.
Losing grows old and the Browns have done more of that over the past 25 years than any other sports franchise in the world. It really is a sad state of affairs. To add insult to injury we have the faces of the franchise from the owners Dee and Jimmy Haslem, the General Manager Andrew Berry and the coach Todd Monken trying to sell lies about their team. When they say that winning is the No. 1 goal of the team week in and week out while they are making poor decision after poor decision, the trust between the fan and the organization continues to die.
While the losing does grow old, it’s not as if the strong and steady Browns fan hasn’t been able to handle it. We are the most compassionate and loyal fan base around the world. But this time the dysfunction and lies are becoming too much. Even the strong have their breaking point and that is where I believe this fan base is at.
The Browns played their first game of the 2026 season on Sunday, and it was a very humiliating loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. At one point the team was down 31-0. It’s not very often you see an NFL team go down by so many points.
The other significant part of this current sad state of affairs in Cleveland is that the Browns made a decision to go back on their word over a year ago about their quarterback Deshaun Watson. The Browns owner Jimmy Haslam said that the team took a swing and miss on Watson a year ago. This was stated after the Browns had originally signed Watson to a crazy $230 million contract in 2022. After Watson last played for the team in 2024 and had a dismal 1-6 record Haslam publicly came out in 2025 to tell the fan base that the team was moving on from Watson.
Obviously that didn’t happen and here we sit. Watson’s play on Sunday was awful. We’ve seen this type of play before, and we will see it again if the team continues to run Watson out there.
The definition of the word “insanity” in Merriam-Webster Dictionary reads as this: extreme folly or unreasonableness and something utterly foolish or unreasonable.
In the modern age insanity is often referred to as “ doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
At the end of the Browns training camp, the team’s coach Todd Monken announced that Deshaun Watson would be the Browns starting quarterback instead of other quarterback Shedeur Sanders. The announcement came hours after Watson ripped the Browns fan base for booing him at the last preseason game.
The Browns fan base knows football and while the fans will usually support their teams but when a player or coach for that matter takes shots at them then the honeymoon is over. The honeymoon was really never on with Watson, but most fans did support him nevertheless when he came to the team in 2022.
Many fans struggled, however, with the side show he brought with him off the field.
His play on the field in the meantime progressively got worse and here we are.
Coach Monken said on Monday that he was sticking with Watson at quarterback despite the quarterback’s dreadful play.
It’s simply insanity in its most basic definition. The entire Browns organization is at fault for this. Time will tell how all of this chaos turns out as the fans sit at this crossroads.
With the Browns organization spinning its wheels and my own Browns fandom, I often think about that last scene of the classic Tom Hanks movie Castaway when Hanks stands outside his car at a crossroads in the Texas Panhandle. What way will he turn?
You and I have a choice every day to cheer or not cheer for our favorite team. I’ve seen many Browns fans leave their fandom in the dust. While I’ve seen others stick to their fandom like no other despite these turbulent times.
But the dust isn’t settling anytime soon and that should genuinely concern the Browns organization.
Hopefully they get the memo and start paying attention to the most important part of the team which are us the fans.
Recent Comments