There is no cure for the Browns

Cleveland should win more than zero games this season, but winning by itself can’t fix a team that represents the best and worst in humanity.

The problem with the Cleveland Browns isn’t just that they’ve been bad; it’s that they’ve been bad in a human way.

You can fix bad in the football sense, and if the Browns’ issues were only rooted in football, we should have seen a sign of hope by now — not two winning seasons since getting their NFL franchise back in 1999, or dead-last division finishes in 15 of 19 seasons in that same span. No, their problem goes to the bottom of their dark, murky soul.

And it is partially quantifiable. For this preview, Bill Connelly parsed the numbers, and found that the Browns were bad at almost all things, but OK in one: Whenever the offense or defense had a focused task, it often succeeded.

When facing third-and-long and third-and-short defensively, they ranked eighth and sixth in the league in success rate, respectively. That is to say, if they could assume that the offense was passing or likely running with short yardage to go, they knew how to defend it as opposed to third-and-medium, where they were awful — 31st out of 32 teams.

The defense was also awful in the red zone, except on the goal line, where they could stack the line with no shortage of fine, young front seven players. Ditto the offense, which was awful at everything except one well-defined task: When it found itself in first-and-goal, goal line, or third-and-short situations, it converted safely above the league median.

Now, put the Browns in a situation where they had to prepare for all contingencies — to read, then diagnose, then react on the fly — and they were pungently bad. Oh-and-16 bad.

Yet, the numbers outline two simple, human qualities. The first: Being young and stupid leads you to make a lot of young and stupid mistakes. The second (and this applies to the Browns’ entire rich, putrid history): Our capacity to let rich dickheads ruin things.

And in that case, the Browns are both perhaps somehow not as bad as they seem — they should get better just by being a year older — and yet wholly screwed. Statistics can’t show exactly how bad the Browns are, because they’ve been worse than that. Pro Football Reference’s expected win-loss formula says the Browns should have won a combined 6.8 games over the last two seasons, and they won one.

Those numbers say so much. They illustrate how far the Browns have wandered from the flock: Here’s what looks like a bad team on paper, and in actuality we see, oh god, it’s much worse.

But the Browns should be better this season and that’s kinda nice to think about it, so let’s get that out of the way. If the Browns illustrate anything, it’s that there is truly light within everything.

But man, fuck Jimmy Haslam.

Fully rehashing how bad the Browns have been under current ownership isn’t worthwhile, and at some point it’s rude to stare. Just know that in a league that’s designed to prop up badly managed teams — from the salary cap, to the NFL draft, to cheap rookie contracts — the Browns are 0-16, 1-31, and 4-44 over the last one-, two-, and three-year spans, respectively.

There is a wellspring for all the recent badness, though, and really one can never emphasize enough what a piece of shit Haslam is. If he’s done anything to his credit, it’s draw attention away from his terribly run franchise by being so reprehensible and damaging all by himself. He made his fortune inheriting, then running, a con company that ultimately had to pay $92 million in restitution to its cheated customers, and installed explicitly racist people — particularly toward the people of Cleveland — high up on the org chart.

Haslam has so far escaped culpability in Flying Pilot J’s fraud scam, but he has clearly shaped the Browns. He has gladly put his fingerprints all over them, in fact.

Imagine that, thinking you’re Jerry Jones without ever having had even a fraction of a percent of the same success.

In six years as owner, Haslam has overseen five GMs and four head coaches. The continuity of players hasn’t been any better. Granted, all of the people who have come and gone within the Browns organization haven’t necessarily been the cream of their profession; on the other hand, former Browns have a tendency to get a lot better when they leave town.

There’s a reason for this cycle of losing and firing and wholesale roster reshaping — it’s right there: white-haired, square-jawed, puckered lips.

The reason the Browns should be a better team this season is everything else within reason. This roster is better at nearly every position, and especially the one that matters most.

Tyrod Taylor is, at the very least, steady, and potentially much better than that. The fact that he was competent in Buffalo would be encouraging if he had gone anywhere else except Cleveland. But if he somehow doesn’t pan out, then No. 1 overall pick Baker Mayfield is a solid bet to succeed. Both have looked downright good at times in preseason football, both in the mold of what a Browns quarterback ought to be — smart, physically nimble, and brave.

Around them is an older, stronger, wiser team. Last year, the Browns had the youngest offensive, defensive, and overall roster weighted by snaps, and by a significant margin. The difference in average age between them and the No. 31 team, the Rams, was 1.2 years, or approximately the same difference between the Rams and the fifth-oldest team, the Patriots.

The Browns’ maturation should most acutely show on defense, where not only does a relatively good defense get older, it also returns 2017 No. 1 overall pick and noted abdominals enthusiast Myles Garrett. In him, the Browns have a potential generational player to anchor a front seven that was good at lots of things, but wanted for a pass rush.

And before you think that thought about relying on Browns draft picks to do anything good, just know that new general manager John Dorsey thought the same thing. The team traded for Taylor, safety Damarious Randall, and wide receiver Jarvis Landry in the offseason, and added offensive tackle Chris Hubbard, cornerbacks T.J. Carrie and E.J. Gaines, running back Carlos Hyde, and linebacker Mychal Kendricks through free agency.

Dorsey spent conspicuously with the explicit purpose of creating veteran vs. youngster competition at as many positions as he could. And despite the spending spree, the Browns still have the most effective cap space in the NFL.

It’d be absurd to think the Browns aren’t significantly better next season. This is also a team that has also gone 1-11 in one-score games and has been unfathomably bad at recovering fumbles the last two seasons — two trends that point to dumb, bad luck that the laws of nature say will be, have to be, rectified.

But if you’re rightfully hesitant to buy into a team that we’ve established exists outside of rationality, then at least remember that this was the team of Joe Thomas — a man who not-even six months out of retirement seems more like myth, an all-time great who stuck with the Browns long after he had given them more than they could ever give him in return, who came to be the one thing more inevitable in Cleveland sports than losing. Thomas loved the Browns for reasons no one can know for sure, but he loved them completely.

Thomas is the counterpoint to Haslam’s toxicity. He ought to be proof enough that there’s something intrinsically good about the Browns. Even if no one else sees it — through a sharp thicket of corruption, and incompetence, and misfortune — at least Joe Thomas did. There’s something good there, even if we can’t make it out.

But it’s understandable if something still feels off to you. Cosmically so. That, by now, something else is at play in Cleveland.

Curses don’t exist, yet that feels more rational than this run of incompetent leadership (I repeat, the NFL is supposedly engineered to prevent this). Get beat down long enough, and it’s sadly easy to begin blaming yourself for someone else’s gross dickatry, as if you deserve your fate. No one can say exactly what effect being a sports fan has on the human psyche, but being a Browns fan would require separate study, anyway.

And if you think this is a lot of to-do about a bad football team, consider how often the Browns turn up in obituaries. Last year, a Huron, Ohio, man blamed the Browns for hastening his illness in the lede.

Paul Stark passed away Dec. 27, 2017, of complications from a brief illness, exacerbated by the hopeless condition of the Cleveland Browns, at Stein Hospice, Sandusky.

Joe Thomas showed us that anything with an ounce of good in it can be loved, and that perseverance and faith are rewards in themselves. That man’s tongue-in-cheek obit was a hearty-as-hell nah in response. Because, it turns out, there’s no way to know what good it does to put up with bullshit until much too late. If the Browns are truly human, there never, ever has to be a progression to the mean. The Browns may never get better.

This was supposed to be a therapeutic story about the Browns, but trying to understand this team led me to a dark place. No one could pretend to know what a fan of a team like this needs, or where they should place their hope when they have seen so many promising and promise-making people come and go with the same results.

I know a lot of people love this team as earnestly as anyone can love anything, with all their heart. And who knows, the Browns might win five games next year — maybe six! — and that will be progress.

But that still means more losing than not, and I hate the thought of the guys who are just in charge of things being enabled to stay and perpetuate this cycle of small hopes and precipitous disappointments. I want anyone who can break free of the Browns to be able to do so, because there’s a body of evidence that this team may be morbidly inept.

The Browns didn’t win a game last season. They went 0-16. THEY WENT ZERO-AND-SIXTEEN.

The Browns aren’t just human, they’re the worst part of humanity, the flotsam that fails so badly they bring the rest of us down with them.

The Browns went 0-and-16 last year and no, we haven’t made a big enough deal out of this. They’re in part responsible for the death of our outrage, our ability to be shocked and all the good that shock response does. We need shock. We need a defense against our sympathetic hearts, which when left unchecked come to justify the things that are slowly making us sad.

The Browns may be a testament to the light that lives in everything, but they also highlight a scarier and unknowable truth; that though light exists, there are some things it can’t escape. And that in time, that light goes out.