Sports teams are the final form of the leveraged buyout nonsense that killed things like Toys R Us and nearly killed Caesar’s Palace. The cost will go up, the experience will crater, and as long as it is marginally better than not having it at all, it will continue.
I really wonder if the next generation will fade away from sports, since it’s no longer the freely available filler content of our (at least, my) youth. There’s no long view to bring in fans and allow them to form an attachment to the team, it’s demanding the attachment and letting the worst of fandom dole out guilt for not being a real fan.
(Lest anyone think this cynical bleeding of devoted fans is sports specific, [looks side-eyed at Disney]...)
(Also, totally shocking that an NFL owner would basically shrug off these allegations but would blackball a player for doing something completely legal they didn’t like)
Sports will never love you. You may love sports, but once you peel back the onion, you see something that is capable only of greed, taking while giving nothing more than tiny kibbles of happiness in return.
There is no power to being a fan. You are part of a collective that believes you have power but you are nothing more than a mindless drone. But we all crave being a fan because it means being part of something greater. I grew up a Steelers fan (ducking from the tossed beer bottles). I was an apologist for Big Ben in his early days, because he was "innocent," but with age comes wisdom and I really wish the Steelers would have been done with him. And it bothers me that I have memorabilia with him on it that I will have to explain to my daughter why I thought it was a good thing to purchase. The unintended punishment for fandom. Being responsible for your fandom even if you have absolutely no control over your team.
Watson will skate. Sure he'll pay out the civil suits probably behind closed doors. But he becomes the new stain on the Browns. Just like Dan Snyder is the stain on the Commanders (piss poor PR/marketing team) but nothing changes. The only time it does is if there are photographs, the key is multiple photographs showing the assault or video evidence. Ray Rice would still be in the League if he wasn't caught on camera.
Fans deserve better. But when sports are entertainment and an escape, more bread for the masses, while the rest of the country crumbles.
Also, F* those owners who claim poverty and demand the public build new stadiums or they will move, may a pox be on their houses for eternity. Also forget relegation, I believe in deletion, if you don't put a marginal .500 team on the field, you don't deserve to be an owner and should be removed and banned.
It was a bit heartening to see the VA legislature somewhat reach across the aisle to basically tell Dan Snyder to fuck off and pay for his own damn stadium.
I am surprised that the reports of Snyder having two sets of books in order to cheat the other owners out of their revenue share hasn't led the other owners to catapult him right out of the league. Makes you wonder if Snyder either has dirt on other owners or if it is just SOP amongst owners to have two sets of books to dodge taxes. Seems like they would have made a bigger deal out of that. Maybe they're just waiting on the Congressional inquiry to do all the work for them, which letting taxpayer dollars pay for what they want is pretty on the nose.
This shit has been amplified by the explosion of Fantasy Football. Now, not only do you have people rooting and making excuses for detestable pieces of shit because they are on their favorite, real team, but it is multiplied by all the dullards making excuses and half-assed, bad faith justifications so a player can help their imaginary team win a game that only matters to maybe 12 people.
I love this post with the entirety of my being. Truth be told, I was already displaced from Cleveland when the relocation happened, and in reality, my allegiance died then. I never recognized the replacement franchise as "the Browns". They were at first "the New Browns" or later, the "lolBrowns". I still have tons of family up there (West Side bro-fist), so I casually remain interested, like some friend from high school you've long since lost touch with. The Watson signing made me sick, but it made my still-local family a weird mix of irate and antagonistic. As in, they WANT the franchise to fail now, just to spite the management who sees winning as the only goal.
It's funny that they think of the team-fan relationship as a family. I've distanced myself from plenty of family that bring nothing but disgust, head-scratching stupidity, or a constant state of need to the table with nothing in return. It's a difficult, but healthy choice one has to eventually make lest they be dragged to ruin. I figure Clevelanders are at this crossroads with the team they reluctantly love as well.
As for the Browns, I was a die-hard Cleveland fan in the Eighties and right up until Art Modell moved the team. I moved to DC in 1990, just in time for the last of Joe Gibbs's Super Bowl teams, and followed Washington pretty closely until Dan Snyder killed both the franchise and my interest in it. Overall, the league has become so simultaneously self-important and oleaginously amoral that I've watched one game since 2014. (Even I couldn't resist seeing Joe Burrow in the Super Bowl this year, but it was just enough to remind me why the Old Bobcat cursed his Bengals fandom weekly.)
Scott, I think you hit upon why this feels different, not just for you as a Browns fan, but for a larger whole. It's the sheer magnitude of the audacity of the contract and the flagrance in which the public is being told to ignore what we see and trust the institution to do the right thing.
We've seen so many forms of abuse of power in sports that it's almost too much to keep up with, and yet, they know we keep coming back.
I was in the same spot as you, Scott, several years back. When I was a child, I didn't really have a grasp on the grosser underbelly of how these things go, likely both because I wasn't paying attention to that part and also because the media was happier to hide those things under the rug.
However, when the Browns signed Jamal Lewis in 2007, I put them on "indefinite probation" - I wouldn't watch or cheer for them while he was on the team. However, in 2010, he was gone, and I came back to watch again.
Then, when they drafted Manziel in 2014, I was out again - ostensibly, I put them back on probation. By the time he was gone, however, I'd found that through the change in my life and the addition of other things, I no longer missed the NFL, and I haven't really been back. I'll watch the Super Bowl with friends sometimes, but my Sundays are freer and happier than they were when I was watching every week. That realization was eye-opening at the time, for sure, and might have even hurt a little. Even when I wasn't watching, I had considered myself a Browns fan, but now, I guess I don't.
Promotion and relegation will never be implemented in the major American sports leagues but there has to be something done about the people like Castellini who just don’t openly don’t give a shit about being competitive. Tanking in the NBA is at least a means to an end of eventually being competitive again but it’s not apparent that Castellini and others are even trying.
I was so glad he was leaving Houston, only to follow me to my now-home-state. I am with you Scott, in feeling that he won't face any major consequences.
Sports teams are the final form of the leveraged buyout nonsense that killed things like Toys R Us and nearly killed Caesar’s Palace. The cost will go up, the experience will crater, and as long as it is marginally better than not having it at all, it will continue.
I really wonder if the next generation will fade away from sports, since it’s no longer the freely available filler content of our (at least, my) youth. There’s no long view to bring in fans and allow them to form an attachment to the team, it’s demanding the attachment and letting the worst of fandom dole out guilt for not being a real fan.
(Lest anyone think this cynical bleeding of devoted fans is sports specific, [looks side-eyed at Disney]...)
(Also, totally shocking that an NFL owner would basically shrug off these allegations but would blackball a player for doing something completely legal they didn’t like)
Also, cities should start only publicly funding stadiums if they get a percentage of the team ownership. Watch the asks dry up really quickly.
At least we've still got college football with its unchanging traditions, student-athlete ethos, and historic conference rivalries.
Sports will never love you. You may love sports, but once you peel back the onion, you see something that is capable only of greed, taking while giving nothing more than tiny kibbles of happiness in return.
There is no power to being a fan. You are part of a collective that believes you have power but you are nothing more than a mindless drone. But we all crave being a fan because it means being part of something greater. I grew up a Steelers fan (ducking from the tossed beer bottles). I was an apologist for Big Ben in his early days, because he was "innocent," but with age comes wisdom and I really wish the Steelers would have been done with him. And it bothers me that I have memorabilia with him on it that I will have to explain to my daughter why I thought it was a good thing to purchase. The unintended punishment for fandom. Being responsible for your fandom even if you have absolutely no control over your team.
Watson will skate. Sure he'll pay out the civil suits probably behind closed doors. But he becomes the new stain on the Browns. Just like Dan Snyder is the stain on the Commanders (piss poor PR/marketing team) but nothing changes. The only time it does is if there are photographs, the key is multiple photographs showing the assault or video evidence. Ray Rice would still be in the League if he wasn't caught on camera.
Fans deserve better. But when sports are entertainment and an escape, more bread for the masses, while the rest of the country crumbles.
Also, F* those owners who claim poverty and demand the public build new stadiums or they will move, may a pox be on their houses for eternity. Also forget relegation, I believe in deletion, if you don't put a marginal .500 team on the field, you don't deserve to be an owner and should be removed and banned.
It was a bit heartening to see the VA legislature somewhat reach across the aisle to basically tell Dan Snyder to fuck off and pay for his own damn stadium.
I am surprised that the reports of Snyder having two sets of books in order to cheat the other owners out of their revenue share hasn't led the other owners to catapult him right out of the league. Makes you wonder if Snyder either has dirt on other owners or if it is just SOP amongst owners to have two sets of books to dodge taxes. Seems like they would have made a bigger deal out of that. Maybe they're just waiting on the Congressional inquiry to do all the work for them, which letting taxpayer dollars pay for what they want is pretty on the nose.
This shit has been amplified by the explosion of Fantasy Football. Now, not only do you have people rooting and making excuses for detestable pieces of shit because they are on their favorite, real team, but it is multiplied by all the dullards making excuses and half-assed, bad faith justifications so a player can help their imaginary team win a game that only matters to maybe 12 people.
I love this post with the entirety of my being. Truth be told, I was already displaced from Cleveland when the relocation happened, and in reality, my allegiance died then. I never recognized the replacement franchise as "the Browns". They were at first "the New Browns" or later, the "lolBrowns". I still have tons of family up there (West Side bro-fist), so I casually remain interested, like some friend from high school you've long since lost touch with. The Watson signing made me sick, but it made my still-local family a weird mix of irate and antagonistic. As in, they WANT the franchise to fail now, just to spite the management who sees winning as the only goal.
It's funny that they think of the team-fan relationship as a family. I've distanced myself from plenty of family that bring nothing but disgust, head-scratching stupidity, or a constant state of need to the table with nothing in return. It's a difficult, but healthy choice one has to eventually make lest they be dragged to ruin. I figure Clevelanders are at this crossroads with the team they reluctantly love as well.
As for the Browns, I was a die-hard Cleveland fan in the Eighties and right up until Art Modell moved the team. I moved to DC in 1990, just in time for the last of Joe Gibbs's Super Bowl teams, and followed Washington pretty closely until Dan Snyder killed both the franchise and my interest in it. Overall, the league has become so simultaneously self-important and oleaginously amoral that I've watched one game since 2014. (Even I couldn't resist seeing Joe Burrow in the Super Bowl this year, but it was just enough to remind me why the Old Bobcat cursed his Bengals fandom weekly.)
I always enjoy the newsletter but this one was exceptional. Great work.
Scott, I think you hit upon why this feels different, not just for you as a Browns fan, but for a larger whole. It's the sheer magnitude of the audacity of the contract and the flagrance in which the public is being told to ignore what we see and trust the institution to do the right thing.
We've seen so many forms of abuse of power in sports that it's almost too much to keep up with, and yet, they know we keep coming back.
So, with the breaking trade news, are you a Panthers fan now?
I was in the same spot as you, Scott, several years back. When I was a child, I didn't really have a grasp on the grosser underbelly of how these things go, likely both because I wasn't paying attention to that part and also because the media was happier to hide those things under the rug.
However, when the Browns signed Jamal Lewis in 2007, I put them on "indefinite probation" - I wouldn't watch or cheer for them while he was on the team. However, in 2010, he was gone, and I came back to watch again.
Then, when they drafted Manziel in 2014, I was out again - ostensibly, I put them back on probation. By the time he was gone, however, I'd found that through the change in my life and the addition of other things, I no longer missed the NFL, and I haven't really been back. I'll watch the Super Bowl with friends sometimes, but my Sundays are freer and happier than they were when I was watching every week. That realization was eye-opening at the time, for sure, and might have even hurt a little. Even when I wasn't watching, I had considered myself a Browns fan, but now, I guess I don't.
Promotion and relegation will never be implemented in the major American sports leagues but there has to be something done about the people like Castellini who just don’t openly don’t give a shit about being competitive. Tanking in the NBA is at least a means to an end of eventually being competitive again but it’s not apparent that Castellini and others are even trying.
I was so glad he was leaving Houston, only to follow me to my now-home-state. I am with you Scott, in feeling that he won't face any major consequences.
Oh man, as a lifelong but fading fan of the Ottawa Senators (NHL), this message resonates with me.