According a recent Harris poll, the Cleveland Browns are the 17th most
popular team in the NFL.
They rank below the Tennessee Titans, and are about half as popular as the
Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers. Not more than 6% of adults who follow
professional football have claimed to be fans of the Cleveland Browns since the
poll began in 1999. In 2006, after seven mostly horrible seasons, that number
has merely dropped to 5%, a testament to the patience of the team's fans.
What's interesting about the poll is that popularity numbers aren't directly
tied to the on-field success of the team. For example, the Tennessee Titans, one
of the worst teams around, with even less hope than the Browns, are ranked above
Cleveland. The popularity of the Packers has never fallen below 11%, and they've
been awful for several years.
The ultimate test of loyalty to a franchise is not how fans pack stadiums
when the team wins, but how well they support them when the team loses. That
baseline number of hard-core fans is incredibly important, for planning and for
the team's finances.
Frontrunners are easy to find. An audience of loyal fans takes years to
create, and years to lose. They are the most valuable commodity that a team will
ever have.
Browns fans are still among the most loyal in the NFL, but it is those
hard-core fans, who support the Browns through thick and thin, that are slowly
drifting away from the franchise.
I know. I talk to them everyday.
I know that they're not just drifting away because the team has been losing.
It's not that simple.
* * *
After the Browns 1-4 start, fans are looking for hope.
Fans on the OBR tend to be weeks or months ahead of the mainstream in their
thoughts about the team. They were questioning Maurice Carthon after the first
pre-season game, and last year.
They look for options on our radio show and in Ask the Insiders.
For example, a number of fans like WR Travis Wilson, or at least what they
saw of him in the pre-season, and ask us why he was inactive last game. "What's
wrong with his game?", they want to know.
We can only repeat what the head coach has told us, because we're not allowed
to see his progress in daily practices. The fans are cynical about what they're
told by the team's head coach. You don't really get the truth, they say.
In the absence of credible information, many assume that Wilson was either a
blown third-round pick or that Crennel and Carthon are clueless about evaluating
talent.
Fans are worried about Joe Andruzzi, and wonder if Isaac Sowells will be able
to help. They think of perhaps moving Ryan Tucker inside to one of the troubled
guard positions as he gets older and handing the right OT job to someone like
Nat Dorsey.
"How's Dorsey doing?", they ask. "We don't really know", we tell them, and
then offer our analysis of what we saw a couple months ago. After that, we can
only repeat what we're told, which is basically nothing.
They turn away, disappointed, but they look forward to the off-season, where
there's information that the team and league doesn't control, yet, and they can
get some fodder for their hopes, maybe.
But, right now, we can't help them keep their hopes alive.
* * *
The St. Louis Rams closed practices to the media this September, as another
branch of the Bill Belichick tree became head coach there.
At this point, 75% of the teams in the NFL close practices to reporters after
the 30 minute minimum established by the NFL. The time allows the media to watch
players stretching and casual unit drills. Very little useful information
results.
Two of the vanishing breed of teams which did not close practices to the
media last year are the Steelers and Seahawks.
Both teams went to the Super Bowl.
* * *
Fans are upset with Maurice Carthon and his
operation of the Browns offense. I have a transcript of Carthon's comments to
the press before the pre-season started. It is the only time all year that we
are allowed to speak to him.
Carthon cannot explain his own decision-making, in
his own words. Romeo Crennel speaks for him. Such protectiveness only makes
Carthon appear more inept and incapable.
We reported last year that the Browns assistant
coach Jeff Davidson was the heir-apparent at offensive coordinator if Carthon
falters. Fans ask us whether he's capable.
We can't tell them what we don't know. We've never
been allowed to speak to Davidson or gain insight into his capabilities. All we
have to go on is the performance of the team's offensive line, which has been
horrible. There's not much hope we can offer fans about Carthon's likely
replacement.
According to a survey by the Pro Football Writers
Association, there are seven teams in the NFL as of last year which allow no or
limited access to assistant coaches.
The Cleveland Browns are one of those franchises.
* * *
The number of fans who remember when the Cleveland
Browns were the "Yankees of the NFL" is declining each year. I am middle-aged,
and I was three years old when the Browns won their last championship.
In 2000, the Cleveland Browns crowed about their
season ticket waiting list. For a small sum of money, Browns fans could pay to
get on a list to, perhaps, if they were lucky, spent thousands of more dollars
on season tickets.
In 2006, the Browns need to spend their own money to
advertise tickets and loges on television. It took only six years to squander a
benefit of the loyalty the team had built for fifty years.
* * *
Part of what I feel binds fans and teams together is the mutual struggle they
go through to be successful in a league where, by definition, 31 of the 32 teams
will end the season out of the playoffs or with a loss. Part of that
struggle is the drama associated with all aspects of the sport, on-field and
off.
Choking off information by closing practices and barring access to assistant
coaches limits the amount of topics that the media can comment about
knowledgeably. This combines with rather banal information pouring out of team
and league-owned outlets to make the sport fundamentally less interesting. It
gives us less to talk about.
So, I ask the question. How is the league served in competing for the
disposable income of families by making their sport less interesting?
They don't get it. They don't understand that the struggle is part of what
pulls us together. They refuse to admit that the drama is part of what sells.
They seem to believe that it's their own marketing which is responsible for
the success of the sport and that winning and losing games is the only variable
in their popularity.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
* * *
The Harris poll I mentioned above is focused on learning more about the fans
of the NFL, their economic status, and so forth.
It shows that the percentage of adults who follow professional football has
dropped 7% between 1998 and 2006, from 55% to 48%.
* * *
I know of two plays that the Cleveland Browns have added to their playbook.
We know them because a member of the organization told us about them as we
sought information about another matter. People will talk.
They are plays the public hasn't seen and would be interested to learn about.
I could write them down and describe them, put them in a premium article, and
maybe get a couple of subscribers from it.
But I won't.
I would never consider it, not for a moment. Neither would anyone else in the
press room in Berea.
* * *
This isn't ESPN the Magazine. It's not written at a fifth-grade level. I
don't have to connect the dots for you, and don't have time to wordsmith it.
I don't go to Berea very often. It's too much time for too little benefit. I
have to work another job to keep this place going, and don't have two hours to
lose driving back and forth to get the same information as everyone else. I
leave that to far more capable writers, like our own Fred Greetham.
So maybe I can say what others are thinking or are too smart to put into
print.
NFL franchises are acting based on an overly paranoid distrust of the media.
This isn't an overt public relations disaster because it plays on a fundamental
distrust of the media felt by many people in general.
The NFL feels that it is so big and so successful that it no longer has to
rely on local news organizations to help keep the public informed.
In my opinion, the NFL and Cleveland Browns engage in restrictive policies
toward the media that are arrogant, self-destructive and idiotic. There is no
on-field advantage to them. They hurt me, they hurt my peers, and they hurt
hard-core fans of the sport. I'm watching it happen, every day.
Mr. Crennel, the time has come to be your own man. To think outside the box,
and not just copy what Bill Belichick did. He won three of four Super Bowls as a
head coach. You've won nothing. This organization hasn't sniffed a national
championship since this middle-aged writer was three years old.
The time has come to re-open the doors and let the media back in for the good
of the Cleveland Browns organization and their fans.
Romeo doesn't read the internet or the papers, so he says. Randy Lerner is
off basking in the glow of his purchase of a soccer team. The Vice President of
the team in charge of this area of responsibility has never once returned a
phone call I've placed to him.
This plea will fall on deaf ears.
* * *
Those of us with a cynical bent will say that everything that rises must
fall.
Your town library is filled to the brim with biographies of men and women who
forgot their own strengths as they gained power and wealth, only to suffer a
precipitous fall. History books are full of examples of empires which frittered
away their wealth on displays of might while they quietly crumbled from within.
The National Football League and the Cleveland Browns have both risen quite
dramatically in the last half-century. NFL executives and owners command an
empire which includes billions in wealth, extorts athletic palaces from
cash-strapped cities at will, and now attempts to spread its reach around the
world.
But there's something I can sense, there, at the edges. A rot that has
already set in. You can see it already eroding the interest of the fans who
support the bloated sports league on their back.
Smells like hubris.
Barry McBride is publisher of The Orange and Brown Report. He began
publishing football-related commentary as a hobby in 1996 with a website
protesting the move of the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore. In 2001, he
established the OBR, originally named Bernie's Insiders. Barry would be happy to
receive your questions or comments via email at
barry@theobr.com.
The opinions expressed in this article are his and his alone, and do not
necessarily reflect the opinion of other writers and employees of the Scout
Network or The Orange and Brown Report.