Rooting for the Cleveland Browns is one of the most difficult fandoms in the NFL. If competing for a playoff berth year after year is the goal, the Browns have fallen well short since the franchise was reinstated into the NFL in 1999.
Not only that, the Browns have had more off-field strife than almost any team in the league, with most of it related to the quarterback position. From Johnny Manziel to Baker Mayfield to Deshaun Watson to Shedeur Sanders to many more in between, Cleveland has been one of the most dysfunctional organizations over the past three decades.
With 16 last-place finishes in the division over those 26 campaigns, insider Terry Pluto of Cleveland.com revealed what it means to be a Browns fan, which is learning to never expect too much.
“It teaches you not to have great expectations out of life,” Pluto said. “Keep those expectations to a minimum.”
The list of failures dwarfs the number of recent successes. It includes an 0-16 season in 2017, which followed a 1-15 campaign the year before.
The Browns have not won their division since returning to the NFL, and they have finished as high as second just three times. Cleveland has won one playoff game in that time, with just three postseason appearances, and it is one of four teams to have never made it to the Super Bowl, joining the Detroit Lions, Houston Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars.
The team has had 10 head coaches, plus two interims, since 2002, and 16 different starting quarterbacks since 2017. The Browns also made one of the worst trades in NFL history in acquiring Watson from the Texans, and recently dealt one of the best players in franchise history, Myles Garrett, to the Los Angeles Rams.
This season is not expected to be any better, as the Browns are projected to contend for the No. 1 overall pick in the 2027 NFL Draft. The wish is that someone from the talented quarterback class expected to be available will turn the franchise around once and for all.
But as Pluto warns, Browns fans shouldn’t get their hopes up that it will turn out to be the case.
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