The twenty years since the Cleveland Browns returned to the NFL is the worst period of football in NFL history according to Football Outsiders.
The offseason is full of a lot of different kinds of rankings about the present and the future but it is also gives time to look back. Fans of the Browns have little desire to look back because there is so much to look forward to after the team made the playoffs in 2020.
Looking back may just help Cleveland fans appreciate the pure dreck that their team put them through for two decades. During that time, the team is over 100 games below a .500 record at 101-234-1. They lost over two-thirds of their games during that time.
The Browns averaged a 5 – 11 season for 20 straight years.
According to Football Outsiders, that is the worst span of football of all time. In their “anti-dynasty rankings” Cleveland received 119 points with the next closest being a span for the Cardinals (who went by three different names during that span) with 106.
They go into details of the terrible nature of the team but hit the nail on the head with all the different ways the team tried to pull themselves out of the tailspin they were in:
The Browns have had three different owners, nine different general managers, two different stadiums. They tried focusing on the analytics. They tried focusing on tough-guy macho-man attitudes. They had strict coaches, player coaches, defensive coaches, offensive coaches. They built from the lines out, from the skill positions in. They built through the draft, they built through veterans in free agency. We have never seen a team try to many different things to just reach basic competence, and fail for so long.
While their warnings about the 2021 season later attempt to drown all the goodwill built up by the fan base, it cannot be denied that there have been a lot of terrible experiences and stories to be told including:
It’s hard to even pick the worst of the worst of the Browns here. How can you sort between the first-round bust passers? Manziel versus Weeden is an impossible decision. Hue Jackson should be a shoo-in for worst coach, but he’s competing against Eric Mangini’s micromanaging and utter disregard for the franchise’s substantial history. The Factory of Sadness defies inspection. It’s fractal—every depressing fact you can dig up is composed of multiple other depressing facts, which are then composed of multiple MORE depressing facts. It’s bottomless. Trying to sum up a generation of terrible Browns football, of hopeless years and of crushing near-misses, could be an entire series of articles on its own.
Thankfully for Browns fans, the 2020 season brought hope and a very good 2021 offseason has kept that momentum going. Perhaps the next 20 years will find their way to the top of the best dynasty list.