An open letter to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, General Manager Ray Farmer and head coach Mike Pettine as the team gets ready to host the Cincinnati Bengals today at FirstEnergy Stadium:
For the purpose of this letter, I am going to take off my objective journalist’s hat and replace it with my subjective fan’s hat.
Yes, long, long before I covered the Browns professionally – for 26 years now – I rooted for them as a fan growing up in a little community called Manchester, located about eight miles south of Akron, Ohio.
And deep down inside, gentlemen – this letter will be full of full disclosures – I remain a fan. I continue to be objective in my writing – trust me, guys, I’m very objective — but personally, I want the Browns to win every game. And when they don’t, my heart sinks and not just my day but my entire week, is ruined.
Really.
It will be like that until my dying day, of that I am certain. It’s just the way I’m built.
To be honest – and again, gentlemen, I am going to be brutally honest here – I had no choice in the matter of whether or not I was going to be a Browns fan, that is, if I wanted to continue to live under my father’s roof. Like thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people – men and women — my age, I got my love of the Browns handed down to me from my long-deceased father, who came home from serving in World War II to find this brand-new pro football team that won so many games, division titles, conference titles and league titles that you have to categorize.
As my dad described it to me – as he weaned me on stories of Automatic Otto, Bill Willis, Lou “The Toe,” Gluefingers Lavelli, a freight train named Marion Motley, Gunner Gatski and all the rest — those early Browns were really all-star teams, filled with a bunch of players – and an iconic coach named Paul Brown, who is aptly called “The Father of Modern Football” for all the innovations he brought to the game – who would go on to fill up the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
When the Browns lost a game, it was a big deal. Teams marked their calendar when they would be playing the Browns, for to beat them – or, in some cases, just be competitive with them – made their season regardless of anything else they did, or didn’t do.
As such, while we’re on the subject, what you did, Jimmy, in taking away most of the perks afforded these heroes and their families through your alumni department, is criminal. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’re not worthy to carry their shoes, let alone embarrass them and, more succinctly, emasculate them as you have.
But all that is another story for another time, and believe me, Jimmy, there will be another time to write that story and I will most certainly write it.
What I want to concentrate on here is what’s going on – and, as it were, not going on – on the field. It’s a disgrace, and that’s being kind.
I didn’t believe it was possible, but you guys – all three of you – have done more damage to this team and its reputation than all of the other men who held your positions did in the first 15 seasons of the expansion era. And that’s saying a lot, considering all the incompetent, no-nothing, mumbling, stumbling, bumbling, fumbling nincompoops who have come before you.
You did it, fellas, you have crash-landed the once-proud Browns into their lowest level and worst shape they’ve been in during their 69-year, 67-season existence. What you have done right – I’m sure if I think long and hard enough that I could come up with something – could fit onto the head of a pin, but what you have done wrong couldn’t fit inside of the Terminal Tower.
You have made my Browns – and the Browns of countless other people I know and have met along the way in covering this team long before you even knew where Cleveland was – a national laughingstock. They are the butt of every joke. They are perceived as being the 1962 New York Mets, who, in their first year, couldn’t get out of their own way and lost 120 out of 162 games. But seven years later, they won the World Series and were called the Miracle Mets.
For the Browns, at this pace and with you guys in control, to win the Super Bowl in seven seasons wouldn’t be just a miracle. It might signal that the apocalypse is here.
I am not being flippant or over-exaggerating. I am being as serious as a heart attack.
And although you might not like what I have to say here, you know full well in your heart of hearts that I’m right on point with exactly everything you’ve read so far.
But I’m just getting started.
Jimmy, you’re going to fire Framer and Pettine and that is going to give the fans some hope, but then you’re going to consult with your clueless, snarky, holier-than-thou team president, Alec Scheiner, the only “football guy” who will be left in the building at that point, to find replacements. That’s like asking the chicken hawks to guard the chicken coop, or the inmates to run the asylum.
Remember at the beginning of the Bible where verse after verse talks about begetting? This is the football version of it, only in a negative way.
You’d be better off picking names out of a hat, talking to that homeless guy you met, or asking area preschoolers to give you input.
If the decision is going to be left up to you, Jimmy, and Scheiner, there is absolutely no chance – zero – that you’re going to get it right. Since you have no idea what you’re doing, you’re going to end up with the same kind of candidates like Farmer and Pettine. It’ll be a beauty contest where all the candidates are ugly, and you’ll try decide who is the lesser of two evils.
It’s a vicious cycle, and there’s no end in sight.
Really.
Jimmy, if you ran your travel plazas like you’ve run this football team, you’d be out of business. You’d be homeless, too.
I wish I could fire all three of you. There is nothing in my life right now that would give me more pleasure, and give me more hope that the Browns could be fixed, than throwing you and your possessions right through – not out, but through – the front door so you could feel the same level of physical hurt that your fans are experiencing emotionally. This team means a lot to a lot of people, and as such you have hurt us far more than you could ever know with your buffoonery.
Once I tossed you into the middle of Lou Groza Boulevard, I would sterilize the building and get all the Jimmy, Ray and Mike stench out of it, and there’s a lot of that so it will take some time. But we couldn’t go forward until that happened, for I would be committed to changing everything – everything!
But that’s not going to happen, Jimmy. You’re too proud, too selfish and too stubborn to admit you can’t do this because you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re too egotistical to do what successful owners do and hire competent football people to run the organization and then get the heck out of the way, remaining in the shadows and emerging only to sign checks to pay for what those guys want to do.
The saddest part of this, Jimmy, is that we – the fans, even those of us with no business acumen of any kind – could do a much, much, much better job of running your travel centers than you are doing running our football team. Because you’ve done more than run the Browns. Rather, you’ve run them right into the ground.
As such, Jimmy, you deserve every miserable thing that is happening to you as a result of that – the criticism, the mockery and the anger. The problem is, your misery is our misery because we were all here long before you came, and we’ll be here long after you leave. This is still our football team. All your $1.05 billion bought you was the right to run the team for a while – again, historically poorly, as it turns out.
What’s the answer? Jimmy, to be honest, I don’t know because you’re staying. And as long as you’re here – or at least as long as you are determined to meddle in this football business that you know nothing about, which are, sadly, one in the same – nothing is going to change.
But this much I do know, Jimmy: You’re definitely not the answer. I want my Browns back, and I want them back now – this minute, this second, this moment. And once you’re gone, don’t ever come back.
Please.
Sincerely,
Steve King
