David Modell, who passed away Friday, appeared in an ESPN documentary last year and was vehement in defending the move of the original Browns franchise to Baltimore by his father, Art Modell.

That’s understandable. David Modell loved his father, and any son who loves his dad is going to hit back against those who are trying to harm him. I would have done the same thing. Most all of us would have. Kudo to David Modell for being so loyal

But with all that having been said, his actions in that documentary just offers further substantiation to the fact that the Modells – David, Art and Art’s wife, Pat – could never understand why the people in Cleveland were mad at them. They never admitted that any of what they did was wrong, or that the way they sneakily carried out their plan, meeting on the far reaches of an airport near Baltimore to seal the deal after ordering a moratorium on even addressing the matter back in Cleveland, was deceitful and dishonest at the highest levels.

They were blind to all of that. They were either delusional, ignorant, selfish or just plain crooked. I think it was – they were — a little of all of those things.

That fact got to be almost as heinous as the deed itself – not totally, mind you, but in the same ballpark.

Moreover, the Modells did everything they could to turn themselves from culprits to victims. They actually believed they had been wronged by the people in Cleveland much, much more than anything they did, which, in their thinking, was an easy conclusion since, again in their thinking, they believed they never did anything wrong – not even a little bit.

Yikes! I need a shower after just writing that, and another one after just reading it. And it has to be a hot shower at that, the kind that washes away all the germs.

It’s a little bit of what Hitler did when he took over Germany in the 1930s. That is, if you tell lies enough times, over a long enough period of time to enough people, and you do it with enough veracity, then those lies begin to be accepted as the truth.

But the real truth – that which needs no embellishment or revisionist history to be believed and accepted – always wins out.

And that fact, that even with all of the many hours, days, weeks, months and years spent trying to sway people, there was no one outside of the Modells’ inner circle who believed it, frustrated everybody in that inner circle right to the very end.

As such, it is at least part of the reason why, aside from the love for his father, David Modell was so emphatic in his defending of him and what he did, and didn’t, do 21 years ago.