Jimmy Haslam owns the pro soccer team in Columbus, the Crew.

He is lucky that the pro football team he owns, the Browns, isn’t based there as well, or else he, along with his beleaguered head coach and general manager, Kevin Stefanski and Andrew Berry, respectively, would be under siege right now from angry fans.

Indeed, they take their football in Columbus very seriously.

Just ask Buckeyes head coach Ryan Day.

Day has the third-highest winning percentage (.875) in major college football history behind only Walter Camp and Knute Rockne, the legend from Notre Dame, the school the Buckeyes played in the College Football Playoffs national championship game last Monday night.

And until the Buckeyes defeated the Fighting Irish 34-23 to win their first national title in 10 years, there were a lot of people in Ohio’s largest city — and throughout The Great State of Ohio and Buckeyes Nation — who wanted him fired — and unceremoniously so — because he has lost four straight times to The Team Up North.

The value of the Buckeyes beating “their rivals” put up against what they do overall is a debate for another time, but the question that begs to be asked is how would Ohio State fans react if their coach and director of football ops had the record of Stefanski and Berry for the last five years when they’ve worked together in Cleveland?

We can only shudder to think.

And that leads us to another question that begs to be asked; thst is, why should Browns fans have to tolerate so much less as their standard, as Haslam allows it?

The answer?

They shouldn’t.

Steve King