Time Sept. 2–9, 2019Yet as the Browns opened training
camp this summer, a surprising quality
could be detected across the city: opti-
mism. The Browns are actually expected
to win more games than they’ll lose.
Sports Illustrated and ESPN’s Football
Power Index predict that the Browns will
win their first division title in 30 years.
Thanks to an infusion of young talent
led by brash second- year quarterback
Baker Mayfield, the Browns, who finished
7-8-1 a season ago, have a swagger usually
reserved for teams from bigger markets
and with better pedigrees. Indeed, their
prized off- season addition was the former
New York Giants star Odell Beckham Jr.,
who traded the bright lights of Broadway
for the lower-key charms of Playhouse
Square. Amazingly, it is not hyperbole
to say that the Cleveland Browns, whose
logo-less burnt- orange helmets, icy home
on Lake Erie and hard-luck history em-
body gritty, lunch- bucket football, have
become the NFL’s sexiest team.
“We’re like the guy in high school who
everyone made fun of, and never got the
girl, showing up to the 10-year reunion
in a Ferrari, sticking his chest out and
dancing around,” says Chris McNeil, a
purchasing manager for a steel fabrica-
tion company who organized a parade to
mock the 0-16 season. “If any fan base
deserves to be that guy for once, it’s us.”
The Browns’ resurgence mirrors the
shifting outlook of their home city. Once
derided as “the Mistake by the Lake,”
Cleveland rebounded following a post-
industrial exodus of jobs and people that
accelerated in the 1970s. In the past year
alone, home prices and many employ-
ment metrics have trended up. Largely be-
cause of the vaunted Cleveland Clinic, the
metro area is the densest health- science
labor market in the country. According
to one analysis, the region’s year-over-
year per capita income- growth rate was
the fifth highest of the nation’s 40 largest
metro areas, behind only New York City;
San Jose, Calif.; San Francisco; and Den-
ver. The downtown population has risen
77% since 2010, and construction cranes
dot Euclid Avenue, a major thoroughfare.
Cleveland has taken a star turn as host of
the 2016 Republican National Convention
and this year’s baseball All-Star Game.
The NFL draft is coming to town in 2021.
To many close observers, no small
measure of credit for this revival rests
with LeBron James, the Akron native who
led the Cavaliers to the NBA champion-
ship in 2016— Cleveland’s first title in any
major sport in more than 50 years. (Base-
ball’s Indians have now gone 70 seasons
without a World Series win—the longest
streak in the game.) But James has since
decamped for Los Angeles, and for all the
excitement over finally winning some-
thing, it’s football that really speaks to
many Clevelanders’ souls. Pro football
began in Ohio, with some teams spon-
sored by the mills and plants that gave the
Rust Belt its name, and is still followed
with a devotion just shy of religion. “The
drought is over,” says Richey Piiparinen,
an urban theorist and researcher from
Cleveland who specializes in the relation-
ship between where we live and how we
think. “But have we really had a full glass
of water? No.”Paul DePoDesta knows all about
the expectations. The Browns hired
DePodesta as chief strategy officer in
2016 with the mandate to build a turn-
around plan that would finally end the
losing. He was an unconventional choice:
DePodesta spent his career in baseball op-
erations, including a stint with the Oak-
land A’s that led to his being portrayed by
Jonah Hill in the Oscar- nominated film
Moneyball. He worked for the Indians ear-
lier in his career and recalls telling a life-
long Clevelander after the team clinched
the 1997 pennant that the city seemed
electric. He says the man told him that it
would pale compared with what it would
be like if the Browns ever won. Mind you,
the Browns had just left for Baltimore.
The team didn’t even exist.
To shape his restoration plan,
De Podesta picked the brains of experts
inside and outside the game, including
Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize– winning
behavioral economist who in 2013 co-
wrote a paper finding that impatient NFL
teams overvalued early picks in the annual
college draft. That influenced the Browns’
eventual strategy of acquiring future draft
picks and clearing salary-cap space.
Analytically minded teams in other
sports have successfully gutted the pres-
ent to build for the future, a practice often
derided as “tanking.” But in the NFL,
Cleveland’s plan to do the same was fairly
novel. In theory, the league’s hard salary
cap creates parity by putting teams onSports
T
T
DAWG DAYS
Since the Cleveland Browns returned
to the NFL in 1999, the team has
turned in just two winning seasons
and made a single playoff appearance.1986 Browns
lose the first
of three AFC
championship
games in four
years to the
Broncos.1996 Browns
owner Art
Modell moves
the team to
Baltimore. The
Ravens win the
Super Bowl in
their fifth year.2016 LeBron
James’ Cavs
win Cleveland
its first major
title in 54 years.2017 Browns
lose all 16
games—
matching NFL
futility record
set by Detroit
in 2008.2019 Cleveland
has suited up
30 starting QBs
in the past 20
seasons. The
latest, Baker
Mayfield,
offers hard-
earned hope.
SOURCE: NFL.COMSEASON
PR
EVI
OU
S (^) P
AG
ES
: (^) C
LE
VEL
AN
D.C
OM
/AP
; (^) T
HIS
(^) PA
GE
: (^) N
ICK
(^) CA
MM
ET
T—
DIA
MO
ND
(^) IM
AG
ES/
GE
TTY
(^) IM
AG
ES
52