PD file
STREET VENDOR: Hey, mister! Pay me 20 bucks and I’ll kick you square in the crotch!
MAN: No way! Why would anyone pay for that?
STREET VENDOR: OK, I’ll do it for 10.
MAN: Wow! Half price! What a deal!
The Cleveland Browns have announced that they’ll be lowering ticket prices this year, which means we hopeless masochists won’t have to pay quite as much to support our perpetual “crotch-kick” of a football team.
Dropping ticket prices should not be a surprising move in light of the fact that we won a single game last year. Basic principles of economics dictate that the worse a product is, the lower the asking price should be.
But since their return in ’99, the Browns organization has generally managed to avoid having to play by these rules, and we fans deserve some of the blame for that.
We’ve proven that we’ll stick with this team through thin and thin, and our blind support has essentially immunized the front office from financial repercussions. No matter how bad it got, they knew we’d still keep coming back for more.
But even we have our limits. Having gone to nearly every game, I can assure you that there were a lot of empty seats in the joint.
Lower ticket prices are not a sympathetic gesture towards long-suffering fans. It’s a reluctant response to a harsh economic reality. But the important thing is that regardless of why they did it, they made the right choice. I’m going to hope it is just the first of many wise moves to come.
And now that we’re on the right path, this might be the right time to exorcise the demons of the past by listing the five worst recent Browns front-office decisions.
(None of them relate to the actual product on the field. I’m not here to rehash all the bad draft picks, trades, signings and hirings over the years. There’s no reason to dance again on the grave of Dwayne Bowe. These were simply bad business moves.)
White flag giveaway
In 2012, the team announced a Ticketmaster-sponsored promotion where all attendees would receive a white “rally flag” to wave during the game. The fact that such a promotion requires the approval and cooperation of several departments means that no one in the Browns organization was aware that waving a white flag is the international sign of surrender.
True to form, the team was eliminated from the playoffs before the game. When the media got word of the whole debacle and started mocking it, the giveaway was cancelled. This means that somewhere in a landfill there are 60,000 white flags with a Browns logo on one side and a Ticketmaster logo on the other. Also notable: This marks the only known instance where Ticketmaster got screwed out of money by someone else.
Awful team slogans
In all fairness, it can’t be easy to come up with an inspirational motto for a team that hasn’t been good since “Night Court” was on the air. But surely there were better options than these:
“The name on the door is Cleveland”
Kind of vague. It’s less an intimidating warning to the opponent than it is a very rudimentary explanation of where the opponent is geographically located.
“Play like a Brown”
How did no one see anything wrong with this? The ONLY way that this slogan would work is if the Browns had a history of playing well. They do not. By telling someone to “Play like a Brown,” one is literally instructing them to disappoint and underachieve. I emailed the Browns, suggesting this phrase could be salvaged by changing it to “Play like a team that is playing against the Browns.” I received no response.
“We bark together”
No. No, we don’t.
Columbus training camp head fake
What’s the perfect thing to propose when you’re the league’s worst team and your fan base is approaching a mutiny? Why, expansion, of course!
The Browns claimed that they wanted to move training camp to Columbus to try and win over some new mid-Ohio fans. I guess the assumption was that there are a lot of Ohioans on the fence about following a one-win team, and that they just needed to sweeten the pot by giving those people the thrilling experience of watching linemen run wind sprints in July.
The great helmet orange-ing of ’15
I personally could not possibly care less about uniforms and wouldn’t care if they wore wrestling singlets and capes next season, if they’d win eight games. But it was the dramatic hype leading up to this event that doomed the comically mild payoff. The Browns unveiled the revamped uniforms at a big media event where it was revealed that our helmets had gone from “Burnt Saffron” to “Summer Tangerine.”
Swagger the mascot dog
Animal rights organizations such as PETA have been conspicuously silent while this innocent bull mastiff has been sadistically exposed to every Browns home game since 2014. Remember, in dog years this equates to 21 Browns seasons.
Now let’s leave all those bad decisions behind us. This is the year it all changes. I can feel it!
But if they trade down out of that first pick, I’m honestly going to snap.
Mike Polk Jr. is a Cleveland humorist who writes a column every other week for The Plain Dealer and for cleveland.com. Contact him on Twitter at @mikepolkjr.
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