Saw*Kick Media

Cleveland Browns fans deserve more. I don’t know how it happened. I was born into a life of rooting for an awful football team destined to lose. Today, the Browns won their fourth game of the season and were celebrated as a team that just won the Super Bowl. The only problem is the team has eight losses and the team was surrounded by controversy for the past two weeks.

The same thing occurred when I was at the game a few weeks ago. We had just won our second game of the season and the atmosphere at Browns Stadium was like few things I have ever experienced. High fives all around. A total celebratory glee overtook the entire city. To top it all off, the Steelers just lost to the Raiders, possibly the worst team in football, leaving both teams with a 2-5 record.

This makes me question, how many other cities have fans that get this ecstatic over such a poor team finally getting a win? And better yet, why are we like this?

To answer the first question the answer is no. The front running Bengals’ fans that peeve me so much certainly are not. When they were enduring 15 straight losing seasons, did they sell out year after year? Hell no. Yet the Browns, a team who has been futile since their return and have not finished a season more than one game over .500, has fans who continue to sell out eight times a year. Today, in a failed attempt to stir up the controversy of the previous weeks, the commentator pointed to the empty seats in the stadium, saying “The city who sells out every week has empty seats due to the problems here in the recent weeks.” What were they showing on the screen during this comment? The answer is a section in the far upper right of the stadium that is about 50-60% full. That is the best they can do to display the supposed “empty stadium?” The bottom line is, whether we are frustrated or not, we still come to the games and endure the emotional beat down. Today was one of the rare occasions that this did not occur.

To answer the second questions as to why we get so excited over a meaningless win, the answer is simple. It is that Browns’ fans put so much emotional commitment into the games. We ride crazy highs when we win, and become depressed and self-loathing when we lose. Therefore, when the Browns come through with a win, we celebrate. The reason we celebrated more today was that they actually looked like a complete football team. We didn’t win in spite of ourselves or play poorly for a half. We played four quarters of football and looked good. We won the game, the other team didn’t lose it for us (ex: Raiders blowing a 21-3 lead.)

I don’t know what to expect Thursday vs the Steelers, but for the next four days, we have the ability to actually feel good about our football team. This does not happen often recently, so when you see a Browns’ fan celebrating, leave them be and let them enjoy it. They will beat themselves up enough if they lose Thursday.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.