Curtain Call - The Browns of Omelas

Do me a favor - imagine for a moment that it’s the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement is in full swing, dividing the nation between those in favor of integration and assholes. The Beatles are in the midst of one of the most productive decades in music history. And the Cleveland Browns are one of the single most successful NFL franchises in existence.

Cleveland hadn’t even been an NFL franchise originally, starting instead in the All-American Football Conference: a 1946 upstart league meant to compete with the increasingly popular NFL (the 3rd such attempt that decade after the United States Football League and the Trans-America Football League). Thing is that it was hard for the league to complete with the NFL because there was hardly any competition within the league. What I mean by that is that Cleveland quickly established itself as the top club in the league - they won the Western Division with a 12-2 record, three games clear of their closest competition; and in the first ever AAFC championship they got the last word in a tight 14-9 win over the New York Football Yankees.

And then they won the next three championships as well!

In fact, the only team to ever win an AAFC title was the Cleveland Browns. Though their point differential shrank slightly every year, suggesting that the league was catching up to some extent, they continued to end up on top year after year with a 52-4-3 record through their first four years to go with all four championships. And then, after 1949, it was over - there would be no 1950 AAFC season.

But there would be a 1950 Cleveland Browns season.

While the AAFC had managed to put enough of a dent in the NFL’s pocketbooks to get their attention, the end result was a merger rather than any kind of defeat of their foe. Thankfully for Cleveland fans, their team was one of the three that would continue on under the newly named National-American Football League (which would go right back to NFL shortly thereafter). And despite the previous insistence of folks like Washington owner George Marshall who said in reference to the AAFC that "The worst team in our league could beat the best team in theirs", Cleveland ended up doing pretty well in their new settings.

That was now five straight championships for the Cleveland Browns under head coach Paul Brown between the two leagues that had hosted them. Brown, the namesake for the team, helped the team then reach five more consecutive NFL championships. Even if they lost the first 3 of those subsequent title games, they still pulled off a back-to-back pair at the end of that five year run. The Cleveland Browns had been in the NFL for six years, and after hearing from their new peers that they would become cellar-dwellers upon arrival, they had made the title game in every single one of those seasons and won half of them (again, in addition to the four consecutive AAFC titles prior to the leagues’ merger).

Given how hot of a commodity these Browns were, it’s not surprising that in the midst of this run their original owner decided to capitalize on the success by selling the team in 1953. Arthur “Mickey” McBride had made the money to start the Browns as a taxi-cab magnate, but it’s also worth mentioning that during this period information came out about his potential ties to organized crime in the Cleveland area, so this sale might not have exclusively been about realizing a profit on the investment. Either way, in 1953 control of the team changed over to a group of Cleveland businessmen (not legitimate businessmen as in potential mob guys, but truly legitimate businessmen as far as anyone can tell).

The reign of these owners lasted about as long as McBride’s, and in 1960 the team was in talks to change hands again. The league was about two years removed from the 1958 Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Football Giants, commonly cited as one of the major turning points for the overall popularity of the sport in the country. Beyond it’s popularity, the first-time NBC broadcast of the ‘58 Championship massively altered the outlook on how the sport could exist in the growing world of television. In New York, the site of that 1958 game, a young gun in the television and advertising game had a vision of what would be possible if only he could get into the ownership realm now before things really took off. In March of 1961, Art Modell eliminated the if and spent nearly $4 million to become the new principal owner of the Cleveland Browns.

Modell originally claimed that Paul Brown, still the coach at this point, would be able to maintain primary control over the direction and management of the team. Less than two years later, frustration between the two had boiled over to the point that Brown was fired from the team literally named after him. For the first but far from the last time, Art Modell was in hot water with the hometown fans. Thankfully, the team took care of defraying that tension just a couple years later. In a matchup that would later have a darkly beautiful poetry, the Browns absolutely throttled the Baltimore Colts just two days after Christmas 1964 to win the 1964 NFL Championship - their fourth since coming into the league just fifteen years ago.

The Cleveland Browns may have been without their original namesake, but they did maintain a certain commitment to the bit. The gentleman on the far left of those images is named Jim Brown, and he is one of a few players who has a legitimate claim to being the greatest running back of all time. Following this 1964 season, he will have accumulated over 10,000 rushing yards in just eight years. With the shorter seasons during this period that comes out to 103.5 rushing yards per game, the highest career mark ever, full stop. He’s even got an additional 2,171 receiving yards too.

After 1965, when the Browns make their 8th title game before losing a close one to the Green Bay Packers, Brown’s per game average has actually increased all the way up 104.3. He had lead the league in rushing eight of his first nine seasons; he had made the Pro-Bowl every season; he had been named an All-Pro every season; and he had racked up three MVP award along with three other top-three finishes. Even if the Browns came up short this year, there was every reason to believe that their window was still wide open as long as Brown was in the backfield. And even if their window had closed, they had already established themselves as one of the pre-eminent winning franchises in the NFL, an absolute top tier organization that any other team’s fanbase would have been right to be jealous of.

So here we are, in those 1960s, and the Cleveland Browns are indeed not just one of the very best football teams right now but one of the very best franchises to ever play the game of football. So how do the Browns go from this to being thought of as the dictionary definition of losers? Well, the first thing Cleveland lost was Brown.

Jim Brown’s very last NFL game was that championship loss to Green Bay. You could argue that the only reason that players like Emmitt Smith or Barry Sanders or Adrian Peterson even have an argument for their place in the all-time running back hierarchy is because Brown quit while he was ahead, not even playing for a full decade before hanging up his cleats for good.

So now there was now Brown in Cleveland either in the huddle or on the sideline. Both Jim and Paul had been there before Modell took over the team as owner, and both to some extent had overshadowed him. Which is understandable - it’s never a good thing if your owner is somehow the most prominent member of your organization. But according to writers working around the team, the fact that Modell was in charge of something that many fans still first and foremost associated with other bygone figures seemed to bother him. And that lack of prominence might have been a reason that things would, decades later, happen to end in the particular manner that they did.

The Browns did not turn into pumpkins over night - it was more of a “slowly, then all at once” situation. 1965 was their last trip to the title game ever as of writing this, but they still managed to make the playoffs in five of the next seven years. Then, in 1973, the worm turned - after only a single season up with a negative point differential (1956, sandwiched between two runs to the championship game), the Browns were outscored for four straight seasons while posting a previously unthinkable 23-31-2 record during that time.

After making it to the final week of the season for 6 years to start out their run in the NFL, they would end up going 7 years without even making it to the playoffs at all between divisional round losses in 1973 and 1980. If you were looking back to their most recent playoff win at this point, you’d have to go all the way back to 1969 (nice), and that drought would continue into the late 1980s.

Finally now you could imagine that what you were seeing was the beginnings of a turnaround led by quarterback Bernie Kosar. These Browns were far less dominant than their predecessors (the 1985 team won the division with a point differential of -7), but without a Brown to call their own in this era for the team, this penchant for late-game fireworks and stressing out their fans did at least afford them the luxury of an easy nickname: the Kardiac Kids.

The 1985 squad did suffer yet another first round exit, but in 1986 they finally managed to buck that trend - after a second straight division championship, they squared off against the New York Jets in the first round and finally, after almost two decades, managed to put on a winning show in the postseason for the Cleveland home crowd.

It feels interesting for the Jets to be their opponent in this moment, because in so many ways this Cleveland franchise, after by far the nadir of their existence, were still historically better than their opponent on this cold Saturday in January. This was the once-mighty Cleveland Browns we were talking about - a team who guaranteed their fans for 10 straight years from 1946-1955 at least a chance to watch a championship game if not a championship win (and who had still made 3 more trips since then). The New York Jets had played on the final week of the season exactly once in their only-slightly-shorter run at this point. But they won that game, which was sort-of known then and absolutely known later on as Super Bowl III.

Cleveland, meanwhile, had all of that success prior to the Super Bowl era. And Art Modell had been right about one thing - television broadcasts were going to come to define the NFL, and because of the outsize importance of the Super Bowl in that TV era, that success felt a lot more real to football fans in the 1980s. Part of that is also because many pro-football fans in the 1980s hadn’t been football fans during the Browns heyday. That was part of football history, sure, but not necessarily part of football.

For folks who had been fans then, it might have been jarring to see the extent to which Cleveland celebrated this first round win. Shouldn’t you all expect this of your team? Isn’t this what you’re supposed to do? Well, the good news is that they did take the time to savor it, because the next week they held a late lead in the 4th quarter when visiting QB John Elway decided to orchestrate a possession so efficiently deadly it’s become known as The Drive.

The positive momentum carried into the following season, at least - another playoff berth was secured, and another first round opponent was vanquished, this time the Colts of Indianapolis (put a pin in that). And their reward for this was another second round matchup against John Elway and the Broncos with another gutting ending summed up by just two words: The Fumble.

Some good news and bad news. The bad news is they lost a third conference championship to the Broncos in 1989. The good news is at least this one was a relative blowout without any lasting image seared into Cleveland’s retinas. Entering the 1990s, the Browns had become one of those teams that just could not win in the playoffs. Then they turned all the way into straight-up losers. The new coach, Bill Belichick, did not have a Hall of Fame quarterback at his disposal in the early-to-mid-’90s, and as such wasn’t able to accomplish much other than single one-and-done trip to the postseason in ‘94. And so entering the next season, Art Modell started to make moves.

Modell to this point had been battling with the city of Cleveland over public funds he wanted from them in order to help finance a new stadium. With Cleveland unwilling to budge on the matter, he had already been engaging in barely-secret dialogue with other prospective homes for his franchise in an attempt to at the very least exert leverage on northeast Ohio. One such city had been the home of the team that Cleveland had tasted it’s very last drop of ultimate success over all the way back in 1964, when they bludgeoned the Baltimore Colts 27-0. But since then, due to the city of Baltimore’s own cantankerous team owner Robert Irsay’s quest for tax dollars to supplement his own wealth, the Colts had been moved to Indianapolis.

Baltimore, in 1994 and 1995, did have football, but it was Canadian football during the CFL’s brief attempt at expansion into the States. To be clear, this was extremely successful Canadian football - the “Stallions” made it to the Grey Cup championship both years and even won in 1995 - and it was an extremely successful financial venture as well, with Baltimore crowds far outpacing the rest of the experimental American markets. But it was also relatively common knowledge that this was just as much of a proof of concept of the city’s appetite for a potential NFL team as much as it was for the CFL team they had.

Still, even with a nearby space ripe for football’s return, if the Browns could recapture some of that former glory that had been there at the beginning of their time in the league, Modell would be unable to make a move. He was well aware that it would be an unpopular decision under any circumstance, but trying to take this team away when they were fresh off a playoff berth and considered a dark horse team to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl that year for the first time ever - it would be suicidal. Unfortunately for Cleveland, a promising 3-1 start had devolved to 4-5 by mid-November when Modell made the fateful announcement: an agreement had been struck with the Maryland Sports Authority to move the Browns to Baltimore.

The 1995 season ticked on. The Browns record continued to plummet. Entering Week 16, they were enduring an L6 that had dropped them all the way to 4-10. Spoiler alert: they’ll finish off the season the following week in Jacksonville with yet another loss - longtime kicker Matt Stover will tie the game late, but the Jaguars will respond on the following drive with their own kick to break that tie and end the game. It’s worth mentioning that the “Duval” chant that Jaguars fans do, in reference to their location in Florida’s Duval County - not only did the Jaguars not exist the last time the Browns won a championship, but the city of Jacksonville still was not yet a part of Duval County until four years later. But that’s not the ending that Browns fans are likely to remember, and so it won’t be the one that we zoom in on. Instead, we’ll look back one week to their final home game - the last time that the Cleveland crowd would ever see these Cleveland Browns.

Football’s Hall of Fame is located in Canton, OH because the state has, from the beginning, held a central role in the history of the sport. As such, it feels incredibly appropriate that if the Browns must come to an end, they can do so at home against their in-state rivals: the Cincinnati Bengals. On December 17, 1995, the 6-8 Bengals come to face the 4-10 Browns as Cleveland looks to avoid a 7th consecutive loss so they can at least send the franchise out on as high of a note as they can manage given the circumstances.

The first quarter is a scoreless slog but Cleveland begins to pull away rapidly in the second as quarterback Vinny Testaverde throws a pair of touchdowns sandwiching offsetting field goals to give us a halftime score of Cleveland 17, Cincinnati 3. Those are Testaverde’s only touchdowns of the day, but kicker Matt Stover piles on three more field goals to make it a 26-3 laugher before the Bengals manage a garbage-time touchdown to make it 26-10.

Cincinnati will finish with the ball - Pepper Johnson, a linebacker who got his nickname supposedly because he used to put black pepper on his cornflakes will end up recording the final tackle in Browns history before he follows soon-to-be-deposed Browns head coach Bill Belichick up to New England to become a part of his coaching staff. But the game’s already long over by that point. Truthfully it’s been over since either the 2nd or 3rd of those Stover field goals, but the Browns did receive the ball back with about 6:51 to go in the 4th quarter prior to that final Bengals drive. And only one player touched the ball at all during that final series. Allow me to introduce you to Ricky Powers.

It is completely possible that you have never heard of Ricky Powers - he has three career games in the NFL, all in the waning moments of this 1995 Browns campaign, and his career production amounts to 51 yards rushing, 6 yards receiving, and 54 yards on three career kickoff returns. Remember those glory days in Cleveland, when Jim Brown was authoring one of the greatest halfback careers of all time by averaging 105.3 rushing yards per game for his career. In his final season, the 4th most productive for him by that metric, he averaged 110.3 - just a little more than two feet short of Powers’s entire career statistics. So again, it is fair to not know who Ricky Powers is.

But the thing is that plenty of Cleveland fans that day were far more familiar with him than you might think given the lack of on-field success. That’s because years earlier, Powers had authored one of the greatest high school careers in Ohio history just 40 miles away in Akron. His Buchtel High Griffins won back to back state championships in 1987 and 1988 as Powers gained 367 yards on the ground in just those two games. Even in a crowded landscape that included a future Heisman winner in Chris Weinke and future NFL running backs Robert Smith and Jerome Bettis, it was Powers that was named the all-Midwest Offensive Player of the Year.

It would have been easy for him to be overshadowed with that competition in high school - it unfortunately was easier for him to be overshadowed once he reached the college level as a Michigan Wolverine. His freshman year did see him set the freshman record for rushing yards, but his backfield partner-in-crime Jon Vaughn would outshine him by taking home a share of the Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year Award while also earning All-Big Ten honors. The next year, Powers stood out as the primary running back and topped 1,000 yards on the ground; but it was teammate and Heisman winner Desmond Howard who drew most of the attention both from defenses and the viewing public on Saturdays that year. For his final two seasons, he was again relegated to a running back committee in which it was his teammate (this time Tyrone Wheatley) and not him earning the All-Big Ten honors and Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year.

Powers finished his college career with just over 2,500 yards from scrimmage along with just over 2,500 yards on kick and punt returns for a prominent Michigan program, one that produced dozens of NFL Draftees during this period. He was not one of them. At the start of the 1994 season after graduating, the best he had been able to manage was a training camp invite with the nearby Detroit Lions, who would waive him before the start of the season. It wasn’t until the following season that he was able to at least his way onto a practice squad for these 1995 Cleveland Browns.

The one thing to know in sports - for the love of whatever God you worship, never say that “you’ve hit rock bottom”, or that “the only place to go is up”. Things can always get worse. The Cleveland Browns are proof positive of that. Nonetheless, Powers did manage to remain on the practice squad until late in the season, past that fateful November announcement that this would be the final Cleveland Browns season at least for some time. He’s here as a backup, even now being outshone by another partner in the backfield. This time it’s Earnest Byner, who today against the Bengals has racked up 157 yards from scrimmage. But now, with the game well out of hand and needing to kill the clock one last time in front of the Dawg pound, Bill Belichik sends out Ricky Powers with the offense.

On first down, he rushes for 2 yards. A false start by tight end Harold Bishop moves Cleveland back 5 yards, and on second down Powers picks up another 2. Then another 2 on third down, and yet another 2 on fourth down before Cleveland turns the ball over to the Bengals for their final pointless drive. Powers did his job - three minutes have ticked away on the scoreboard, and everyone is that much closer to reaching the end that none of them particularly wish to see but which is rapidly approaching them anyway.

Judging by the state of Cleveland Municipal Stadium by the end of this intra-state game, we can at least admit that Modell might have been right about its long term viability. By the final whistle, fans are already tearing it apart. Some are doing so in anger, looking for something to hurl onto the field not so much to hit something as to show that they wish they could. Some, though, are probably just intentionally doing what Powers has just unintentionally done - carved out a little piece of Browns history.

Powers will record a few more touches the following week in that trip to Jacksonville - in fact, it will produce just about the only good picture of Powers in a Browns uniform during a game that I was able to find. There’s something about this image, the simple clean cut uniforms of the Browns that recall football’s history juxtaposed against the teal and snarling cat of the Jaguars that just screams 1990s - it makes their ultimate fate feel almost pre-ordained by this point. How could a franchise so tied to the past, so mired in shit in the present, ever hope to keep up in a league where this blue, cartoon jungle cat is what the league is pushing for instead? Hell, part of the reason that Baltimore - another one of the league’s old cities instrumental to its growth as a product - is still even available as a future home for these browns is because it was passed over in favor of Jacksonville and their feline counterparts in the NFC, the Carolina Panthers.

That will be the last time Ricky Powers ever steps onto an NFL field during the regular season. His professional football career will continue for a couple more years, but only with teams and leagues that' you’ve probably never heard of - the Spring Football League, which will last all of one season; the World League of Football over in Europe; and one final gasp of relevance to his home with the Regional Football League, where he returns to Ohio to play for the Cannons.

Every time one of these transactions occurs, Powers previous prominence in Summit County where he grew up means that he’s almost guaranteed at least a brief writeup in the Akron Beacon-Journal, the source for both of those previous headlines. This was the paper that a decade ago had made him just the third Junior in history to be named their Player of the Year amongst area high-schoolers. This is not what the ending was supposed to look like for Ricky Powers. I’d also hazard a guess that if you were someone who didn’t have to imagine the greatness of the Browns in the 1960s, who had either lived it or had that oral tradition passed down to you from the previous generation, the one who had seen one of the greatest beginnings any sports franchise has ever gotten to experience - this is probably not what the ending for those Cleveland Browns was supposed to look like either.

The Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens before the start of the next season. Much as when they moved from the AAFC to the NFL, this move is also marked by the team quickly entering the upper echelons of the league. In just their fourth season, the Ravens will ride a world-beating defense to Super Bowl XXXV; and a little over a decade later, they’ll ride the hot hand of Joe Flacco to a win in Super Bowl XLVII against the Browns’ old AAFC foes, the San Francisco 49ers. A new iteration of the Browns does begin play in 1999 as per the NFL’s promises, and they’ll eventually play in the same AFC North division as those Ravens. This guarantees a home-and-away pair of games every season, a series that Baltimore has dominated to this point with a 36-15 record at the time of writing this.

Powers traveled along with the Browns to their new home in Baltimore. In fact, I was able to find just as many images from camp of Powers practicing with the Ravens as I was able to find of him practicing with the Browns. Appropriately enough, it’s an image of him - a vestigial organ from the 50 years of Ohio history, the whole region wrapped up in one tidy little underperforming metaphor - being completely swallowed up by Ray Lewis, the vanguard of what the Baltimore Ravens would come to represent in the years that would follow. I don’t think you could craft a more perfect representation of the future laying waste to the past in order to create something new.

So about the title of this piece: if you are familiar with the author Ursula K. Leguin, you may have read a piece of hers that’s halfway between a sci-fi short story and a philosophical essay titled "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". In it, she details the existence of this glorious utopian city in the midst of some hedonistic festival that never really ends. It is presented as being, for all intents and purposes, a perfect city. The revelation that would lead someone to ever walk away from that city comes towards the end, when she presents a twist - within the dungeons of the city is a single child that is malnourished, deformed, desperate for affection or attention, a child that is living as tortured of a life as possible. And it is specifically the suffering of that child that makes everything else in Omelas that the reader has learned of possible. Every resident, like the reader, must eventually learn this truth and decide whether to remain in the city or become one of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

Let’s imagine something again. Imagine that you are a fan of the Baltimore Ravens. In under 30 years your team has already not just been to two Super Bowls (something multiple teams with much longer NFL tenures have failed to do) but won both of them. You’ve produced Hall of Famers on both sides of the ball, and not just Hall of Famers but inner-circle legends with claims to being the very greatest to ever play their position. And all you have to do is twice a year watch as your team faces the ghosts of their past, the fans who’s tears watered the soil from which your team has not just sprouted but flourished, and in all likelihood watch as you knock them senseless up and down the field.

Baltimore fans will say a lot of things to justify this relationship. They’ll be quick to point out that they, more than maybe any other fanbase east of Oakland, are familiar with the specific pain that Browns fans felt - as if that makes inflicting it any easier. They’ll mention that whereas they’ll never be able to officially claim the Colts records of the past that they bore witness to, at least the name and history of the Browns remained in Cleveland - as if that history has much to celebrate over the last half-century. I’ve heard all of these arguments - as a diehard Ravens fan, I’ve made most of these arguments.

The fact of the matter is that Art Modell stabbed a city in the back, just as Robert Irsay had 11 years prior. Art Modell is beloved here in Baltimore for this betrayal - in Cleveland, fans still hate him so much that after his passing, at least one fan very literally pissed on his grave.

This isn’t to sit around and heap blame on myself and everyone else rooting for the purple and black. We didn’t make the decision to move either the Browns or the Colts, and likely would have been content for everyone to stay put. But at one point or another, someone takes us away from the cheering Ravens crowd down to some dark dungeon, and shows us the beleaguered Browns lying there in agony. We are brought face to face with the reality that a non-zero amount of the suffering of others makes our joy possible. And in that moment, we do decide whether or not we can live with that. And for most of us, the answer is “yes”.

To the credit of Cleveland fans, they have rallied around their team through a pretty dismal first 25 years of existence back in town. The new Browns have made it to the playoffs just three times since their rebirth. Technically, this is still the team that Paul Brown coached, the team that Jim Brown dominated with, the team that along with Bernie Kosar damaged the cardiovascular health of an entire fanbase, the team that for three brief games gave Ricky Powers the totality of his NFL opportunity. All of that history, still belongs to them, and dozens or even hundreds of Ricky Powers will still come through. Hopefully, the next time that the Cleveland Browns make it to a title game, their first since the 1965 loss, by then there’s another Ricky Powers to make their own footnote.