Leadership doesn’t feel deep pain of fans

There was a time, in a stadium long ago, when Browns fans would consider a soaking parka a badge of honor as they shivered in miserable weather to watch Otto Graham, Jim Brown, Leroy Kelly, Brian Sipe, Bernie Kosar, and a host of other heroes take away the cold with how they played on the field.

Some of those fans would go to work the next day, their jacket still damp from sitting in Cleveland Stadium in rain or snow and hang it on a hook in the shop.

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“It was a great game, Fred,” the fan would say to his workmate. “I know you probably watched it on TV, but if you coulda been there, watching the way Bernie passed that ball to Webster Slaughter — I’m tellin’ ya, Fred. Nothin’ can keep me away when the Browns are playing like this.”

Now — now the Browns are 88-210 since returning to the NFL in 1999. The ghosts of the deceased Hall of Fame players on the Ring of Honor inside FirstEnergy Stadium must groan every Sunday. Surely, they were groaning on Nov. 19 when the current Browns disintegrated again in a 19-7 loss to the Jaguars. The wind chill was 29 degrees in onand-off snow showers.

The Browns are 0-10 this season, 1-25 under Hue Jackson and

4-43 dating back to the final five games in the 2014 season. It is the worst 47-game stretch for any team in the history of the NFL.

The depressing numbers only partially reflect the disconnect the current fans feel with this football team. Team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam want to win and so does EVP of Football Operations Sashi Brown and his brigade because they are competitive. But they are all outsiders. They do not identify with the Browns fans, and the fans sense it.

FirstEnergy Stadium was, maybe, 40 percent filled with witnesses to DeShone Kizer turning the ball over four times — three times in the final eight minutes of the fourth quarter to turn a 10-7 deficit into a 12-point stomping.

Why do I say there is a disconnect between the people running the Browns and the people paying to watch the Browns? Because Jimmy Haslam admitted he was unaware when he bought the team in 2012 of the passion the fans have — or had — about the Browns.

“Dee and I had no clue, but do we realize it and share in that pain now? Absolutely,” Haslam said in training camp this past summer. “I think Dee says that better than I do that we share in that pain, and we feel the responsibility for helping to erase that pain.”

The Browns big shots say the right things, but they still don’t get it. They don’t get it because they were not here when the former franchise was taken away from the fans. They didn’t see the tears fans shed after the final home game in 1995 because they weren’t part of it. They can’t be blamed for that, but that’s why the connection will never be there.

Brown was a 19-yearold student at Harvard in 1996 when Browns

fans bombarded the NFL with faxes demanding “No team, no peace” until Cleveland got another football team. What would he really know down deep in his soul how much this football team means to the fans?

Fans were so proud to keep “our name, our colors” when the former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced Cleveland would get an expansion team for the 1999 season, and now look how the stewards entrusted with that legacy have destroyed it.

There are still enough gray-haired fans around who remember what football was like here to keep the embers burning. But when Haslam and Brown say the Browns have “the greatest fans in the world,” it sounds like lip service. Just look at the stands in FirstEnergy Stadium.

Nobody younger than 37 has any recollection of when the Browns were worth watching. They haven’t been to the AFC championship since the 1989 season and they haven’t won a playoff game since 1994.

Haslam has no plans to move the Browns. But if that ever did happen, even if the old-timers did still have the energy to mount another “No team, no peace” campaign, they might tell their younger counterparts: “Don’t bother. It isn’t worth the heartbreak.”