THEY START GATHERING four hours before the gates open. It’s a muggy Friday morning in late July, with thunder forecast for the afternoon, but the fans lining up outside the back entrance to the Cleveland Browns’ training facility in Berea, Ohio, will not be deterred. They’re here, on a leafy suburban street six weeks before the regular season, for the Browns’ first public day of training camp, which is free each year.
It’s an eclectic procession waiting to enter — some large and serious men wearing jowly rubber dog masks, families in matching orange football helmets, elderly couples with tributes to Paul Brown etched on their forearms like initials carved in wood — yet in their sense of affiliation and purpose, they’re perfectly, intimidatingly aligned.
“You got a knife?” a man named AJ asks me. He adjusts his orange-and-white leather vest, courtesy of the Browns of Columbus, a club of about 400 fans. We’re standing behind the bleachers that overlook the Browns’ practice field, on a section of grass the Browns have repurposed into a festival ground. There are bounce houses, food trucks and even a dog adoption area called “the Puppy Pound.” The vibe is part Midwest county fair, part big-tent revival. AJ has to raise his voice over the music. “Cut it,” he says, pointing at his forearm. “You’re going to see orange and brown.”
Back outside, a defensive-end-sized man named Big D sits behind a fold-out table on the sidewalk, a tub of wares by his feet — orange-and-brown plastic dog chains with bulky dog-bone pendants and serving-plate-sized tags reading “DAWG.” He sells the biggest chains for $20. He says he has been selling chains outside games and practices for 40 years. And business has been good. “I’ve raised six kids just doing this,” he says. He’s telling me that he plans to set up on East 9th Street before the Browns’ lone home preseason game next month when, from somewhere down the line, a fan with a foghorn voice calls out, “Here we go, Brownies, here we go!” As one, the entire congregation — Big D included — stops what it’s doing and starts barking. The noise shakes the leaves.
CLEVELAND IS A historic American sports town, and the Browns are its most important sports institution, a picture of how much more than football a football team can mean to a place. The organization is active in the community; according to a report commissioned by Jimmy and Dee Haslam, who purchased the Browns in 2012, the team has invested more than $150 million into Northeast Ohio since 2014. Browns fans, meanwhile, remain the most loyal in sports — a distinction so broadly recognized as to qualify as cliché. “They could put an empty orange helmet on the 50-yard line and 50,000 people would pay 10 or 20 bucks to go stare at it,” says Terry Pluto, longtime local sports columnist and author of several books about the Browns.
But Browns fans are also bone tired. The first night of training camp, I meet Dave Ketterer at the Clevelander Bar and Grill in downtown Cleveland. Ketterer is an IT director at a law firm downtown. He is, like every person I talked to for this story, a lifelong Browns fan. But recently, he had lost the stomach for it. “I can’t do it to myself anymore,” he tells me over a beer. “Every Sunday is just misery.”
If you’ve been following the Browns even casually over the past few seasons, you can understand why. Cleveland has been pro football’s worst team for more than three decades. The Browns are 180-335-1 since 1990, equating to a .350 win percentage, which, according to ESPN Research, is the worst in the league during that time. They’ve not strung together two consecutive winning seasons since the 1980s. This century, they made the playoffs in 2023, 2020 and 2002, and went 10-6 in 2007, but over an especially cursed stretch between 2016 and 2017, they went 1-31. They’ve never appeared in a Super Bowl. Most fans chart the team’s history on a timeline of heartbreaks — The Fumble, The Drive, Red Right 88. Last year, the team took Cleveland’s relatively high hopes from a brief playoff run the season before, bottled them up, and shook them violently back in the city’s face, with a 3-14 record that felt somehow worse for being so familiar.
But it’s more than just losing. Over the past 30 years, the Browns have also started 42 quarterbacks. One was Deshaun Watson. In 2022, the Browns traded three future first-round draft picks, a future third-round pick, and two future fourth-round picks for Watson, before signing him to a five-year, $230 million contract, the largest guaranteed contract in NFL history. Watson finished the 2022 season with a passer rating of 79.1. Last year, with Watson under center, the Browns had the worst offense in the league. He’s rehabbing a torn Achilles. CBS Sports has called his acquisition “the single worst transaction in NFL history.”
Yet, it isn’t the move’s on-field failure that rankles fans — it’s the shame that radiates off it. From March 2021 to August 2022, 25 lawsuits were filed against Watson alleging sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct. One of those suits was dropped. He started his tenure with the Browns by serving an 11-game suspension for what the NFL labeled “predatory behavior.” “It polarized the town,” says Tony Grossi, an analyst for ESPN Cleveland. “I do know fans who did walk away” because of it, says Casey Kinnamon, staff writer for the Orange and Brown Report.
On top of all this, Haslam Sports Group began its push last winter to secure $1.2 billion from taxpayers in public funds for a dome and adjacent mixed-use development in suburban Brook Park. A political battle over the plan promptly ensued, with the city of Cleveland suing the group to try to stop it, and HSG suing in return. “Haslam Sports has sparked a bit of a civil war in this town,” Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne says. Brent Rossi, the Browns’ chief marketing officer, says the move to Brook Park is necessary for the Browns to provide “an unrivaled fan experience.”
The Browns, according to Rossi, have several organizational pillars. The first is “win.” The second is “fans.” “Every decision that we make as a team has the fans at the center of it,” Rossi says. “Every time we talk about an idea, the response is always, ‘Will that help elevate the fan experience?’ And really, there’s no better example than Brook Park.”
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation. City Hall spokesperson Tyler Sinclair has previously stated that the Brook Park move constitutes “a betrayal of the city and residents who have stood by the franchise for generations.”
Among fans, the conflict has become a source of division. Some support the move. “I’m pro-dome all day long,” says Dustin Kuck, co-host of the “Here We Go Brownies” podcast. Others, however, fear getting priced out, and bemoan what will be lost if the Browns leave downtown, where they’ve played — saved three very dark seasons in the late 90s — since 1946. Others do not think taxpayers should help fund the project. The Haslams are worth $14 billion, according to Forbes; earlier this summer, they purchased a $25 million mansion in North Palm Beach, Florida. Cleveland, meanwhile, has the highest rates of childhood poverty of any large city in the nation.
“The premature replacement of perfectly good sports facilities just to appease owners is a tremendously wasteful practice,” says Ken Silliman, who was the executive assistant in charge of development for former Mayor Michael White. Silliman helped secure public funds for the construction of Huntington Bank Field, which opened in 1999, but he opposes the Brook Park plan. “What other opportunities for public funding are foregone if you spend $1.2 billion on the Haslams?”
And so it is that Browns fans have been getting it from all angles. “I’m tired,” says Tim Rudnick, president of the North Royalton Browns Backers. “It sucks to suck.”
For still others, like Ketterer, the effect has been more spiritual. While we sit at the bar, someone beside us quotes a popular joke about the Browns from local comedian Mike Polk Jr., saying they operate “a factory of sadness.” Ketterer laughs. Then, he looks contemplatively into his pint. “It’s the constant pain,” he says, after a moment of searching. “Every year, it’s like getting kicked in the nuts with a golf shoe.”
What would seem the operative question surrounding the Browns heading into 2025, then — as the team continues its pitch for public funds and prepares for a new season that doesn’t figure to be more successful than the last — is how much more of this can Browns fans take? You see the effects chipping away at the edges: Attendance went from 610,295 (19th in the league) in 2023 to 541,808 (28th) in 2024.
But to doubt the Dawg Pound’s endurance — its resilience and raw nerve, its shared sense of history and community, commitment and good humor — is to misunderstand where that endurance derives from: what, at root, the most loyal fan base in sports is most loyal to.
WHEN THE BROWNS played their first season in 1946, Cleveland was a much different city. An abolitionists’ hub in the century prior, Cleveland had matured by the end of World War II into America’s seventh-largest city. It was a center of steel and oil production, iron processing and metals fabrication, a city of grand architecture and industry — one of the broad-shouldered Midwestern giants, a place possessed of history and relevance, a symbol of the guts with which a particular America was made.
Midcentury Cleveland was, more than anything else, however, a football town. The NFL was born 60 miles down I-77, in Canton. Some of the nation’s fiercest high school rivalries, such as that between Massillon and Canton, originated in the region, and minted many of Northeast Ohio’s most important local heroes.
In spite of this, for a time in 1946, Cleveland was left without a professional football team when the Rams, of the NFL, left for Los Angeles. But the Browns were on the way: Businessman Arthur B. McBride formed the team in 1944 as founding members of the All-America Football Conference, and Clevelanders rallied around them like a civic cause when they played their first game in 1946. Even though the Browns played in Cleveland Municipal Stadium — a cavernous, open-air, steel-and-concrete gladiator pit on the hostile shores of Lake Erie — every year the AAFC existed, the Browns were at the top or near it in attendance. The Browns transferred to the NFL in 1950, the year after the AAFC folded. They led that league in attendance, too.
They were also great. They won the AAFC league title every year of its existence in the 1940s. They won the NFL championship the first year they joined that league, and additional titles in 1954, 1955 and 1964, the latter behind freight train fullback Jim Brown. But, importantly, the Browns were also of and by Cleveland. When McBride first looked into forming a pro team in town, he tapped Massillon High School’s Paul Brown as coach. Brown was beloved by Ohioans — so much so that when McBride asked residents to vote on a name for the new team, they voted to name it after Brown. “The Browns were born out of the postwar flourishing of the American city,” says John Telich, a longtime sports anchor for Fox 8 Cleveland. And because Paul Brown “had his mitts all over getting the team assembled,” Telich says, the team “embodied so many things that are Cleveland.” Clevelanders saw in the Browns their favorite, most successful version of themselves.
It was perhaps for this reason that Clevelanders held even tighter to the Browns in the unsuccessful decades that followed. By 1980, America’s seventh-largest city had lost nearly 40 percent of its population. Unemployment and poverty had spread across the city as its steel and manufacturing industries moved to the suburbs, the Sunbelt, and overseas, leaving large, haunted blocks of closed steel mills and warehouses mournful in their wake. Urban renewal and an exodus to the suburbs had splintered the city’s sense of community and hindered its capacity to mend it. Racial tensions escalated. In 1978, Cleveland went into default, the first American city since the Great Depression to do so. Reputationally, the symbol of midcentury American muscle had faded into a sketch of abandoned buildings and sadly colored skies, a place that felt left behind. “America has only three cities,” goes the apocryphal-yet-poignant quote attributed to Tennessee Williams. “New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
Sports emerged as the city’s sole means of reclamation and rebuttal. The Muni Lot and the aging Cleveland Municipal Stadium provided sources of community amid the fracture and decline. Cleveland’s teams functioned as its standard bearers, repositories of hope, ways it reminded itself and the rest of the world what the city had been and what it once again could be. “Cleveland is a city that is overwhelmed by a desire to believe in something beyond what people outside of the place have ascribed to it,” Hanif Abdurraqib writes in “There’s Always This Year.” Cleveland’s teams facilitated this self-belief. Especially the Browns. When, in the 1980s, the Browns experienced a resurgence, Clevelanders rallied around them once again as if there was something far more critical than football at stake.
Clevelanders created the Dawg Pound during this time. Histories of the formation of the Dawg Pound differ, depending on the source. But it is broadly agreed that fans formally started it after witnessing Browns defensive backs Hanford Dixon and Frank Minnifield barking at their teammates on the practice field in 1985. Fans, for obvious reasons, barked back. Then, fans began wearing dog masks and dog chains and femur-sized dog-bone hats to games at old Municipal Stadium — most concentratedly, and with the most flagrancy and verve, in the bleachers behind the east end zone. Those bleachers became a caldron. Browns fans snuck costumes and contraband and beer into the bleachers — and also dog biscuits and batteries, which they threw at opposing players — and out of it clawed a new collective identity. The new identity gave expression to the true and unkillable traits for which Cleveland thought it could still be known. It was a mascot and a microcosm and an instrument. The city embraced it. “The Dawg Pound, the thing about it was, it was not a marketing tool,” local radio host and veteran Cavaliers broadcaster Mike Snyder says. “That’s what I always loved about it. It just kind of happened.”
Through the Dawg Pound, Cleveland minted its reputation as one of America’s most devout sports towns. Even better proof, however, would come 10 years later, when then-Browns owner Art Modell announced that he was relocating the Browns to Baltimore.
The motive, as always, was money. City-owned Cleveland Municipal opened in 1931. The Browns had been sharing it with the Indians since 1946. By 1995, the place was in dire need of either replacement or repair; it became known as “the Mistake by the Lake.” Modell, a silver-haired former advertising executive who purchased the Browns in 1961 — and who nursed certain nagging insecurities about his standing in town — was seeking public funds for renovations. He had been financing the stadium’s operating and capital improvement expenses since 1973. He was also a philanthropist and an involved member of the community. His team’s stadium was deteriorating. He thought those renovations were his due.
At a news conference in 1989, Modell proposed a publicly funded renovation plan that would have cost Cleveland $85 million. The news conference was well-attended by the media but snubbed by city leadership. That same year, as part of what would become known as the Gateway Project, that same leadership proposed creating a county-wide sin tax to raise $203 million for new stadiums for the Indians and the Cavaliers. Modell didn’t participate in Gateway, preferring his renovation plan. But that plan materialized slowly, and ultimately with less public funding than Modell wanted. By the time Cleveland announced its only partially funded renovation plan for the Browns, Modell was neither in the mood nor in the position to accept. The cost of upkeep at Cleveland Municipal had increased coterminously as the revenues it generated dropped. In 1995, Modell asked his wife to take out a loan to sign wide receiver Andre Rison.
By 1995, Modell was deep in debt. He was feeling unappreciated by Cleveland. Most importantly, he fielded a much more lucrative offer — from Baltimore. It consisted of a $50 million signing bonus, a $200 million publicly funded stadium, and the chance to play in that stadium rent-free for 30 years, in return for moving the Browns. In a letter sent to Mayor White in June 1995, Modell requested a moratorium on discussions with Cleveland about the renovations until after the football season. White’s office thought this was so Modell could focus on football, but really it was so he could focus on finalizing terms for the move to Baltimore. “We knew we were at risk,” Silliman says, but they thought that when they sat down with Modell by the end of the year that they would have a chance to respond to Baltimore’s offer. “What we did not know is that the Browns, over the late summer and early fall, were in secret negotiations with the governor and the Maryland State Authority.”
Modell made the surprise announcement that he decided to move the Browns in a news conference on a Monday afternoon in November, outside of Camden Yards. He stood at the lectern flanked by Baltimore and Maryland state officials. Gov. Parris N. Glendening waved a copy of Modell’s freshly signed lease in the air. “The Browns are now the Baltimore Browns, and we’re proud of it!” Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke said.
The words registered on Clevelanders’ TV screens like a gash in the Western sky. “That was something I could have never, ever dreamt,” says Snyder, who interviewed Modell shortly before Modell’s announcement. “It was like moving the terminal tower out of Cleveland. You were taking a cornerstone of our community. It was a gut punch. It made you feel sick.”
“I felt like I was losing family members,” said Rebecca Browand, a lifelong Browns fan from Strongsville, Ohio.
The gut punch, however, galvanized Cleveland. At once, business leaders pulled their ads from Browns games. Local TV and radio stations cancelled their Browns-related programs. City prosecutors brought cases against Modell in court, while state lawmakers passed what has become known as “the Modell law,” which sought to prevent professional sports teams from leaving Cleveland again. Mayor White, meanwhile, transformed himself into the city’s William Wallace. He held news conferences during Browns away games, instructed fans to petition the NFL to reject Modell’s move, and regularly visited the NFL’s corporate offices to do the same. “There may not be peace afterward, if we don’t keep the Browns,” he promised ominously to Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin.
Cleveland made clear it would make good on the promise. Across the city’s busiest intersections, residents strung banners and programmed digital message boards, reading variations of STOP ART MODELL. Fans organized demonstrations, including the Drew Carey-emceed Save our Browns rally at Huntington Park before the Steelers played the Browns in Cleveland. Two weeks before, a caravan of buses and cars traveled from Cleveland to Pittsburgh for a rally outside a Browns-Steelers game. One fan, John “Big Dawg” Thompson, testified tearfully before Congress. Fans organized letter- and fax-writing campaigns. They flooded the NFL’s corporate headquarters with faxes. “I set my alarm to every two hours,” says Dan Fuline, a former youth football coach in Manchester, Ohio. At the Browns’ final home game of 1995, emotions boiled over. Fans ripped apart the stadium with wrenches and hacksaws. They dumped the disarticulated pieces of wood onto the field.
At least partly because of fans’ outcry — and thanks in large part to the pressure applied by White — then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue convinced Modell to leave the Browns’ history and likeness in Cleveland, where they could be adopted by a future expansion team. Tagliabue delivered Cleveland that new expansion franchise in 1999. The team was received rapturously. At the team’s first practice in its new stadium, 30,000 people showed up.
Fans haven’t stopped showing up. After the Browns went 1-31, and on the heels of an 0-16 season, fans responded by organizing them a parade. In 2023, sportswriters for USA Today ranked Browns fans the best fans in all of football, still.
BY 2023, HOWEVER, fissures within the fan base were already formed. Fans were divided over the Watson move. They were exhausted from the losing; whatever exciting seasons the Browns mustered were followed by returns to inconsequence. In that USA Today ranking, the entry for Browns fans read: “Being a Browns fan is what it must feel like getting a grand jury subpoena, except every week.”
Over the summer, I connected with Rossi and Renee Harvey, the Browns’ vice president of community impact. In separate conversations, they described to me an organization operationally and philosophically committed to the caretaking of its relationship with fans. Harvey shared that through its community foundation, the Browns have worked over the past several years with school districts and nonprofits across Northeast Ohio to do things such as reduce chronic absenteeism in school, provide formerly incarcerated Ohioans with job training, and increase participation in youth football. Though in 2024, the city council criticized the team for its $30,000 contribution to the Cleveland Muny Football League, compared with the council’s $160,000.
In April, the Browns organized a free concert in Huntington Bank Field for season-ticket holders. They got Journey to headline. A watch party for the draft on the big screen followed. “We certainly don’t take our amazing fan base for granted,” Harvey says.
The Browns are cognizant, as well, of how hard their fans have had it over the years. “They’ve been loyal, they’ve been passionate. They’ve been dedicated through the ups and downs,” Rossi says. This is one reason, according to Rossi, the Browns take so seriously their first “organizational pillar,” which is winning. “It was disappointing last season, but that is 100% always the motivation. Our ownership group wants to win so badly for the fans because they deserve it.”
But the stress of the Dawg Pound is varied. And the Browns have, in recent years, exacerbated it in ways that go beyond losing, including most recently the Brook Park project, which, to some, has felt like insult to injury.
The most salient issue with the Brook Park project is money. When we spoke, Rossi cited as among the Browns’ foremost inspirations for wanting to build a dome in Brook Park the potential for the Browns to throw more non-football-related events, such as concerts, and to create other revenue streams inside and outside the stadium, which the Browns believe will lift all boats. Often in pitches for publicly funded stadium projects, teams will trumpet the potential wide-ranging economic benefit of new development as the reason taxpayers should support it. The Browns are pitching Brook Park in much the same way. “When you’ve got a hundred, 150 events and you have 50,000 people coming from out of town, where do you think those people are going to stay?” Rossi said. “Some might stay in Brook Park, but the vast majority are probably going to stay in Cleveland. So, we see this as this massive economic driver for all of Northeast Ohio.” On the team’s website, the Browns have suggested a domed stadium in Brook Park can attract “up to an additional 1.5 million visitors” per year. According to Rossi, the tax revenues generated from all of this increased economic activity will pay back “the entire public sector contribution” for the project.
The Browns have already secured $600 million for the project from the state. This is from the state’s pool of unclaimed funds, which are money and assets not used for a while, such as bank accounts, rent deposits, uncashed checks, or undelivered stock certificates, according to the state of Ohio’s website. And when the Brook Park project starts collecting tax revenue, the money will not go back into the unclaimed funds reserve — where they can be claimed again by residents — but rather into the state’s general fund, where they can be used for anything, including more stadiums.
The rest of the public contribution will need to come from tax increases — including a sin tax, which will have to be approved by voters — as well as new bonds, which the Browns want the county to not only issue but also back, meaning the county will be on the hook for them if revenues fall short. “We’ve said no,” says Ronayne, the county executive. “We’re going to continue to hold the line under the premise that this is a bad idea.” Earlier this year, nonpartisan budget analysts with the state reviewed the Browns’ revenue projections for Brook Park — the amount of money the Browns believe the project will generate each year from events and tourism. The analysts found the numbers “may be overly optimistic”; the projections forecast more visitors than other nearby domes in Detroit, Minneapolis and Indianapolis annually receive. And there are only so many Taylor Swift concerts a 70,000-seat stadium reasonably can hold.
“Gross. I feel slimy. I feel complicit,” says Jim Sammon, a local lawyer and third-generation Browns season-ticket holder, when I asked him how this has made him feel. “The way they moved, the way that they’re moving again … Deshaun Watson, they literally destroyed the future of the team. … It’s just gross.” His grandfather, Marty, was one of the first people in Cleveland to buy season tickets for the Browns in 1946; he literally died supporting the team, of a heart attack in his seats. According to his obituary, a priest seated nearby administered the last rites. If the Browns move to Brook Park, Jim said, he’s not likely to renew his season tickets at the new stadium, especially if the Browns charge more for personal seat licenses, which is standard practice. “Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” he says.
Some fans are dismissive of such criticism. Before training camp, I spoke with Ray Prisby, famous in Cleveland for the Browns’ memorabilia he has collected over the years. We met inside a kind of mobile museum he set up outside. Framed, game-worn Jim Brown jerseys hang beside signed and worn Lou Groza cleats. “Since we’ve been back, we’ve been perpetual losers,” he says. “We’ve gotten used to losing and complaining. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. So, fans selling their season tickets? Dah, dah, dah. It’s all part of the losing.”
Everybody, however, admits to being at least annoyed by all this. “I love the owner,” Kuck told me. “But I think last year Browns fans were kind of like, ‘OK, it’s time to get this right.'”
FOUR OR SO hours before the Browns’ final preseason matchup against the Rams in August, I walk the five blocks from my hotel to the Muni Lot. A long slab of asphalt situated gruffly between train tracks and a freeway, the Muni Lot has been the favored tailgating destination of Browns fans going back generations, long before the Dawg Pound.
On the far western side of the lot, closest to the stadium, outside of an old school bus that has been refurbished to resemble a snarling brown dog in an orange football helmet, I meet Scott Nunnari, president of the Muni Lot Browns Backers and the “Godfather of the Muni Lot.” Congenial, loquacious, in his mid-60s, Nunnari has a scruffy grey beard and a sea-captain’s face. In his floppy old Browns hat and faded Scott Player jersey, he looks a bit like how you might imagine Hemingway would have if he had chosen football over fishing.
We meet at the back entrance of the bus, which Scott owns. He gives me a tour; inside is a stove, a fridge, two bars and seats from the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Fans cycle in and out, some to secure drinks from Scott’s bar, others to give Scott a drink or a smoke, others just to say hi. Scott gives many hugs and takes several shots.
Outside, he props an elbow against the driver-side door. “I grew up with a family who’s always been Browns fans above everything else,” he says. “My mother had the parties before I had the parties. I was going to games when I was too young to know what a first down was.” I ask him if that’s why he remains a Browns fan — because it’s an ancestral thing. He shakes his head, gestures with his drink at the sweep of asphalt before us — the line of RVs stretching into the distance like a herd of elephants; the plumes of smoke rising from the many portable grills set up outside them; the kids in oversized Browns jerseys playing cornhole between the RVs and the grills. It’s overcast, but slowly, the sun is coming out, and the music, smoke and sun make the air feel electric and swimmy. I recognize several fans I had met weeks earlier, at training camp. Everyone seems to know each other. It feels like a family reunion. The stadium controversy, Deshaun Watson, last season’s 3-14 record, the seasons that had been even worse before it — it all feels very far away.
To our right, the hard grey towers of downtown loom; from our left, a breeze lifts off Lake Erie.
“The reason I’m a Browns fan is because I’m a fan of my town,” Scott says. “I was born and raised here. I’m a Cleveland fan, and most of the people here, they’re a fan of their town.”
This, he suggests, is where the Dawg Pound’s endurance stems from. It isn’t loyalty to the Browns; it’s loyalty to — and genuine love for — the community the Browns helped create and represent. “I really believe this,” Scott says. “The Browns sucking made us better as a group. You got people you know are loyal because if they’re following this team, they’re doing it because they’re enjoying their time here.”
“The Browns are one of the most important things in my life,” says Giovanni Castelli, who goes by “Pappy.” He’s with a fan named Alfredo, a firefighter with the city, who goes by “Scumbag.” The lot is filling up now, not like it will be for the home opener, but enough to fill the air with interesting smells and the feel of community and colorful marching band sounds. “And I’ll tell you,” Castelli says after taking a drink, “it’s not because they’re good. … The Browns are the vehicle to get us here. We’ve created everything else.”
OF COURSE, THERE’S still football to be played. I spoke with many, many Browns fans this summer. All regard highly the Browns’ civic and communal values. But so, too, did most profess to keep lit in their mind a cradled flame of an idea: What if the Browns were good?
This point, turns out, is one thing the Dawg Pound is really in sync about: winning would change everything.
Especially one day winning a Super Bowl.
“It would be the greatest thing I would ever witness,” Becca Browand said.
Jerome Baker, a Browns linebacker and Cleveland native, remembers when the Cavaliers won their title in 2016. “The excitement … the energy. Times that by, let’s just say, a hundred,” he says during training camp. “That’s what it’s going to feel like when we go out there and win games.”
“There will be no bigger parade in any city,” Rossi says, “than when the Browns win the Super Bowl.”
“A Browns Super Bowl,” Nunnari starts, but then he trails off, looking dreamily into the distance. “I hope I’m alive to see it.”
Then he goes off, retrieved by the party. The lot is filling up. More old friends are asking to see the bus.