By Bethany Chambers | Digital Operations Manager
Dear Rams Fans,
Go ahead, let it out. You feel hurt. You’ve been betrayed. Your team is moving for sunnier pastures and warmer waters. Forget all the history you have, The Greatest Show on Turf, the Super Bowl victory, the agony at the feet of Adam Vinatieri.
The logo you once wore with pride — “This is my team.” — now means something much worse, a symbol of a traitorous owner who would pick a stadium over the people in it, a local boy blinded by glitzy new digs into selling out the very friends who filled his old dome every Sunday for 20 years.
We get it. We were once in the seat you are in, watching as our heart was torn out leaving a giant concrete void in the center of our city.
Art Modell opted to relocate the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in 1995 without so much as waiting for the citizens to vote to remodel Cleveland Stadium, much as Stan Kroenke lied to you about his intention to stay.
The unfaithfulness hurts just as much as the upheaval.
Ask the fans in Anaheim who mourned the Rams’ move out your way in ’94. They know what it feels like to be left with just baseball and hockey (which many of you likely don’t consider a sport).
But here’s where we have some advice for you that differs from conventional wisdom: Don’t fight it, and don’t try to get another team. It doesn’t work. Cleveland filed an injunction to keep the team in the city and season ticket holders banded together to file lawsuits, much like the one filed by your fellow fans just yesterday.
You know what we got from it? The Cleveland Browns name, and nothing else. It was an empty win. Is that really what you want? A Rams name that actually started here in Cleveland in the 1930s? We didn’t think so.
An expansion team won’t replace the champions you lost. On the contrary, it will be like getting a Marc Bulger for a prime Kurt Warner. We went from legendary teams led by Otto Graham and Jim Brown and Bernie Kosar to a long list of players as unmemorable as they were unhappy. We made a deal with the devil to get an expansion team. The price we paid? To start every season with a new 22-year-old quarterback and Draft Day as our Super Bowl.
Just as Kroenke will have the equivalent of a big new house in Inglewood with no furniture, a new team for St. Louis will be a shiny new jersey without the heart. You’re better off if you keep your memories…and start watching hockey.
Yours in defeat,
Cleveland Browns Fans
