Cleveland Browns
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Cleveland Browns, American professional gridiron football team based in Cleveland that plays in the American Football Conference (AFC) of the NFL. The Browns have won four NFL championships (1950, 1954–55, 1964) and four All-America Football Conference (AAFC) championships (1946–49).
The Browns were founded in 1946 and, as the result of a fan contest to choose their moniker, were named after their first head coach, Paul Brown, who was already a popular figure in Ohio, having coached the Ohio State University to a national collegiate football championship. The Browns were originally members of the AAFC and won the league title in each of the four years of the AAFC’s existence. The most notable of these title-winning teams was the 1948 squad, which went 15–0 to become the first undefeated team in organized professional football history.
The Browns were integrated into the NFL along with two other former AAFC teams in 1950, and—despite the prevailing expectations—they continued to have success in the new league. The Browns’ first game in the NFL was a 35–10 victory over the defending champion Philadelphia Eagles. The early years of Browns football were defined by the stellar play of quarterback Otto Graham and the innovative coaching of Brown, both future members of the Hall of Fame, who guided the team to 10 divisional titles in its first 10 years and seven championships between the two leagues. These early Browns teams also featured Lou (“The Toe”) Groza, a kicker and offensive lineman, and Marion Motley, a bruising running back who was one of the first African Americans to play professional football.
In 1957 Cleveland drafted Syracuse University running back Jim Brown, who would set every major NFL rushing record during his nine-year career and gain the status of possibly the greatest football player of all time. Cleveland’s plans to pair Brown in the backfield with another remarkable running back from Syracuse, Ernie Davis, winner of the 1961 Heisman Trophy, came to naught when Davis contracted leukemia and never played a game for the Browns. Nevertheless, Brown helped the team reach four league championship games, one of which they won (1964). Cleveland advanced to the NFL conference championship game twice in the five seasons after he retired in 1966, but the Browns entered into their first prolonged period of mediocrity in the 1970s, from which they emerged briefly in the 1980 season due to the frequent last-minute heroics of a team dubbed the Kardiac Kids.
Quarterback and Ohio native Bernie Kosar was drafted in 1985 and led the Browns to five appearances in the playoffs in his first five years in the league. The Browns lost two memorable AFC championship games to John Elway and the Denver Broncos during this span, each of which is remembered by Browns fans by an epithet describing the last-minute events responsible for Cleveland’s downfall: “The Drive” (1987) and “The Fumble” (1988). The mid-1980s also saw the advent of the Dawg Pound, a section of the end-zone bleachers of the team’s home stadium where a rowdy group of often-costumed fans sat, solidifying the image of Browns supporters as some of the most vocal and devoted fans in the NFL.
The 1990s brought much darker times for the Browns. Owner Art Modell—who had been losing money for years because of an unfavorable stadium lease with the city—orchestrated a move that sent the team to Baltimore in 1996, breaking the hearts of Cleveland’s many loyal fans and shocking many football observers nationwide. The NFL arranged to keep the Browns’ name, logo, colors, and history in Cleveland, and the league promised the city a new team in the near future. Cleveland was without a franchise until 1998, when local businessman Al Lerner purchased an expansion team that assumed the Browns’ name, uniforms, and history. The revived team began play in 1999.
The expansion Browns earned a playoff appearance in 2002 (a loss to the rival Pittsburgh Steelers) but soon became by many counts the worst franchise in the NFL, tallying 12 seasons with double-digit losses in the 14 years following that postseason berth while cycling through numerous management and coaching regimes in the process. The franchise bottomed out in 2017 by becoming the second team in NFL history (after the 2008 Detroit Lions) to finish a season with an 0–16 record.
After a mid-season coaching change, in 2018 the Browns underwent an encouraging turnaround behind the play of rookie quarterback Baker Mayfield, who led the team to its best record in over a decade (7–8–1). Two years later the team won 11 games and reached the playoffs for the first time in 18 years. They beat the Steelers in the wild card round—the Browns’ first playoff win since 1994—before falling to the Kansas City Chiefs. That turned out to be the high-water mark of the Mayfield era, as the team missed the playoffs in 2021 and the quarterback was traded in 2022.
In the same 2022 offseason the Browns traded for quarterback Deshaun Watson and signed him to the largest guaranteed contract in history. Although undeniably talented on the field, Watson arrived in Cleveland having missed the entire previous season and facing civil lawsuits from 22 women who accused him of sexual assault. In August the NFL fined Watson and suspended him for 11 games. The team struggled in his absence and missed the playoffs. In his second year with the Browns, Watson suffered a season-ending shoulder injury. Cleveland nevertheless managed to qualify for the playoffs, where they lost in the wild card round.