The Cleveland Browns should be rooting for the Cavs to complete their championship run on Sunday, since it would benefit them to see the title drought end in Cleveland.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have earned their shot to win the first championship in that franchise’s history and the first championship in professional sports in Cleveland since the Browns won the NFL Championship against the Baltimore Colts in 1964.
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Not only would the Cavs winning a championship be historic for their own sake and the region as a whole, but they would also be the first team in NBA Finals history to come back from 3-1 deficit to do it and the first team to be down 3-1 in a playoff series and come back and win with games five and seven on the road.
Of course they couldn’t make it easy.
If the Cavs can pull off this monumental feat, it would be good for the Browns as well. The collective frustration of this region when it comes to professional sports manifests itself in the worst ways possible, which impacts its teams and athletes.
And Cleveland is a football city, first and foremost. The Browns come first even if when they don’t deserve it, which only compounds the problem.
The Cavs winning a title doesn’t make the past 20 years of awful football in Cleveland acceptable. The Browns still should feel the need to fight to earn this city’s fandom. However, the Cavs winning a championship (or Indians for that matter) would reduce the pressure on a powder keg of fan frustration that grows by the year.
A frustration that is stoked by certain members of the media will use it to their benefit. Just like how television networks have the montage of Cleveland sports misery cued up and ready at a moment’s notice, some in the media will hit on the same tropes to keep a segment of population clicking, reading, watching and listening.
The stereotypical fan goes through the same cycle with the Browns every year. They convince themselves this year will be different, the Browns can be headed in the right direction, ascribing impossible expectations to players that only Joe Thomas has been able to reach to this point. And even Thomas finds himself in the cross-hairs at times.
The season actually starts, the team falls far short of expectations (and is often downright bad) and the players that were supposed to save the franchise don’t. Whether fans turn on those players or excuse their inability to reach those heights becomes the discussion that takes over the season.
When the season is officially lost, the discussion turns to the next batch of players that are destined to save the Browns while trying to create a big enough mob to storm Berea with torches and pitchforks. Then the cycle repeats.
That cycle can turn make the normally rational irrational and the normally irrational insufferable.
This problem becomes bad enough where fans turn what should be a home field advantage into a place to vent frustration and often boo the players on the field because the organization isn’t playing the guy they want or they’re frustrated the team has been bad since the team came back in 1999, as if the current players on the roster were responsible.
Make no mistake, the team has taken advantage of the fans and the blank check worth of support for decades. The fans deserve better and the team owes them that. It’s also a fan’s right to boo, even though it does nothing to improve the situation.
That negative aura in Cleveland Browns Stadium impacts the team just as the incredible environment for game six of the finals at the Q was an enormous benefit for the Cavs Thursday night.
Home field advantage should mean little in the NFL. Teams don’t go on extended road trips and there are only so many dramatic changes in climate that would have much of an impact.
It’s not like a west coast swing in baseball or the ‘Texas Triangle’ in the NBA, where it’s weeks away from home at a time, potentially getting to the next hotel in the wee hours of the morning. Even with chartered flights and top flight hotel accommodations, it takes a toll.
Nevertheless, good NFL teams tend to play well at home and have more difficulty on the road. That goes beyond a difference of a few degrees or a strong breeze.
When the Browns are competitive or winning, there’s no better fan base, but when something goes wrong and as many 70,000 sphincters collectively clench at once. That almost clinical Cleveland psychosis takes hold. It starts with hoping it won’t happen this time, then transitions to ‘here we go again’. Finally, depending on the fan, that goes to a sad, desperate place or an angry one. Players and teams in general feel it.
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It’s no different from how movies can manipulate how a person feels in a given moment, if done correctly. Using music, sound, light, etc. to impact how the audience feels at a given moment.
The Browns are bad and need to get substantially better. But maybe, just maybe the Cavs winning a title would at least alleviate some of the angst fans have when it comes to their teams and especially the Browns. They at least have one championship to enjoy and don’t always feel the need to that familiar downward spiral on Sunday afternoons.
The default setting may not be the stadium wide panic attack when things get tight. There might be a hair more patience when it comes to the team and what it’s doing to try to improve.
That drop in pressure, frustration should benefit the current players, especially the ones that just got here in April. They still have to prove themselves and produce on the field, but they don’t have to take on the overwhelming pressures of curing this city’s sports woes.
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Hopefully the Cavs go out and win game seven Sunday night; for themselves and then for the city of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. It would be great for its own sake. The Browns should be rooting for the Cavs to win as much as anyone else, because it may just make their jobs easier. If nothing else, it will spare everyone from the montage of misery in December.