Nation Obsessed

If the Cubs are the nation’s “lovable losers”, than the Cleveland Browns are the polar opposite. For a franchise whose history rivals any in professional football, the modern incarnation hasn’t even lived up to its late 20^th Century tradition of collapsing on the brink of achieving. In fact, the new Browns haven’t even had the opportunity to throw away a conference or Super Bowl championship, having only reached the playoffs on one occasion in the 15 seasons since returning from their post-Modell exile.

Yet for some reason it is Cleveland’s other franchise, the MLB’s Indians, who are saddled with the bane of the city’s frustrations, being labeled “underachievers” with an ownership group unwilling to make the investments necessary to compete for a World Series title.

I hate to say this makes Cleveland deserving of its trials and tribulations in the world of professional sports, but it sure does make it hard to defend my fellow fans.

Quick comparison:

Both teams had coaching vacancies this past offseason. The Indians went out and hired Terry Francona, a two-time World Series champion manager. The Browns? Rob Chudzinski, a first-time head coach who just five years earlier had been fired by those same Browns from his position as offensive coordinator.

Which of those franchises made the “commitment to winning” more clearly in their hire?

As I mentioned earlier, the Browns have had just a single playoff appearance in 15 seasons since returning to the NFL in 1999. They have had just two winning seasons and have not had a single postseason victory.

Even when you exclude the period of success had by the Indians in the 90’s under owner Richard Jacobs, the Indians have during that same period reached the playoffs twice under the ownership of the Dolans family, finishing .500 or better three times. In fact, the Indians have been in contention (including 2013) in the 2^nd half a full 8 times since the return of the Browns to Cleveland. Their neighbors on the gridiron, meanwhile, have been out of the playoff race by November in all but three seasons since their resurrection.

There is no doubting that baseball in Cleveland is a frustrating fan experience. The annual rite of seeing former stars lead other teams to division and league pennants is something unique to Northeast Ohio and obviously painful for the ardent fan to endure. But at the same time, the Indians do seem to produce those stars on a fairly regular basis, a claim the Browns could never make with a straight face. So why trust the Browns front office (no track record) and not an Indians staff that has done quite a bit despite far more limited resources (hey, even the Jimenez trade might work out)?

Still, I hesitate to say that this illogical clinging to Cleveland’s football team at the expense of its baseball franchise is peculiar to the city on the lake. In fact, I think Cleveland is no different in this respect from any other city in our increasingly football-crazed city.

Cleveland’s obsession with the Browns is a symptom of the nation’s obsession with football. High school football, college football, NFL football, even Arena league and Canadian football: if it involves goalposts, helmets, shoulder pads, and severe concussions then we are willing to put everything aside to watch it each and every chance we get.

Today the Indians blew a golden opportunity to potentially pull into a tie for the final AL Wild Card spot with just three weeks left in the season. It was a beautiful and sunny Sunday afternoon in Cleveland with an exciting young pitcher taking the mound for what could be his final start of the year. What did the Indians draw? 13,317

At the same time, on the other side of town, 71,513 fans watched the Browns play one of the most ugly games of football games possible in an opening week loss to the Dolphins.

Obviously its football and opening week so you would expect the Browns to draw a sellout, as do the Indians on their opening day each spring. But consider this: the Browns drew nearly 25,000 last month to a PRACTICE.

To quote Allen Iverson: “I mean listen, we're sitting here talking about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, but we're talking about practice.”

Not even a preseason game, this was a practice. And it wasn’t just in Cleveland: the Chicago Bears drew nearly 30,000 to Soldier Field and the Packers drew a whopping 63,000 to Lambeau Field. Keep in mind, Green Bay is home to just 104,000 people. While I know there are many from outside the city who come to events such as the open practice (forgetting for a moment that traveling an hour-plus to watch a practice only furthers my point), that means that 63% of the city’s population came to watch a team run through drills.

Baseball is our national pastime and while I don’t want to sound like a traditionalist and go into a treatise on how we’ve lost our way in that respect, football is a demon that is taking our great country down a dangerous road.

The obsession with football is symptomatic of a general disregard in this country for human health and safety.

From our inability to realize the dangers of gun proliferation to our obsession with foreign wars, we seem to have lost that amongst our founding fathers’ belief in the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, it was life that they deliberately chose to be the leadoff hitter.

Late last month the NFL reached a tentative $765 million settlement with a group of 18,000 former players to compensate them for long-term injuries and wrongful deaths that have been shown to be the result of playing football for a living.

$765 million. Let that settle in.

While the settlement did not require the NFL to admit that it had been negligent or had committed any wrongdoing, it did show that the league recognizes the existential danger head injuries poses to the game of football and subsequently, to the billions of dollars the game has been able to generate.

But while the settlement essentially demonstrates that football is unreasonably dangerous by its very nature, we as a nation did not care one bit when the games returned a few days later.

After all, fans of football rarely have to deal with the adverse effects of the game themselves, so why should they care that the game is leaving its stars resigned to a life of chronic pain, severe depression, and a general inability to live normally?

We need to take a step back collectively and reassess how greatly we as a society value human life. Forget the “right to life” movement, a movement which inexplicably places more value on protecting the rights of unborn humans than the rights of those of us already here, we need a “right to live a normal life” movement.

Soldiers have a right to be able to get the care they need when they return from the wars we put them in. That shouldn’t be a debate.

All of us have the right to live free from fear of being shot up at the mall, the movie theater, at school, or at work. Again, that shouldn’t be a debate and if the solution means a few more hassles for hunters then so be it.

And while all of us have the right to enjoy the entertainment professional sports can provide, we need to recognize the competing right that professional athletes have to do their job without being subject to potential life-long injuries.

Respect for life isn’t manifested when we “ooh” and “aah” over a big hit or clap when an injured player is being carried off the field. Rather, respect for life manifests itself in those of us who recognize that danger and keep our children from getting started in a game that is increasingly being shown to be a ruthless and unreasonably dangerous endeavor.

Over time, I do believe that we will begin to rectify our obsession with football. Parents will begin to push their children away from the game and over time the NFL will become less and less enticing from a fan’s perspective.

But what I hope is that it doesn’t take that. Instead, I would hope we recognize that this very process of “making the game safer” and the boisterous objections many fans have made to it, prove the very existence of an obsession with violence and a general disregard for individual safety of which the nation’s love of football is but a mere symptom.

Once we do come to respect life and realize the dangers of football, the good news is that we have something to fall back on. After all, baseball is still our national pastime and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.