Reddit mentions of False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail

I can't defend the last decade, but the first regime had no chance after what the Panthers and Jags did with their new franchises. That immediate success caused the Texans and Browns to get completely shafted in the expansion process.

I'm not going to go into all the details since they are well documented all over the internet and in Terry Pluto's* book. Many Browns fans hate they guy because he is perceived as eternally pessimistic, but he has been dead on for the most part (most recently Manziel from the start), and deserves some level of respect regarding his editorial opinion.

If you aren't interested in the book, here is a decent recap of the whole expansion. Credit to /u/Brokewood.

/* I was 10 beers deep when I wrote this. I still think Grossi is a solid reporter.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

This was a great book on how the NFL screwed the expansion Browns and goes up to the 2004 season I think

Sure I mean there is a whole book written on it. And I should really say it wasn't just the draft, but the entire set of circumstances surrounding their return to the league.

The tl;dr is that the confirmation of Al Lerner's purchase of the team was heavily delayed in an attempt to drive up the price of the franchise. The NFL was hoping more bidders would come in last minute with better offers. That didn't happen and the final paperwork was signed less than a year before the first game of the season. To contrast, the Panthers and Jaguars had about 2 years to build their team. The Texans had over 3 years.

This doesn't just mean players, though that's a big part of it. It means front office. It means coaching. It means facilities. All of that was delayed. It was an impossible task. A lot of coaches saw this and didn't want to come to Cleveland. Before the roster had even been built! They just knew it would be the shit show that it was. So let's just call Chris Palmer's (first new HC) tenure a complete wash. It's not like he left things any better than they were when he get there though. How could he? Butch Davis inherited the same mess, and so on and so forth until present day.

The draft was fucked up because the rules in place for the Browns were far more strict than the rules put in place for the Jags and Panthers. The Browns were allowed to select fewer players from each individual team. Players on IR the year before were not excluded from the players made available to them. The Browns were given the scraps of the scraps to work with and it was compounded by the fact that the team was only started a few months before the fucking expansion draft even took place! Try putting together a competent scouting department and then actually scouting players in that amount of time.

I'm not saying the team hasn't been massively incompetent at the same time. Lots of bad draft picks. Trouble attracting free agents. A poor track record of treating injuries. Lots of things. But there are other incompetent organizations out there and they seem to figure it out every once in a while. I mean after 20 years you think would accidentally do a couple of things right! But the Browns have been trying to flip heads and have come up with tails for almost 20 years now. Like I can barely believe it's possible sometimes. They were certainly done no favors from the onset though.

The NFL set up the (new) Browns to fail. They had the bids for the new ownership in for years, but they sat on awarding an ownership group. Part of this was pure greed - they wanted to extort public money for stadiums by threatning other cities that their team would be moved to Cleveland instead of having an expansion team there.

The delay of awarding the ownership group (that they knew they were going to pick years earlier) meant that the team barely had any time to put together a front office, coaching staff, scouting staff, facilities, etc. The NFL helpfully suggested some of the worst FO staff in the history of the game to get them started. They also changed the expansion rules to be much less favorable to the new team than they were for Jacksonville or Carolina, putting the team way behind them in terms of assets.

I think a lot of that was also spite. The city of Cleveland embarassed them by mass protests, all sorts of bad press, dragging them in front of Congressional hearings and getting the word out about how the NFL fucked over a city because their incompetant crony needed one last bribe and cashout from the public coffer. Never has such a well-supported team with a good fanbase left their home.

The Browns fans were passionate enough that they were the first team in sports history to earn the right to retain their name and history after a move, and they forced the NFL's hand to get them back.

So the NFL got us back by fucking us over with expansion rules, waiting until the last possible second to award ownership, and "suggesting" some of the worst FO staff in the history of the game (since ownership didn't really have time to find their own).

Edit: More info http://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463795124

The NFL wants the Browns to be terrible since they came back. After reading this book I actually believe it.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

> You don't see conspiracies growing around the Jags, Browns, or even my Fins and there's a reason for that.

How about the basis of this book?

Basically when the Jags and Panthers joined the NFL and were immediately successful the other NFL owners were annoyed/frustrated that these newly formed teams could just come in and beat their established teams so quickly. When the Browns were re-forming in 99 the NFL owners then postponed the votes on who would be the new owner multiple times pushing the vote back over and over again even though it was almost a given that Lerner was going to be the guy. When the ownership was finally approved, the Browns ended up having the shortest amount of time to prepare a team out of any expansion in the history of the NFL by a pretty wide margin. There was also more about the teams making the expansion draft even harder on the Browns. Terry Pluto makes a pretty damn good case based on interviews and observations from people involved in the process that the '99 Browns were set up to struggle from the start. Everything after that has been the organization's fault of course but those first couple seasons were really hamstrung by the rest of the NFL ownership.

If you want to be super pissed, read False Start by Terry Pluto. It goes through the systematic fuckery that happened to Cleveland between '95 and '99.

We were paying the penance of the Jags and Panthers doing well. So the NFL super overreacted and fucked us. On purpose. That, and they wanted to wring as much blood money out of the new Cleveland owner as possible.

What pained me the most was the optimism that Pluto had looking forward (from the book's publishing date of 2004)... and a decade later, that optimism has yet to be validated. But this year's looking to be the right trend!

False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail

Anything that lasts this long is systemic.

• Browns were screwed in 1999. The Expansion draft was rigged so we didn't get any quality players (Ex: There were a number of retired players on the list of eligible draftees) The Owners didn't give a shit about Cleveland and didn't even want the city to have a team, but had to because the city won a lawsuit against the NFL. We were doomed from the get-go (read False Start: How The Browns Were Setup To Fail for more). Couch was arguably our best QB since '99 and he was ruined when he was drafted. This accounts for the first 4-5 years of shitty QBs.
  
  
• Our first owner Al Lerner, actually gave somewhat of a shit about the team (though he helped Modell move the team so fuck him). After he died in 2002 he left the team to his son Randy Lerner who didn't give a shit about the team. He only cared about his soccer team Aston Villa. However, he promised his father he wouldn't sell the team for 10 years. This promise sunk us into 10 years of bad ownership and therefore bad Front Offices, and thus bad QBs.
  
  
• Finally, he sold the team to Jimmy Haslam who does give a fuck about the Browns. Hopefully this means we'll actually get some competent people in management. This is the true first year of the Jimmy Haslem era as Banner/Chud were not his choices.
  
  TL;DR: Nobody cared enough about the Browns over the last 15 years to see them succeed. Hopefully with new ownership this will change.

How many of the orgs you're thinking about have Cleveland's history? After the team was stolen by Art (may he rot in Hell) Modell, the sorry excuse for a team that was dropped on us was set up in the very worst ways imaginable: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1886228884 (False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail by Terry Pluto -- I highly recommend it).

We're talking about gross mismanagement of this team since the freaking return. How do you turn things around after more than a decade and a half of stupid? This is probably the first time in the history of the NFL that an organization with zero roots, whose set-up was a cautionary tale (and certain aspects of which I believe were deliberately not repeated for the team that followed), that was managed into the dirt for 16 years by some of the biggest headcases in sports, actually gets turned around (if it ever happens).

[Edited for the expansion team reference.]

And for some added lemon juice on that paper cut, a local beat reporter wrote a great short book: False Start that shows the utter buttfuckery that was our return.

Edit: had to go the long way round to get a link instead of a screen shot: Here you go

The NFL made the agreement with the Browns because the city of Cleveland had a lease for the Browns to play in memorial stadium for a few more years. The NFL didn't want to go through the headache of of a team playing in an empty stadium without advertisers and an absolutely hostile market so they gave in and agreed to give Cleveland a new team (either expansion or relocation) upon building of a new stadium.

The NFL then fucked over the expansion Browns as punishment and yeah. There is a book about the process, I've never read, but it's quite detailed called False Start.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

I just ordered it. Here's the amazon link if anyone is interested: http://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884 Used copies are available for $4 with shipping.

Main factor, I guess, is time. There's some fantastic reading material on it, but I think the basis was that the Panthers and Jags had around 640 days to get ready for expansion; the Browns? They got 370. Think about how long this LA thing is taking, if, tomorrow, they just said "YEAH, FUCK IT; NEW TEAM IN LA NEXT YEAR, EXPANSION DRAFT, GET STARTED NOW, NEW OWNER WILL BE WHO THE FUCK CARES, GO GET IT." Like that.

False Start by Terry Pluto goes into it more in depth.

Here's also a great explanation from /u/Brokewood.

I enjoyed False Start by terry Pluto about the bungling of the new browns.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail

That's the Amazon link. You can get it in hard copy or Kindle.

Well if you want to feel really depressed you could always read Terry Pluto’s False Start: How the New Browns were set up to fail

http://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

Terry Pluto is THE Cleveland sports journalist and he wrote this book about the theory. Shrug.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know their history.

> It's like you've all forgotten that the only reason you (might) be relevant this year is because of the absurd amount of top 5 (if not #1 overall) draft picks

Trust me, no one has forgotten how shit the Browns have been since coming back in '99.

>you've been given year after year after year thanks to your constant sucking, until half you team is made of top 5 players.

Do you know how the NFL and the NFL draft works? This is kinda the crux of it. The worst teams get the highest draft picks so they have an opportunity to draft the best players. Seems like you might've been unaware of how that works.

Besides, the Browns were not exactly given a full deck to play with when they came back, so it's not like there was a chance of any kind of stability to help maintain a winning culture.

> It's like losing the 100 yard dash so badly that eventually the competitors give you a 70 yard head start, and then when you come in 5th place you start talking shit like you did it yourself.

Yeah, that is an absolutely terrible analogy. It almost makes me think you don't know how analogies are supposed to work.

If the Browns were being spotted a 2.5 touchdown lead in every game and still finished with the record they had in 2018, then yeah, your analogy would be apt because distance is to a race as points are to a game of football.

As it stands though, your version is terrible because the Browns did not get that head start in all their games, and in fact played with something of a handicap for half of the season with Hue & Haley at the helm, as well as rookies and second year players all over the field.

But it's all good! I'm definitely not going to make fun of a certain horse-faced GM who works for a certain horse-based team that can't evaluate QB talent for shit. That would be rude of me.

>Do you know how the NFL and the NFL draft works? This is kinda the crux of it.

You should read my post better. Because that's exactly what I was pointing out. In order to help shitty teams get better, the worst teams get the best draft picks.

>Browns were not exactly given a full deck to play with when they came back

That was 20 years ago. Every single player from back then has long since retired, and the Browns have had enough top draft picks in the ensuing 20 years to have fielded like four SB teams since then.

>Yeah, that is an absolutely terrible analogy. It almost makes me think you don't know how analogies are supposed to work.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you. Let's dive in:

"Handicapping, in sport and games, is the practice of assigning advantage through scoring compensation or other advantage given to different contestants to equalize the chances of winning."

The "bad teams go first" reverse draft order is structured to offer a "handicap" to the bad teams, to give them a better chance of winning. Likewise, giving someone a head start in a race is a way to offer a "handicap" to slower runners, to give them a better chance of winning. And in the same way it would be pretty weak game to talk shit about winning when you only won because you were given a 70 yard head start, it's also pretty weak game to talk shit about how great your team is when it's only good because you were given a "handicap" of top 5 (if not 1st overall) draft picks over and over and over for years and years to help you unshit your team.

You see? That's how analogies work. You should try to get them sometime.

The bottom line is: The Browns didn't repair their shit-hole team themselves, they were helped out by the NFL's draft "welfare" system that gives increased advantage to shit teams. And while other teams may take a year or two of bad records to get themselves right with the draft, the Browns needed two decades of near-constant help. Not sure that's a real brag-worthy thing for Brown's fans to get real cocky about. But I also understand they're... pent up. So here we go.