In Sunday's Super Bowl, all roads lead back to Cleveland
National Post, 13 February 2022
Fickle NFL teams are a testament to the league's never-ending greed
Anyone cheering for Cleveland in the Super Bowl this Sunday? Yes, the game is between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. But a long time ago, the Rams were the Cleveland Rams, and thus this Super Bowl uniquely teaches us about the shiftiness of NFL franchises, which comes about not infrequently due to the shifty characters that own them.
Super Bowl LVI is a testament to how the NFL buys and sells the loyalty of its fans — and their local governments, from which a great booty can be extracted. Follow the bouncing football across the generations:
The Cleveland Rams started playing in 1936 in one of the iterations of the American Football League. It joined the NFL the next year and initially struggled on the field. In 1945, the team won the NFL championship (not yet the Super Bowl), but the on-field improvement was not matched by financial success. It turned out to be the longest victory parade in history, ending in Los Angeles, where the Rams moved the following year.
The Rams played in Los Angeles from 1946-1979, before moving to Anaheim, Calif., where the team was situated from 1980-1994. The Rams then moved to St. Louis from 1995-2015, before coming back to Los Angeles in 2016. They now play in a nearly $5-billion stadium on the site of the old Hollywood racetrack. In a sign of the NFL’s future as a gambling operation, the first venue on the former racetrack was a casino.
As the Rams peregrinated across the generations, Cleveland hopped aboard the NFL franchise carousel.
With the Cleveland Rams having decamped for L.A., another Cleveland franchise began playing in 1946 in the All-America Football Conference, before joining the NFL in 1950. The team’s first coach was Paul Brown, and the franchise took the coach’s surname as its nickname. The Cleveland Browns were a powerhouse, winning the NFL (pre-Super Bowl) championship three times in the 1950s.
In 1963, the Browns fired their eponymous coach, and kept his name. But that was not the end of Brown: he founded another Ohio franchise in 1968, the Cincinnati Bengals, and served as its first coach. So both teams on Sunday, the Rams and Bengals, trace their pedigree, in part, to Cleveland.
Meanwhile, the “dawgs” — the unofficial Browns’ symbol — went from purebred to mongrel mutt. Art Modell, the same owner who fired Paul Brown in 1963, decided to move the team to Baltimore in 1995.
The Cleveland fans went barking mad. Back then, the NFL at least had the decency to dangle a fig leaf over its naked greed, so it brokered a compromise: Modell would take his franchise to Baltimore, but would leave the Browns’ logo, legacy and records in Cleveland.
Somewhere between Ohio and Maryland, the Browns morphed into the Ravens, either when crossing the state line, or when Modell trousered his first subsidies from the Maryland state exchequer. A new expansion team was granted to Cleveland, which assumed the identity of the old team that had slithered off to Baltimore.
Continue reading at the National Post.