Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. No, it’s not another patellar tear or staph infection, so don’t go “woe is me” already. It’s the latest Fan Satisfaction Rankings, and the Browns plummeted. In this “ranking that combines the fan perspective with an objective measure of how well teams turn fan dollars into wins,” they placed 116th out of 122 teams across the four major pro sports.
Last year the Browns had improved to 66th from their earlier similarly dismal ratings, but that proved to be but a dead cat bounce.
While Charlie Weis brought luck back to the Irish and Eric Mangini got the Jets to the playoffs, this branch of the Belichick tree can’t sprout anything: not Pro Bowlers (none during Romeo Crennel’s tenure), not wins (10 in two seasons) and certainly not fan appreciation (Fan Relations rank dropped from 70 to 116). So what’s good? Well, at an average of less than $50 a ticket (sixth cheapest in the NFL), it doesn’t cost too much to boo the Browns in person.
To put it succinctly (and with just half the snark), in seven of the eight categories important to fans, the Browns couldn’t manage to get out of the bottom third. The only slight exception is because the billionaire owner has too much shame to raise prices given the product that’s been foisted on fans.
Here’s a less scientific metric: on a recent Watercooler message board thread in which posters ranked their top five favorite sports teams, just 78% put the Browns on top. (As for me, it’s the Browns and Detroit Tigers tied at the top, with no other team even in the ballpark.) That’s right — from a self-selected sample of people bothering to post on a message board explicitly for Browns fans during football’s off-season, more than one in five people like another team better, and they don’t mind saying so.
Can a dead cat bounce again?
