The Cleveland Browns were once a winning team, having won four AAFC championships and three more NFL championships by 1955. They made the playoffs every single year the first decade of their existence – the only team to ever do so. Then Art Modell took over the franchise in 1961, and everything started to go South(east).

On BIGPLAY Cleveland, Browns reporter Nick Pedone noted that all the disasters Cleveland’s football has gone through stem from Modell’s decision to uproot and move the franchise in 1995.

“I honestly believe that the Browns are still paying for that move to Baltimore,” Pedone said. “I genuinely believe that the NFL realized what a big mistake that was, and they rushed the Browns to get their organization back in 1999 as an expansion franchise instead of 2000.

“They were trying to prepare for an NFL draft, and they had no general manager,” Pedone went on. “They had no head coach, and they were so far behind the eight ball in terms of their offseason process when they found out that they were getting the organization back. They were set up to fail from the jump. I think we’re still paying or the sins of Art Modell to this day.”

Modell’s decision to move the team from Cleveland to Baltimore was the final straw in an unraveling that was three decades in the making. He bought a franchise that had been developed into a winning machine by general manager and part-owner Paul Brown, and then fired Brown in 1963. This was just the beginning.

Modell won a championship in 1964, and that was the last time the Browns ever made it across the finish line. He forced star fullback Jim Brown to retire in 1966 by threatening to fine him over missed training camp. Brown was filming a movie – The Dirty Dozen – at the time. This power struggle cost Cleveland one of the greatest players in the sport; a man who had won 3 MVPs and nine Pro Bowls with the team.

The franchise kept bleeding talent and patience. Modell traded star WR Paul Warfield in 1970, and kept cycling through quarterbacks and coaches. The Browns lost all continuity, and then the move to Baltimore finished the job.

Years later, on the NFL Network documentary A Football Life, former Browns head coach Bill Belichick described what the team lost when the move happened.

“I felt bad for that team, the players and the coaches that were working so hard with less than no support,” Belichick said. “The owner was nowhere to be found; he was in Baltimore. It kind of felt like you were on a deserted island fending for yourself.”

What came back to Cleveland in 1999 was not a restored franchise. It was a team assembled through an expansion draft, and the new team’s top brass used this opportunity the wrong way. The Browns had 11 picks in this draft, including the first one, which was used on quarterback Tim Couch. But the team surprisingly did not draft any offensive linemen.

In their first game after the revival, as recounted by The News-Herald’s Jeff Schudel, the Cleveland Browns were steamrolled into defeat by the Pittsburgh Steelers 43-0. Cleveland had only two downs in the entire game. Head coach Chris Palmer opened with a 2-14 season, then went 3-13. In 2000, quarterbacks Tim Couch, Doug Pederson and Spergon Wynn were sacked 40 times.

The Browns have spent the modern era fighting for basic competence ever since then.

Since 1999, the new Cleveland Browns have burned through 13 head coaches (Todd Monken being the latest) and over 40 starting quarterbacks, making the playoffs exactly thrice: 2002, 2020, and 2023. This was a team trying to grow a spine it never had – not a rebuilding franchise.

That is why the Art Modell scar still matters. Cleveland lost decades of structure, memory, and professional weight in 1995. The Browns are still trying to act like a franchise that was never taken apart in the first place.