Cleveland Browns relocation controversy


The Cleveland Browns relocation controversy, sometimes called "The Move" by fans, was the decision by then-Browns owner Art Modell to move the National Football League 's Cleveland Browns from its long-time home of Cleveland to Baltimore during the 1995 NFL season. Subsequent legal actions by the city of Cleveland and Browns season ticket holders led the NFL to broker a compromise that saw the Browns franchise, history, records, and intellectual property remain in Cleveland. In return, Modell was permitted to establish a new franchise, the Baltimore Ravens and was allowed to transfer the football organization under his control to the new franchise. The Ravens are officially regarded by the NFL as an expansion team that began play in. As nobody was prepared to purchase and operate a franchise for the 1996 season in Cleveland Stadium, the NFL deactivated the Browns franchise and the city of Cleveland agreed to demolish the stadium and build a new stadium on the same site. In exchange the NFL agreed to reactivate the Browns by the 1999 season by adding a team or moving one from another city. In 1998, the NFL decided to establish its 31st football organization in Cleveland and sold the Browns franchise to a new owner for $530 million. The "new" Browns recruited players through an expansion draft and resumed play in 1999.
This compromise, which was unprecedented in North American professional sports, has since been cited in franchise moves and agreements in other leagues, including ones in Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League.

Dissatisfaction with Cleveland Stadium

In 1975, knowing that Municipal Stadium was costing the city over $300,000 annually to operate, then-Browns owner Art Modell signed a 25-year lease in which he agreed to incur these expenses in exchange for: quasi-ownership of the stadium, a portion of his annual profits, and capital improvements to the stadium at his expense. Modell's new company, Stadium Corporation, paid the city annual rents of $150,000 for the first five years and $200,000 afterwards.
Modell had originally promised never to move the Browns. He had publicly criticized the Baltimore Colts' move to Indianapolis, and had testified in favor of the NFL in court cases where the league unsuccessfully tried to stop Al Davis from moving the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles.
However, Modell refused to share the suite revenue with the Cleveland Indians, who also played at Cleveland Stadium, even though much of the revenues were generated during baseball games.
In 1990, the Indians convinced local governments and voters to build a new ballpark and give the suite revenue to the baseball corporation. Modell, mistakenly believing that his revenues were not endangered, decided not to participate in the Gateway Project that built Jacobs Field for the Indians and Gund Arena for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Modell's assumptions proved incorrect, and Stadium Corporation's suite revenues declined sharply when the Indians moved to Jacobs Field in 1994. Soaring player salaries and deficits put additional financial pressure on the Browns' owner. Modell claimed to have lost $21 million between 1993 and 1994.

Announcing the move

After Modell realized how much revenue he lost from the Indians moving out of Cleveland Stadium, he requested an issue be placed on the ballot to provide $175 million in tax dollars to refurbish the outmoded and declining Cleveland Stadium.
Entering the 1995 season, the Browns, coached by Bill Belichick, were coming off a playoff season in which the team finished 11–5 and advanced to the second round of the playoffs. Sports Illustrated predicted that the Browns would represent the AFC in Super Bowl XXX at the end of the season, and the team started 3-1, but they then lost their next three games.
On November 6, 1995, with the team at 4–5, Modell announced in a press conference at Camden Yards that he had signed a deal to move the Browns to Baltimore in 1996 – a move which would return the NFL to that city since the Colts moved to Indianapolis after the 1983 season. Modell said he felt the city of Cleveland did not have the funding nor political will to build a first-class stadium. The very next day, on November 7, Cleveland voters overwhelmingly approved the aforementioned tax issue to remodel Cleveland Stadium. Despite this, Modell ruled out a reversal of his decision, saying his relationship with Cleveland had been irrevocably severed. "The bridge is down, burned, disappeared", he said. "There's not even a canoe there for me."

Initial reaction

The City of Cleveland sued Modell, the Browns, Stadium Corp, the Maryland Stadium Authority, and the authority's director, John A. Moag Jr., in City of Cleveland v. Cleveland Browns, et al., Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Case No. CV-95-297833, for breaching the Browns' lease, which required the team to play its home games at Cleveland Stadium for several years beyond 1995, filing an injunction to keep the Browns in the city until at least 1998. Several other lawsuits were filed by fans and ticket holders. The United States Congress even held hearings on the matter.
Actor/comedian Drew Carey returned to his hometown of Cleveland on November 26, 1995, to host "Fan Jam" in protest of the proposed move. A protest was held in Pittsburgh during the Browns' game there against the Pittsburgh Steelers, but ABC, the network broadcasting the game, declined to cover or mention the protest. That game was one of the few instances that Steelers fans and Browns fans were supportive of each other, as fans in Pittsburgh felt that Modell was robbing their team of their long-standing rivalry with the Browns. Browns fans reacted with anger to the news, wearing hats and T-shirts that read "Muck Fodell".
On the field, the Browns stumbled to finish 5–11 after the announcement, ahead of only the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars, to whom they lost twice, in the AFC Central, becoming the first team in the NFL's modern era to lose twice to a first-year expansion team. Virtually all of the team's sponsors pulled their support, leaving Cleveland Stadium devoid of advertising during the team's final weeks. After the announcement, the team lost all their home games except the final, in which they defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 26-10. The game itself was blacked out on television locally, but NBC did broadcast extensive pregame coverage from Cleveland.

Settlement

After extensive talks between the NFL, the Browns, and officials of the two cities, Cleveland accepted a legal settlement that would keep the Browns legacy in Cleveland. On February 9, 1996, the NFL announced that the Browns franchise would be 'deactivated' for three years, and that a new stadium would be built for a new Browns team, as either an expansion team or a team moved from another city, that would begin play in 1999. Modell would in turn then be granted a new franchise, for Baltimore. Because he was permitted to retain the current contracts of players and other football personnel, and changed the name of his corporate entity from Cleveland Browns, Inc. to Baltimore Ravens, Inc., Modell is typically reckoned to have moved the football organization, but not the franchise itself. The settlement stipulated that the reactivated team for Cleveland would retain the Browns' name, colors, history, records, awards, and archives. The move was approved by league owners after a 25–2 vote with three abstentions.
An additional stipulation was that in any future realignment plan, the Browns would be placed in a division with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals, because of long-standing rivalries with those two teams. Upon their reactivation in 1999, the Browns were placed back in the AFC Central with the Steelers and Bengals, as well as the Ravens, Titans, and Jaguars. This arrangement put teams from Baltimore, Cleveland and Pittsburgh in the same division for the first time in NFL history. When the NFL realigned into divisions of four teams for the 2002 season, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Baltimore remained together in the new AFC North. Tennessee, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and the new Houston Texans were placed in the new AFC South.
The only other active NFL team to temporarily suspend operations without merging with another was Cleveland's previous NFL team, the Cleveland Rams, during the 1943 season at the height of World War II.

Aftermath and legacy

The return of the NFL to Baltimore compelled the departure of the professional football team already in Baltimore at the time, the Grey Cup champion Baltimore Stallions of the Canadian Football League. Although they had drawn respectable fan support during their two seasons in Baltimore, Stallions owner Jim Speros knew his team could not compete with an NFL team and opted to establish a new franchise in Montreal. They subsequently adopted the name and assumed the history of the team that previously played in the city, the Alouettes, who had ceased operations in 1987. Like the Browns, the Alouettes were formally recognized as having resumed operations after a hiatus although unlike the Browns, the decision to reactivate the Montreal franchise in such a manner that it was considered a continuation of the previous franchise had not been previously planned and was made retroactively at the time of their revival. Much of the Stallions' roster and most of the Stallions' other football personnel made the move to Montreal, although unlike Modell, Speros was not formally given the sort of successor rights to existing contracts that would have allowed him to transplant his football organization to Montreal in the same manner was done from Cleveland to Baltimore - this would have been problematic due to the CFL's requirement that the re-activated Alouettes adhere to roster limits on American players that the defunct U.S. CFL teams had not been bound to. The ability of Speros to retain the core of his championship roster to the point that the transaction superficially appeared to be a "move" was the result of a gentlemen's agreement between Speros and the other CFL teams. CFL commissioner Larry Smith, an Alouettes alumnus who was keen to ensure the revived Montreal franchise was an immediate contender, had pressured the other CFL teams to agree not to aggressively pursue what were technically free agents.
Focus groups, a telephone survey, and a fan contest were all held to help select a new name for Modell's team. Starting with a list of over 100 possible names, the team's management reduced it to 17. From there, focus groups of a total of 200 Baltimore area residents reduced the list of names to six, and then a phone survey of 1000 people trimmed it down to three, Marauders, Americans, and Ravens. Finally, a fan contest drawing 33,288 voters picked "Ravens", a name that alludes to the famous poem, "The Raven", by Edgar Allan Poe, who spent the latter part of his life in Baltimore, and is also buried there. The team also adopted purple and black as their team colors, a stark contrast to the brown and orange colors of the Browns. The former Colts Marching Band, which remained in Baltimore after the Colts moved to Indianapolis, was subsequently renamed the Baltimore's Marching Ravens. Along with the San Francisco 49ers, Buffalo Bills, and Washington Redskins, the Ravens are one of only four NFL teams with an official marching band.
Modell's move to Baltimore came amid an unprecedented flurry of similar threats — and actual moves — that fueled 12 new stadiums throughout the NFL. The Seahawks, Buccaneers, Bengals, Lions, Cardinals, and Bears used the threat of moving to coerce their respective cities to build new stadiums with public funds. Modell's team was one of four that actually moved between 1995 and 1997: Los Angeles lost both of its teams for the 1995 season, as the Raiders moved back to Oakland and the Rams moved east to St. Louis ; and the Houston Oilers move to Tennessee in 1997, where they become the Tennessee Titans two years later.
After several NFL teams threatened to move to Cleveland to become the reactivated Browns, the NFL decided in 1998 to make the reactivated Browns an expansion team, which while it temporarily gave the league an odd number of teams, it also eliminated any possibility of an existing franchise giving up its own identity for the Browns and thus prevented more lawsuits. In an ironic twist, Al Lerner—who helped Modell move to Baltimore—was granted ownership of the reactivated Browns; his son Randy took over ownership after Al's death in 2002 before selling the team to Pilot Flying J CEO Jimmy Haslam in 2012. From its beginning, the odd number of teams and the ensuing awkward scheduling was considered a temporary arrangement pending the addition of a 32nd NFL franchise – although Los Angeles was heavily favored, it was ultimately the Houston Texans who were created as the 32nd team to replace the Oilers in Houston, Texas for the 2002 NFL season to give the league once again an even number of teams. Following this decision, Los Angeles became the favored destination for owners threatening to move their teams until the St. Louis Rams finally returned to Los Angeles for the 2016 season, followed by the San Diego Chargers one year later.
The reactivated Browns have had only two winning seasons since returning to the NFL in 1999: a 9–7 finish in 2002 which also saw the team clinch a wild card spot in the playoffs, and a 10–6 finish in 2007 while barely missing the playoffs. Meanwhile, the Ravens have been more successful, reaching the playoffs eight times since 2000 and winning Super Bowl XXXV and Super Bowl XLVII, often to the dismay of Browns fans. Longtime placekicker Matt Stover was the last remaining Ravens player that played for the Modell-owned Browns – he departed the Ravens following the 2008 season when the team chose not to re-sign him, finishing his career with the Indianapolis Colts. General manager and former Browns tight end Ozzie Newsome remained with the Ravens until his retirement in 2018.
The move would also have an effect in Pittsburgh. Steelers owner Dan Rooney was one of two owners to oppose Modell's move to Baltimore because of a mutual respect for the team and the fans. Because of the move, the Browns–Steelers rivalry, arguably one of the most heated rivalries in the NFL, has somewhat cooled in Pittsburgh due to the new Browns' lack of success. The Steelers–Ravens rivalry is considered the spiritual successor by fans in Pittsburgh and is one of the most heated current rivalries in the NFL. Since returning to the NFL, the Browns and Steelers rivalry has been largely one-sided in favor of Pittsburgh; although the rivalry is not as intense in Pittsburgh, Browns fans still consider it their top rivalry despite the Browns' recent struggles against the Steelers.
Because of continual financial hardships, the NFL directed Modell to initiate the sale of his franchise. On March 27, 2000, NFL owners approved the sale of 49 percent of the Ravens to Steve Bisciotti. In the deal, Bisciotti had an option to purchase the remaining 51 percent for $325 million in 2004 from Art Modell. On April 8, 2004, the NFL approved Steve Bisciotti's purchase of the majority stake in the club.
Although Modell later retired and had relinquished control of the Ravens, he is still despised in Cleveland, not only for moving the Browns, but also for his firing of legendary head coach Paul Brown in 1963. Some considered the Browns' move and subsequent lawsuits costing Modell a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which is in Canton, Ohio, 60 miles south of Cleveland and is both part of the Cleveland television market and part of the Browns' territorial rights. Modell died in 2012, having never returned to Cleveland. The Browns were the only home team that did not acknowledge, much less commemorate, Modell's death the following Sunday. The team opted not to do so at the request of David Modell, who feared that the announcement would be met with anger by Browns fans still upset about the move.

Effect on teams in other sports leagues

Major League Baseball