You’re a Browns fan. You hate owner Jimmy Haslam, the slimy, crooked huckster who is trying to stave off a federal indictment by playing dumb about his company’s rebate fraud scandal.
You hate CEO Joe Banner, the squinty-eyed, lock-jawed little Napoleon who got run out of Philly and views the Browns gig as one big ego trip.
You hate GM Mike Lombardi, the sniveling, shadow-lurking weasel who has a vastly overinflated opinion of himself as a talent evaluator.
You hate them all. And if you have any interest in giving the Browns a fighting chance to chip away at one of the most firmly-entrenched losing cultures in professional sports, you’d better hope that you get to hate them for a long, long time.
For 15 years, the Browns have been on a nauseating, ever-spinning carousel of high-level turnover – really, a carousel of insanity – and it has to stop.
Wednesday’s trade of Trent Richardson to Indianapolis is symptomatic of everything that has been wrong with the Browns since 1999. You can agree or disagree with the move itself – for what it’s worth, I’ve seen enough of Richardson to agree with Jim Brown’s original assessment of “ordinary.” Not bad, but certainly not the franchise-caliber game-changer you’d expect to get at the third overall pick. But what makes the trade so troubling is the underlying causes, which stab right at the heart of why the Browns have been so bad for so long.
The night is always darkest just before the dawn.
You get the sense from listening to Cleveland Browns president Joe Banner that this year’s regular season is just one big inconvenience. Banner hasn't liked the make up of this team since he arrived and those pesky games, like this week's against Minnesota, keep getting in the way of his grand scheme to remake the team in his own crabby image. 
The Cleveland Browns decided to go all in on Wednesday – toward giving up on the season – and traded starting running back Trent Richardson to Indianapolis for the Colts No. 1 selection in the 2014 NFL Draft.
Since the reincarnation of the Browns in 1999, the one criticism that has constantly been levied against them is that they are a team without an identity, which is really just a euphemism for saying that they stink in all phases of the game. Aside from possibly the almost-magical 2007 season (