There was a really vitriolic post I wrote about the subject once, but I can’t find it, so I’ll go with the one I did find
For one, the Colts left town due to dwindling fan support. They were only getting the stadium half-full in the years previous to the move. This is a failure of fan support and if anything is the only good justification for moving a team.
The Browns had amongst the best team support in the league. Despite being in a smaller market and poorer city, they had a decades long waiting list on season tickets, among the top merchandise sales in the league, and probably the most rabidly fanatical fanbase. Not only that, but the financial deal that Modell got was ridiculous - not only did he get to lease the municipal stadium for a dollar a year, including the city taking up maintenance and operating costs, but because it was a dual use stadium he actually got the Indians to pay him to use the stadium. It was a ridiculous handout deal.
The move does not in any way stem from a lack of fan support. He was in the best situation you could be in, short of being in a giant market. It stems entirely from his personal incompetance. When the discussion of building new stadiums came up, the city was willing to fund a new baseball and football stadium, and give Modell another giveaway deal where they paid for the stadium and ran the thing and yet he got the profit. But he objected. Why? Because the Indians were going to get their own stadium too - and him only getting a free stadium with free operating costs while profiting just wasn’t good enough, because he wouldn’t have a baseball team paying him too on top of that. So he purposely sabotaged/nixed the new stadiums idea because, while it was a giant public giveaway to him, it just wasn’t quite giant enough. And because he was an utterly incompetant businessman on top of being an utterly incompetant football owner, he’d lost so much money in other investments that he needed even more corporate welfare to stay afloat. So he was offered a new stadium, refused, and then moved on the claimed basis that he didn’t get a new stadium. Modell forced the best player in the history of football to retire. He fired the best coach in the league’s history. He managed to take in hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate welfare and still manage to always be broke. He put forth herculean efforts of personal incompetance.
Cleveland kept the history and records of the Browns because we fought harder than any other city has ever fought something like this. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. We brought legal action against the NFL. Your apathetic fanbase saw their team go quietly in the middle of the night - we resisted so loudly that we scared the NFL. It wasn’t some token gift, it was something won through hard fighting. At the time, nothing like it had ever happened - a city keeping the colors, name, and records of a franchise despite having that franchise move - and it was all due to the unique dedication that this city had to its team. So yes, it was different than all the other moves.
Your claimed hurt over the Colts moving makes you morally worse. Your city is like a rape victim that even knowing how bad the crime was went out and started commiting its own rapes. If you understand how much it can hurt for this to happen to you, then you are even more guilty for being responsible for it happening to another city. You should’ve forced the NFL to give you an expansion team and refused to support the abomination it did give you. I’m not going to let it go until that STD-ridden cesspool of a city gets hit by a decent sized meteor or nuked from orbit, since it’s the only way to be sure.
Basically, I don’t like teams leaving cities, but the Colts in the 80s were at least justified by lack of fan support. The Browns leaving Cleveland while having top-5 financial and fan support is ridiculous, and due solely to the greed and stupidity of one man, and the willingness of another city to buy him out. A city who had experienced the heartache of losing their team, and yet chose to inflict that on another.
The situations are not the same at all, and in fact, I’ll go further. Thinking the Colts leaving is tragic and then supporting the Ravens makes you a dick. Being a Ravens fan is a character flaw. Fuck that STD infested crack den. I’m going to go jerk off to the scene in “Sum of all Fears” where it gets nuked.