Here are three things that happened in immediate succession during Saturday afternoon’s Cleveland Browns Perfect Season Parade, in which 3,000 or so triumphantly demoralized fans of the worst team in football braved single-digit temperatures to celebrate the team’s 0-16 record:
1. “Look out for the poop!” multiple people yelled at a burly gentleman sauntering along the parade route, a simple one-block loop around downtown Cleveland’s FirstEnergy Stadium that fittingly took the approximate shape of a zero. The burly gentleman, assuming “Look out for the poop!” to be some sort of demoralized/triumphant chant, turned toward the people yelling at him as if to join in, whereupon he stepped in an actual, physical pile of horse poop.
2. I took this picture.
3. My phone literally froze, shut down, and would not restart for the remainder of the parade.
Bundled-up street vendors hawked bright-orange “Perfect Fuckin’ Season” T-shirts and “Fuck It, There’s Always Next Year” hoodies. Homemade signs ranged from “Johnny Manziel was the best player in the NFL” to “They tried” to “I have no words” to a Steelers logo printed above the legend “If this flag offends you, it’s because your team sucks.” A gigantic “2017 Preseason Champs, 4-0” flag flapped in the frigid breeze. A half-frozen rock band powered through Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” the lyrics altered to better accommodate a climactic chant of “Pittsburgh sucks! Pittsburgh sucks!” as a dude in a Santa suit with “Sad Santa, 0-16” printed on the back tossed candy into the crowd. A competing nearby sound system pumped out jams including “We Will Rock You,” “Started From the Bottom,” and, most intriguingly, “Like a Virgin.” Paper-bag masks were, as always, a popular motif.
Everyone was frozen stiff, and nobody seemed to be in a bad mood. Maybe it’s self-aggrandizing to attribute this downtrodden-but-jubilant attitude to Cleveland fans specifically and Browns fans even more specifically, but it sure felt particular to us in the moment—a badge of honor pinned to a hair-shirt snowsuit of perpetual tragedy and humiliation.
Let us have this.
The mastermind of this ignoble and delightful event was Chris McNeil, a humble 38-year-old civilian and season-ticket holder who first threatened to throw an 0-16 parade last year, a scheme that the Browns valiantly foiled on Christmas Eve 2016, when they beat the Chargers 20-17, after the Chargers boffed a late field goal. “Believe it or not, I tell everybody this—that game felt like a playoff game,” McNeil told me. He was in the crowd, of course. “It had a playoff atmosphere. People were excited about it. My stomach hurt. I’m telling you.” The win improved the Browns’ 2016 record to 1-14. They finished 1-15 that year, and haven’t won a game since.
So McNeil revived his threat in 2017, and made good on it, once again setting up a GoFundMe for the logistical costs (which amounted to roughly $9,000) and donating all further profits to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Excedrin and the dating websites FarmersOnly and Curves Connect signed on as sponsors. And once again, online and elsewhere, not all Browns fans and media onlookers were so hot on the idea. (When an 0-16 parade was still in play in December 2016, ESPN luminary Tony Rizzo famously railed against the very notion: “I’ll be there, and I will mow you down under my tires.”) Browns players likewise had their misgivings.
“Oh yeah, it’s polarizing,” McNeil told me. “There’s some nutzoid people out there. There are some people in Cleveland who really think I’m going to embarrass the city. It’s gotten a lot better. I think most people are getting it. Gosh, nationally, and I think internationally now, people get it. We don’t want to lose. We don’t want to go 0-16. We’re not celebrating going 0-16. I am a Browns fan. I’m a huge Browns fan.”
We were chatting on Friday afternoon, the day before the parade, on his lunch break from his day job two hours south in Columbus. “Let me put you on hold here for a second,” McNeil said. “I keep getting a call in.” Thirty seconds later, he got back on the line. “Hey, that was just porta-potties being dropped off. They’re freakin’ out up there.”
The word parade might be the rage trigger here, but McNeil insisted that’s what made this public spectacle effective: “If I said it was a protest, and we should all go downtown and go down outside the stadium and, you know, wind chill at negative-16, ‘Why don’t we go out there and have a protest,’ I’d have five people who came out of their mom’s basement, right? I mean, you know that. Logical people understand that.” Rather than embarrass the Browns and their fans, he hoped the parade would celebrate their resilience, a celebration of our willingness to stick with a team that gives us literally nothing to celebrate. McNeil preferred that any actual embarrassment be laser-targeted at the team’s hapless owners, Jimmy and Dee Haslam, a sentiment shared by many parade attendees, though they were less polite about it.
The parade itself was an appropriately grimy and workmanlike affair: Winter-ravaged pickup trucks with “0-16” traced into their ice-crusted dust mingled with a few buses, a fleet of Jeeps, and the odd garbage truck. As one bus puttered by, a teenage boy popped out the roof hatch and screamed, “Pittsburgh sucks!,” as a woman opened a side window and asked the crowd if anyone needed hand warmers. (Yes, someone did.) Johnny Manziel was there in spirit, with one gentleman re-creating the particularly star-crossed former Browns quarterback’s infamous champagne-and-inflatable-swan incident. Paper-bag masks remained prevalent, though the elements took their toll. “I don’t need this bag!” yelled a guy leaning out of a truck, his wind-ravaged mask torn to shreds. “I’m not ashamed! I love Cleveland!”
One SUV had a Tim Couch jersey hanging from the back, taped to a banner emblazoned with every subsequent starting quarterback the Browns have trotted onto the field since returning to the NFL in 1999. The whole thing dragged on the ground like the mile-long train to a zombie bride’s wedding dress.
There was even an official parade queen, Cassidy Oswalt, a lifelong Cleveland sports fan and college student heading to Ohio State in the fall and selected for this honor via online voting. She beamed down from on high, clutching her bouquet for warmth. “Oh, I was freezing,” she told me a few hours after the parade. “I’m from Southern California, so this is my first real winter. I could not feel my face up on top of that car.”
The parade itself started at noon and had pretty much wrapped up by 1 p.m. for practical, frost-bite-averse reasons. But many fans were determined to trudge the full parade route themselves first, a full loop around FirstEnergy Stadium (“NoEnergy Stadium!” somebody yelled) that inspired lusty chants of “Walk of Shame! Walk of Shame!” A lamppost banner of 2017 no. 1 draft pick Myles Garrett glared down at us; soon he will have company, as the Browns have the no. 1 pick in the 2018 draft, too.
The closest cultural analog to all this might be the climactic, chaotic parade/riot from 1978’s Animal House, righteous anger mixed with goofy pride. At least one float took that connection very literally.
That one was McNeil’s favorite. I likewise caught him by phone a few hours after the parade, as he made the two-hour drive home, sounding both exhausted and euphoric. He opted against commanding his own float, preferring to revel in his handiwork fairly anonymously. “I just wanted to go around and talk to all these people,” he said. “Man, they’re just so creative, just great ideas. It was just a blast. Just trading stories and shootin’ the shit.” He was pleased to hear from the police that nobody got arrested; he was hoping to hear from the Browns organization soon, maybe to donate some money, and maybe to promise him that his efforts would not be necessary in 2019.
“Never again, man,” he swore. “I’m never having a parade again like this. The next parade is gonna be for a Super Bowl, bro.”
