headtopics
Cleveland Browns News and Rumors 7/26/26: The Long Habit of Showing Up Twenty-five years ago, I built a Browns website to keep from losing my mind at my day job.
Here's what a quarter century of mornings actually taught me.
(Plus a puffin.) If youve ever met me in person, of course, this makes total sense, because Im so lithe and graceful.
Im a veritable Fred Astaire who doesnt dance thanks to one simple equation: Dancing + Fat Guys=Humor.
Seriously, of course, completely inept at dancing, like I am at most physical things.
Im in the right place as a guy who sits in a desk chair and types most of the day.
Where she got her passion and skill, I have no idea, but shes loved dance from aThe reason I bring this up is because shes been with her company for ten years, and the company itself celebrated its 25th anniversary on Saturday.The companys executive director got up and spoke about what the journey has meant to him, and how its all about the people you impact along the way.
As I listened to him talk about the adventure of starting and making a dance company successful, I reflected on how much we had in common, including some amazing timing.
On September 9, 2001, we launchedand real reporters and alumni participating in our forums.Now, in 2026, under a different name and set of circumstances, we are preparing for our 25th anniversary of joining with a network and creating a lasting entity out of our passion for football and the city of Cleveland.
Shortly after our 25th anniversary in September, well be announcing some major changes to the site and engaging in a sort of rebirth, if you will.
Constant reinvention is a necessity to survive.The actual history of the OBR extends back past 2001, really starting in 1996, when an infant webdork put together a page protesting the Browns move to Baltimore, using a cheap server and a copy of Microsoft FrontPage.
When the team returned in 1999, I changed my tone and focused on the new franchise.I called it BrownsTNG.com, and I ran it out of my own pocket, mostly because nobody was going to pay a hideous troll to be snarky about the Steelers.
It had server-side tricks the other Browns sites didnt have, a running clock informing the world that Pittsburgh still stunk, and an attitude that got me publicly described by then-team president Carmen Policy as a Singular Source of Complaint.
I have never been prouder of a nickname.BrownsTNG became Bernies Insiders.
We built a magazine, a subscription service, and, for the first time, a credential.
Our debut as a credentialed outlet was 9/9/2001, a Sunday, the day the Browns lost to Seattle.
Two days later the towers came down, and nobody cared about football, including me.That is how this thing started: with a loss, and then with the world stopping.and became the Orange and Brown Report.
Three names, several platforms, one obsession, and here we are on a July Sunday in 2026, with me typing at an hour when sensible people are asleep.
LESSON ONE, THE PEOPLE ARE THE PRODUCT: I thought I was building a website.
I was actually building a room.Lane Adkins found his way to BrownsTNG in the early days with front-office connections and a nose for news, and he is still part of the OBR all these years later.
Fred Greetham joined shortly thereafter.
Volunteers like Q and BTNG Greg kept an overworked consultant from drowning.
Every single good thing that has happened here happened because somebody I did not deserve showed up and helped.Servers are cheap.
That is not.
From 1996 to 1998, I argued loudly and constantly that the NFL owed Cleveland the Green Bay treatment, a publicly owned, fan-owned football team.
I still believe that future would have been hundreds of times better than the one we got.The league went with billionaires instead.
, the Packers are now the ones without an ATM, per their CEO, which tells you exactly how much the sport values romance.
Twenty-five years of being a Singular Source of Complaint has taught me that the complaint is worth making anyway.
Just dont expect a thank-you note from Park Avenue or Lou Groza Boulevard.Nothing whatsoever happened in Berea yesterday.
Rookies are in orientation, the media is locked out until next week, and by all rights this should be the deadest morning of the year.
And yet the Watercooler spent it, a 1974 baseball promotion so catastrophically ill-conceived that its remembered fifty years later.Upperduck was actually there and had the good sense to leave in the fifth inning.
An old friend from Georgia Tech wandered in to explain how Atlanta somehow made it worse in 1979 with full pints.Meanwhile, another crew is, arguing about Pogacar and whether the yellow jersey is a urine-sample color chart.
Thats the site.
That was always the site.
The Browns are just the front door.Every platform I have ever loved has been sunsetted, acquired, redesigned, or quietly strangled by somebodys quarterly targets.
Every technology I mastered became a punchline.
The site has changed names, hosts, and business models more times than the Browns have changed quarterbacks, and that is a genuinely hostile comparison.
The only thing that survives the migrations is the audience.Take care of them, and you get to keep going.
Get that backward, and you get a very tidy 404 page.
This is the one that took the longest to learn and is the least impressive to say out loud.
I have written through firings, hirings, relocations, expansion drafts, a pandemic, 0-16, an actual playoff win, and thousands of mornings where I had absolutely nothing to say and said it anyway.There is no secret.
You put your hand up every single day, and one day you look up, and its been twenty-five years.
To everyone who has read this nonsense, argued with me in the forums, subscribed, sponsored, corrected my typos, or written me an angry email at six in the morning: thank you.
Genuinely.You built this thing.
I just keep the lights on and complain about the NFL.
Now, if youll excuse me, training camp starts soon, and I have to go be irrationally optimistic about a football team again.
Twenty-five years, and that part hasnt changed either.Speaking of stubbornly showing up: for the first time in about 30 years, a baby puffin has, on Englands south coast.
That colony was down to six birds and three breeding pairs, from more than 40 pairs in the 1950s, so the National Trust bolted solar-powered trail cameras into a rock crevice and turned volunteers from the Purbeck Natural History Forum loose on it.Those volunteers logged roughly 150 hours over 15 weeks staring at a hole in a cliff, and they got their payoff: adult puffins hauling fish in, and one chick, 38 to 40 days old, about to slip out under cover of darkness and spend the next few years alone at sea.One puffling alone wont save this colony, said project lead Dr.
Richard Caldow, but one is a whole lot better news than none.
A hundred and fifty hours of watching a rock for one small good thing.
I have never felt more seen by a seabird.
When not marking twenty-five years of doing this and quietly wondering where the receipts went, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning.You can follow him on Twitter North Royalton Building Commissioner killed in service center shooting, suspect detained: Heres what we knowWestlake woman remembered by former coworker$1M+ bond for Michigan man accused in deadly shooting on Put-In-Bay: Here is what to knowCleveland Browns News and Rumors 7/25/26: The ATM Machine We Dont Have.