They Finally Built the Factory of Sadness from the Sci-Fi Classic "Never Build the Factory of Sadness."

They finally really did it, the maniacs.

The Browns built the world’s most bizarre hate triangle. A truly unholy trinity.

The Browns hate both their quarterback and their fans. The quarterback hates both the Browns and their fans. Browns fans hate both their team and their quarterback.

The last vestiges of joy and hope have burned away from Browns football. There is only mutual resentment and scorn. A bad team with a bad quarterback who is also a bad human will lose badly every week while spectators feel bad about watching them, and the team/quarterback will try to make fans feel bad about feeling bad.

Browns football, a grim spectacle in the best of times, has become a Milgram Experiment. Following the team is torturous. So is playing for the team. (Dudes are going back to college to escape.) So is running it. Yet everyone with any emotions left to invest in the Browns is either rationalizing their suffering or reveling in it. Browns football has gone from excruciating to dehumanizing.

This is the portion of the column in which the clever sportswriter is supposed to backfill the details: Descuzzball Watson, his various crimes (*alleged* sexual assaults by the dozens) and misdemeanors (taking a gap year whenever it suits him, sucking at football), Shedeur Sanders, the sham competition between them, their pathetic preseason performances (Sanders was better that Watson, but not "good" by any means), Saturday’s steady shower of boos, Watson’s shamelessly derisive reaction to those boos, the money, the messaging, the Browns’ blatant effort to slap a coat of paint over Descuzzball’s reputation while railroading him back into the starting lineup, and so forth. The Browns fixed the fight against Sanders, Watson punched himself out in Saturday's preseason pratfall, and the Browns declared him the winner, anyway.

There you have it. Those are the details. You are sick of reading them. I am bored with recounting them. There’s nothing funny or insightful left to be said. Even righteous scorn and witty condemnation now get sucked into the Browns’ maw and extruded as corrosive sludge. Thinking about the Browns causes pain. Caring about them causes misery. The Browns aren’t a football team. They’re a contaminant. Writing about them risks spreading it. I hate the very act of hating them.

Football is supposed to be fun. It’s fun to play, fun to watch, fun to talk and write about. That’s why you are reading this. It’s why tykes toss footballs in driveways and parents take children to games. It’s why we have fantasy leagues, taverns with 200 televisions and, yes, gambling apps. Winning is important because it is much more fun than losing, but it’s the fun that comes from trying to win that pays everyone’s salary, from Descuzzball’s to mine.

The Browns abandoned winning long ago. Now they have not just forgotten about fun, nor merely tried to eradicate it. They’ve poisoned and perverted it. The Browns went out of their way to build an unwatchable, unlikable team. They will rub their fans’ noses in their failure, as if this was all the fans' fault. The Browns expect fans to keep supporting them strictly out of a sense of joyless obligation, and the franchise will punish fans for doing so.

The tech industry does this sort of thing all the time: megalomaniacs who would grind your bones to make protein smoothies have some insatiable urge to custom-build a dystopia, so they coerce us to keep buying products that cost more but don't do what we want them to. Governments, even in the best of times, often treat the constituency like an inconvenience or chattel. But governments and tech moguls serve a more-or-less captive populace with few other choices.

The Browns are in the entertainment industry, where customers can vote with their feet. When Disney makes a terrible, unwanted live-action remake of a classic, the company loses millions of dollars. The 2026 Browns are like a live-action remake of Moana starring Mel Gibson and Bill Cosby, with songs by The Shaggs and an audience warning that Buzz Lightyear will be tossed out an airlock if anyone tries to leave the theater. People should not just lose their jobs for the decision to start Watson, but be drummed out of the industry. Yet we cannot even manage to drum Watson out of the industry.

I’ve never seen a football team make a decision as disastrous and self-defeating as the Browns' decision to start Watson in 2026. I cannot remember seeing any other professional organization behave so self-destructively. This isn’t "tanking," or the Sunk Cost Fallacy, or wishful thinking, or simple incompetence, or even outright evil, which at least comes bundled with self-interest and a desire for short-term gratification. This is mortification. It’s spiteful self-loathing. It’s Sartrean existential hell: three entities trapped in their own intolerable company.

Browns fans can escape by abandoning the team or the NFL, but that can feel like gnawing off your own arm. In fact, that should be the team’s motto. The 2026 Browns: Marginally More Fun than Gnawing Off Your Own Arm.

I don’t know how to proceed with 2026 Browns coverage. They aren’t funny or sad anymore, merely gruesome. They don’t deserve your time or mine. I am tempted to boycott covering them this year, but that’s a little performative, and I won’t be able to resist a TankWatch in a few weeks, once we’ve all acclimated to the stench. But I promise not to keep poking at this rotted tooth of a franchise when it’s unnecessary, because I fear that Watson and the Browns are making us meaner, dumber and more cynical by the sheer audacity of their continued demand for our attention.

So yes, they finally did it. The Browns created a Factory of Sadness that actually produces barrel upon barrel of sadness.

Damn them all to hell.