Browns

Four championships in four seasons defined Cleveland's arrival in professional football: the Browns took the All-America Football Conference title every year of that league's existence, from 1946 through 1949, before the NFL absorbed the conference and the club kept winning, adding titles in 1950, 1954, 1955 and 1964. No Super Bowl has followed. Five appearances in the AFC Championship game, spread across the late 1960s and the late 1980s, all ended the same way, and that gap has stretched into the longest active title drought in the league.

Paul Brown built the franchise in 1944 with Arthur B. McBride and gave it his own name along with a coaching identity that outlasted him; Otto Graham ran the offense through those early championship years, and Jim Brown carried the running game into the record books afterward. The Browns still take the field without a logo on their helmets, a plain brown shell that has outlasted every rebrand around it.

Ownership tried to erase the team once. Art Modell moved the entire operation to Baltimore in 1996, and the league's compromise kept the Browns' name, colours and history in Cleveland while the players and staff became the Ravens. A new stadium went up during the three seasons that followed, and the franchise resumed play in 1999, legally the same club that had stopped in 1995. The Dawg Pound kept its section in the stands through all of it, and the Steelers rivalry along the turnpike never needed reviving.

Under Jimmy and Dee Haslam, the losses have piled up in different ways than they once did: an 0–16 season in 2017, only four winning years since 2000, two playoff trips in that stretch. Myles Garrett has become the one certainty on the roster in a franchise still short of the one thing four AAFC titles and four NFL titles never bought it — a Super Bowl.