The pressure to act swiftly and harshly has resulted in the Cleveland Browns banning the wrong person from their stadium.
It turns out the Browns fan who was banned from the stadium wasn’t even at the game. After Logan Ryan made the mistake of jumping into the Dawg Pound and throwing a hissy fit on twitter, the wrong person was banned.
Eric Smith received a phone call from the Browns this morning.
Cleveland Scene had an article this morning about the ban.
See, this is the problem with this process. Logan Ryan had no business jumping into the stands as a visiting player. At that point he accepted the risk of something happening, even if it is a fan being an asshole. In a perfect world this doesn’t happen, but this is not a perfect world. Disney does not run everything. There is a quote that seems to ring true here.
Reality isn’t Father Knows Best anymore, it’s a kick in the face on a Saturday night with a steel-toe grip Kodiak work boot, a trip to the hospital, bloodied and bashed.
Jim Carrey as “Chip Douglas” in The Cable Guy
In this case reality just so happened to be a fan giving him a beer shower. Is the fan an asshole? Absolutely, no doubt about it. But trying to police something that happens more often than people realize is a waste of time. If anything more people will now turn to the method of giving a beer shower.
Attempting to control certain aspects of fan interaction just doesn’t work. Whether it is stopping beeramids or cup snakes at baseball games, it only encourages others to try their hand at that activity.
Perhaps the urgency to react quickly resulted in this mistake.
Logan Ryan tweeting about the incident certainly didn’t help matters. Proper research must be done if a team is going to ban a fan and it obviously wasn’t done here. The Browns were put in the court of public opinion and were completely unprepared. They had to act even though they were unable to make an informed decision.
The reality here is that any actions or public moves by a team to try and discourage this behavior almost always backfires. That could be the emergence of copycats or banning someone who wasn’t even at the game. Rather than acting quickly the Browns should have actually found out who the culprit is. Instead, the wrong person is banned and the Browns botched this investigation entirely.
UPDATE
The Browns have since come out and stated that the investigation is ongoing. However there are much more important things to spend time on rather than trying to identify one individual in a see of people who may not have been in that seat originally.
