Cleveland, OH
Should Ohio taxpayers give Jimmy Haslam $600 million for a new Cleveland Browns stadium? • Ohio Capital Journal
It’s budget season, so the lobbyists are out in full swing.
Tennessee Billionaire and Gas Station Tycoon Jimmy Haslam, known up here as the owner of the Cleveland Browns, is purportedly drumming up support among lawmakers for a $600 million subsidy for a new Browns stadium and that money could be proposed as soon as the Governor’s budget request.
For comparison, this is about as much as the state allocated for highway maintenance across the entire state in 2025. It’s a chunk of change.
So what will we get for this investment? Will the Browns be able to scrounge up more than three wins by a combined 13 points and a three-way tie for last in the league if we throw hundreds of millions of dollars at them?
To be fair, there have been no public promises that Haslam and Company will produce a team that avoids embarrassing the state if they get this subsidy. Public arguments have been pretty threadbare: the City of Cleveland has been hostile to the idea of a new stadium. This seems to have shifted Haslam’s eyes down I-71 to see what kind of success he can have under the dome in Columbus getting help to pay for the project.
So far, the reception has been tepid. New Senate President Rob McColley said he was opposed to a “handout” to the Browns when he heard about the proposal. Some policymakers are kicking around backing the project with state bonds, bumping the cost up to $3 billion and using some of that money to develop nearby hotels, restaurants, and housing.
So let’s get back to the meat of the issue: why would we do this? What is it about football stadiums that makes a businessman or a lobbyist think he can credibly waltz into a lawmaker’s office and shamelessly ask for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars? I mean, these aren’t utility companies we’re talking about.
The case lobbyists make for stadium subsidies is fundamentally economic. With a professional football team, your state will get on television. People will travel from far away to visit your city, they will stay at your hotels, they will eat at restaurants, and you will become a destination.
The consensus among economists is that this story is a fantasy. Yes, economic activity will increase around a football stadium: it can be an anchor for a flurry of economic activity once a week twenty times a year. But where does this money come from?
Entertainment budgets are not flexible. If someone didn’t go to a stadium, they would probably go to a bar, restaurant, movie, play, or live performance somewhere else in the city. So new economic activity is not created, it simply is shifted from one part of the city to another.
A study published in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis just a few months ago underscores this economic consensus. For a professional sports team or stadium to be anything other than a net negative on the local economy, it needs to (a) attract visitors from other cities, and (b) get its owner and players to spend a significant share of their income in the area.
So if legislators are going to take this seriously, they need evidence of three things. First, they need to see that this new stadium will bring significant numbers of new visitors to Ohio. Second, they need to see that Jimmy and his team are spending a lot of their own money in Ohio. And third, they need to see that this is a better investment than transportation infrastructure, education, broadband, and the many other priorities they will have to put aside to give Jimmy a new place for his team to play.
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CLEVELAND, Ohio (TheOBR.com) Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
There are mornings when I sit down at this keyboard, look at the Browns quarterback discourse, and wonder whether I should have gone into a more stable line of work. Such as selling timeshares from inside an office that has been lit on fire. Because here we are in late June, with no pads, no preseason games, no live pass rush, and apparently everyone from television personalities to team-adjacent announcers to webdorks like me has solved the Browns quarterback battle. That’s 90% of the news items out there this morning.
But I don’t care, and look on that endless speculative churning as simply being noise at this point.
One story that matters this morning is Andrew Healy leaving Cleveland for Minnesota, which I wrote about several days ago. He’s joining the Vikings as an assistant general manager.
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If your first reaction was, “Okay, front-office guy changes jobs, wake me when someone throws a slant,” I get it. Executives mostly become famous when something goes wrong, which is a cruel system, but, hey, I didn’t design the planet. I just live here.
But Healy’s departure is a real loss. Alec Lewis’ Athletic reporting had two quotes that should get your attention. Browns offensive analyst Dom Borsani called Healy “a little bit like a unicorn,” because he combined research background and technical aptitude with a traditional scouting lens and an understanding of coaching schemes. Former Browns senior software developer Zach Zelinsky, now with the Arizona Diamondbacks, called him “probably the smartest guy I’ve worked with in sports.”
That’s not normal praise. That’s not “great teammate, first guy in, last guy out” boilerplate. This is people inside the machine saying the Browns just lost one of the people who helped connect the spreadsheet world to the football world. And that matters because the modern NFL is not analytics versus scouting anymore — or at least it shouldn’t be. The good organizations are the ones where the numbers people understand what the scouts are seeing, the scouts trust that the numbers can challenge their assumptions, and the coaches don’t throw the laptop into Lake Erie.
Healy’s Sloan Sports Analytics bio says that, for the last five years, he “led the integration of data and advanced insights into all parts of football operations.” It also says he started with the Browns in 2016 as Senior Player Personnel Strategist, helping to develop methods for valuing players, making game decisions, and evaluating draft assets. Before that, he created projection systems for Football Outsiders, and before that, he was an economics professor with a Ph.D. from MIT. So, yes, he is smarter than your humble webdork. This is not a high bar, but still.
So, naturally, I was worried about this and did what I always do when I’m looking for common-sense answers: I talked to Lane. He let me know what he “was told all the systems have been in place, with others handling the process. It doesn’t feel like they are overly concerned with his departure. As they have told me previously, you never like to lose assets, but you plan accordingly.”
The Browns still have Andrew Berry. They still have people in the research department. This is not a one-man shop collapsing because the smartest guy took his stapler to Minneapolis. But when you lose Paul DePodesta to the Rockies and Healy to the Vikings in the same general era, you lose institutional memory, decision-making frameworks, and the people who knew why certain models were built the way they were. Don’t expect the loss of the two to indicate much about how the Browns use analytics – it hasn’t fallen out of favor or suddenly joined Maurice Carthon’s playbook in the annals of football history.
This is the type of stuff fans don’t see until two years later, when the draft board feels different, the fourth-down decisions get twitchy, or the team suddenly stops finding value in places it used to find value. Maybe Berry replaces that brainpower cleanly. Maybe the remaining group steps forward. Maybe the Browns are fine. But losing a “unicorn” from a front office is like losing a left guard: nobody talks about it until the pressure starts coming up the middle.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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THE WATERCOOLER
THE LIFT
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond…
Space.com reports that scientists are drawing up a research blueprint to examine whether warming Mars is actually feasible — not because anyone should be selling lakefront property in Olympus Mons by Thursday, but because the work could help humanity understand what sustainable habitats beyond Earth would require. University of Chicago geophysical scientist Edwin Kite told Space.com, “We do not yet know enough to create a biosphere from scratch,” which is both humbling and oddly comforting. We can’t even get everyone to agree on the Browns quarterback depth chart, but sure, let’s keep the option open for Mars.
WRAPPING UP
When not trying to identify the precise moment quarterback analysis becomes interpretive dance, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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Copyright 2026 WOIO via TheOBR.com. All rights reserved.
Three people are dead after a double murder-suicide in Lakewood.
Police said a man called his ex-wife early Sunday morning, saying he shot two people at a home on Chesterland Avenue.
According to investigators, the man threatened to shoot himself.
When officers arrived at the scene, they saw a man in a truck speeding away.
Police chased the truck until it stopped on Warren Road.
The 45-year-old man exited the vehicle with a gun to his head and shot himself moments later, police said.
Police found 35-year-old Richard Eastin and 33-year-old Amanda Wakut dead inside the kitchen of the home on Chesterland Avenue.
The investigation is ongoing.
CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) – Officers from the Cleveland Division of Police Fourth District responded to the sound of gunshot Saturday evening.
According to police, officers were in the area of the 3200 block of E 93rd Street when they heard gunshots around 8:30 p.m.
Officers responded to the area and located an adult man with gunshot wounds.
They immediately began to provide first aid until EMS arrived.
When EMS arrived on scene crews continued care and transported the man to the hospital.
Police said during the course of the investigation, officers identified and detained a 33-year-old man.
Officers also located two firearms and several casings from the scene.
The victim was treated at the hospital, but was later pronounced dead by hospital staff.
The Cleveland Police Homicide Unit is investigating the incident, and no further information is available at this time, police said.
Copyright 2026 WOIO. All rights reserved.
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