Pour one out for poor Eric Smith, whom the Cleveland Browns banned for life from their stadium for dumping beer on visiting Tennessee Titans players this past Sunday—even though he was nowhere near the stadium at the time. Just be careful not to get any on anybody, or the Browns will have some random sucker’s legs broken for it.




At the tail end of the team’s ugly Week 1 home loss to the Titans, TV cameras caught a red-bearded Browns fan in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and Baker Mayfield jersey pouring beer from a bottle onto a group of Tennessee defensive players who’d leapt to the top of the padded wall behind the end zone to celebrate an interception return. Let’s turn to Cleveland Scene’s Vince Grzegorek for what happened after that:

Eric Smith was going about his morning at the Cleveland Music Group today when he got a call from Bob Sivik, the Cleveland Browns’ Vice President of Ticket Sales & Service. Sivik, Smith says, informed him that he had been identified as the fan who poured a beer on Titans’ player Logan Ryan during the Browns’ game at FirstEnergy Stadium on Sunday afternoon. [...] Smith was informed he was banned from the stadium.


A possible problem with this is that, well:

He told Grzegorek that he was DJing at a wedding at the time. (Not for nothing, but to my eyes the guy in these photos from Smith’s Instagram account looks beefier and more neatly groomed than the jerkass spraying beer all over the Titans on Sunday.)

T his is the most on-brand possible thing the Browns could have done, short of erroneously attributing the ban to Nelson Mandela. Anyway, there are worse unearned punishments than not being allowed to go to Cleveland Browns games. Being forced to go to them, for example.


[Cleveland Scene]