“All the pretty chicks with the crimson lips go, ‘Cleveland Rocks! Cleveland Rocks!'”

Or does it?

Just a few short days after the Cleveland Indians lost their chance at playoff glory (and one short day after Boston, the team who made it instead of Cleveland, began their playoff games), we wonder: Why does Cleveland have such bad luck?

Sure, many would say that the Indians weren’t even supposed to be that close, that their final record was much better than anticipated and that this is a young team that can dominate next year, but we here at the Daily Kent Stater editorial board don’t just mean the Indians. We mean the entire city.

Cleveland, at first glance, has everything one could hope for in a large city: Numerous sports teams; an arts center; small, ethnically-diverse communities; a nice downtown district; LeBron James lighting up basketball courts for six to eight months out of the year-the list goes on and on. And yet, there seems to be something lacking from this city.

Voted just a short year ago to be one of the worst places to live, with the highest violent crime rate (it actually beat Detroit and Chicago-too bad crime isn’t baseball) and abounding political scandals, Cleveland isn’t as friendly as one would hope, particularly for a midwest town.

Other cities seem to have a better handle on things. Columbus is a thriving international city whose borders keep growing. Cincinnati, at least, has gotten past its legacy of the Pete Rose scandal and having Jerry Springer as a former mayor to a town that embodies a certain twist of midwest and southern-genteel notions (and a football team that is winning games it shouldn’t win).

The one thing that really stands out, then, is the lack of a really good college. This is to say nothing against Case Western Reserve or even John Carroll, but neither stand up to Ohio State University, University of Cincinnati or even University of Akron.

It appears that if you remove colleges from a city, the city loses some sort of vivacity, some sort of vitality. It loses that thing that causes a city to appear to be great, but is, in reality, sub-par.

Oh well. Only so much can be done, and fans of Cleveland can be thankful for this much: At least the Browns had a bye this week, or this editorial would probably be 300 words longer.

The above editorial is the consensus of the Daily Kent Stater editorial board, whose members are listed to the left.