CLEVELAND — These days, it seems more and more like we’re prisoners of the moment. The last great/horrible thing we saw was the greatest/worst-of-all-time, and we’re often guilty of letting such hyperbole roll off our tongues without fully thinking through whether it’s actually true.
It’s easy to fall in such a trap with the Cleveland Browns. Since their 1999 reincarnation, Cleveland is a putrid 87-195, with just two winning seasons and one trip to the playoffs. Though we currently see an 0-10 team with a fan base embracing the worst case scenario, what is oft forgotten is that the Browns were once every bit as good as the present-day New England Patriots.
The Cleveland Browns were founded in 1944 and dominated the All-America Football Conference. They won their first-ever regular season game 44-0 and over the four years in the AAFC (the league folded in 1949), the Browns posted a 52-4-3 record and won all four championships. In fact, Cleveland’s unbeaten 1948 season came 24 years before the Miami Dolphins more famously completed the feat (a fact ’72 Dolphins blowhard Mercury Morris likely wouldn’t know). Of course, Cleveland was considered nothing more than the class of an eight-team minor league so nobody really mentions that.
Well, the Browns destroyed that notion when they joined the National Football League in 1950. They beat the two-time defending champion Eagles by 25 points in their NFL debut, finished 10-2, and won the first of their four NFL championships. Between 1950 and 1964, if the Browns didn’t win the championship, they got damn close: Cleveland played in seven of those 14 championship games.
Even though the Browns have never won a Super Bowl, they weren’t bad after the 1970 merger. Cleveland endured only five losing seasons between 1970 and 1985 (Marty Schottenheimer’s first full season as head coach) and notoriously came close to advancing to Super Bowls in 1986 and 1987 (I don’t know … you may have heard of “The Drive” and “The Fumble”).
This stroll down memory lane isn’t just to remind younger readers that the Browns haven’t always been a laughingstock, but to lend context to this amazing statistic in the wake of their heartbreaking loss in Baltimore (of course, given the Ravens used to be the Browns, every loss in Charm City is a heartbreaker, but I digress): Cleveland is threatening to become an all-time losing team for the first time in their history.
That’s right. The Browns are now 461-461-10. Their record has never, ever dipped below .500. The days of Paul Brown, Otto Graham, Lou Groza and Jim Brown were so rich with victories that they provided more than enough leeway to wade through a decade or two of mediocrity before returning to their winning ways. Yet Cleveland is still about to see that seemingly endless bank run out. It truly is sad.
As is generally the case in “Believeland” there’s still hope. Many think the 2016 Browns are on a collision course with a miserable 0-16 season, but I don’t think so. They have a ridiculously late Week 13 bye and play four of their remaining six games at home. They’ll face Pittsburgh (twice), Cincinnati, New York (Giants), Buffalo and San Diego — far from a murderer’s row. I figure their best shot at a victory comes against the Bengals after the bye or the following week against the Bills, and two or three wins would justify management’s decision to stick with coach Hue Jackson.
Of course, Cleveland could really shake things up by winning out and actually winning a rather mediocre AFC North. In a year when the Cavaliers won an NBA title and the Indians were in the World Series, are we really going to bet against it?
So hold on, Dawg Pound. There’s a gleam.
And it looks eerily similar to the NFL Week 10 Recap.
