When the Cleveland Browns manage to be anything other than terrible, the media goes absolutely wild and the underdog story begins yet again. "It's our year finally!" they shout from the endzone fanzone that has remained super popular in Cleveland despite the fact that the Browns are the most losing team in the past 30 years or so.
It makes the news because people can't believe that the Browns do anything other than fumble, get intercepted, and make bad penalties.
This year started out the same way except for one thing: The Browns actually didn't look terrible for once.
I was one of the realists out here though and figured that it was only a matter of time before the Browns dropped the ball. I didn't figure they would do it so literally though.
"Blame it on the rain" isn't just a song by Milli Vanilli, it is also one of the excuses that people are using for how this bad snap, botched catch, whatever you want to call it resulted in a turnover on a punt attempt by the Browns. The Jets turned this into a TD and went up on the scoreboard and eventually won the game.
The Browns were ahead 12-10 with just a few minutes remaining in the game when the special teams came out and botched this extremely routine play. Blame it on whatever the hell you want to guys, the fact of the matter is that special teams only does a few things...ever. There is really no excuse that I will, or Browns fans should, accept in this situation. You screwed it up and that is sticking with what the football world kind of expects of the Browns.
The fans got their heads in the clouds again this year and at least this time it was for semi-good-reasons.
Losing to Jacksonville in week one was expected. What wasn't expected is that Cleveland kept it close. When the Browns defeated Tampa Bay and Carolina in the next two weeks people started to look more at Cleveland even though TB and Carolina or mostly terrible teams. When Cleveland dispatched Pittsburgh in week 4 though and went to 3-1, people were starting to think "oh man, are the Browns actually good?"
Well no, no they are not. And they showed their colors this week against the Jets, who are also a terrible squad.
Both teams were boring as F**K with the score 7-6 at halftime. I couldn't bear to deal with the commercials anymore at this point so I tuned out. But the second half wasn't really much more exciting with both teams failing to do almost anything that resulted in scoring points. You know, that thing that gets you the win?
The press is saying that the "Jets stole the win" and I guess so man. It's just so hard to tell when both teams on the field fail to perform in any sort of way that you can look and discover some semblance of greatness.
The thing for the Browns is that they have a really tough game next week vs Baltimore, who is looking guaranteed to be a powerhouse all the way to perhaps the Superbowl. After that they get the next best thing to a bye-week by playing the winless Tennessee Titans. The rest of the season though, I think we are going to see Cleveland slot into where they belong at the bottom two of their conference.
The AFC North (where the Browns are) is kind of strange right now because the Ravens are at the top but the rest including the Browns, Steelers, and Bengals are all tied at 3-2.
It was a moment of pure joy for Cleveland diehards when for once in lord knows how long, the Browns were at the top of the division. This was something that they seemed likely to continue when playing against the always-struggling Jets. I don't know what happened to that explosive offense that we saw in the first 4 weeks but it wasn't on that field today.
Browns fans need to calm down though I think. I called it early on when I said "no, this is not your year" and unfortunately due to upper management commitments, it is unlikely that the Browns are going to get out of the doldrums for several more years after this season.
In other news the Panthers managed to not lose this week purely because they were not playing.
