The Browns Pain, When Will It End?
I’ve started to think the Cleveland Browns are less football team and more performance art. I mean really, how does this happen? Over and over and over and over again? How have they not, in all this time, not gotten a lucky roll of the dice and found a QB worth keeping? A coach or GM worth keeping? An owner worth keeping? How can one franchise continue to keep making the same errors over and over again? How the hell can these utterly heartbreaking losses keep happening? It just never ends. They can’t even have a normal bad year or anything, everything has to fall apart in the process. They can’t just lose, they have to lose in the worst ways possible. A kick-6 after Matt Schaub gifts you an INT? Whatever that Austin Davis slide was? The Browns are like the football version of the aristocrats and it’s baffling. I’m convinced that when the NFL disbands or the sport ends, the owner of the team will come forward, walk up to a podium at the final press conference, and go “TAA DAAA” then bow and curtains will close, and it’ll get rave reviews. This franchise can’t be real anymore.
The Browns have such a strange flavor of perpetual failure to them. The Lions are lovable losers who just flop and suck when they are bad. The Bills? The Bills always have hope, even when history isn’t on their side. The Browns are different. They feel different. They are like the tortured kid in school with a horrible life and no friends that you just root for until he overcomes his trials and truimphs…only this is the real world, and the kid actually just ends up a loser with no future living in a van down by the river, slowly dying of AIDS. AIDS he got from a heroin needle, not even from getting laid.
Anyway, Austin Davis gets the start on Sunday because Mike Pettine hates Johnny Manziel, so I had to add Davis to the Browns QB hydra.
That’s every QB from the inception of the new Browns. Can you name them all?
Hmm…Couch, Holdomb, Dilfer, Garcia, Davis, Manziel, Weeden, McCown, Campbell, McCoy, Quinn, Frye, Gradkowski, Anderson, and Wallace. Those are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.
The Browns are an inexplicable ball of misery and depression, and it’s baffling just how consistently bad they are. I’d bet you that somehow they’re the reason Lebron left, too.
On a related note, if I can get my hands on a 1999 copy of Madden and figure out how to set things up, I might try and see if I can replicate just how morbidly bad the Browns have been since their return. It’s so impossibly odds-defying how constantly terrible they’ve been, I want to see if I can successfully simulate that level of failure while still making the effort to win. Is it possible in a digital simulation to put the same effort in and achieve the same consistently terrible results?
The Browns are the motor that you see in the back of a used auto store: It never really works, no one really puts parts into it, but when they do it still don’t work, they are rarely top parts and are only hardly better than what’s in there in the first place. Every now and then it kicks up a little, but it dies just as fast. You only keep it around to see if one day it finally gets into gear. It never does, but you always have hope.
I’d add Ty Detmer, Spergon Wynn (the guy drafted before Brady), Luke McCown, Jake Delehome, Thad Lewis, Brian Hoyer, and Tim Hasselbeck are the only others I can think of.
The rest are Connor Shaw, Ken Doresy, and Doug Peterson
Watch Cleveland win 3 of their last 5 games so they can’t draft in the top 5
I’m guessing they’re in reverse chronological order (I recognize Hoyer and Manziel near the top there).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cleveland_Browns_starting_quarterbacks
Also, the last Browns QB to win a playoff game was Vinny Testaverde. In 1994. With Belichick coaching him up.
24 starting QBs, my lord… I’m 29 now, you are gonna have a literal Hekatonkheires (mythical Greek giants with 100 hands and 50 heads) of Browns QBs before my 40th birthday at this rate…
Here’s how long it has taken every NFL team to go back through their last 24 starting QBs. I was surprised how many of these were in the 90’s. Raiders 1996, Bears & Rams 1994, Redskins 1993. Patriots & Giants 1960’s, a few teams in the 70’s.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Browns/comments/3v68o1/24_qbs_since_1999_in_honor_of_a_new_name_i_wanted/
This is amazing! Also pretty hilarious to see that the Texans are the only team (on a quick glance) to have gone through 24 QBs more quickly than the Browns. And lo and behold it was a former Texans QB trying and somehow failing to give that game to the Browns. Amazing!
Also, glad that Sam Wyche was on the list because as a Cincinnatian myself any reason to look up the “You don’t live in Cleveland” clip is always welcome…
Note that the Texans have only been in existence since 2002, and according to that list have had only eleven (11) starting QBs in that time.
Bad teams stay bad until the ownership makes an actual effort to change, which takes patience. Unfortunately we are in a win now culture in the NFL where that patience is hard to come by.
The only way this team gets better if they keep a coach for at least 3 years. When was the last time the browns had that type of consistently?
The perils of sharing a name with a kid who was never able to kick that football.
This video pretty much explains the misery of Browns fandom perfectly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPfdRc01Z58
Got them! http://i.imgur.com/2BitqZ0.png
That took longer than I thought
You know what you’re right. As sad and pathetic as the Lions are atleast we will sometimes pull off comebacks against good teams and break some records with good players. A mean we have the 0-16 but atleast stuff happens. Ironically these terms were the last few that won the old NFL Championships. We may be the 2nd worst team but dammit we are not the first.
Do what the Cowboys did. Don’t focus on a quarterback, focus on getting/maintaining an all-star O-Line. Get a legit running back (one that has legit proven himself). Keep a FB in the formation. Focus on the run, and play action (Benjamin has potential)
On a side note, where is Testaverde?
BECAUSE THE BROWNS ARE THE REASON WHY 75% OF EMOS ARE FROM CLEVELAND AFTER THAT BLOCKED FG WIN FROM THE RAVENS, YOU SEE.
The Browns did fire Bill Belichick, but to be fair, it was before they moved.
Looking at the list of the last 24 QBs for each team, glad I’m a Pats fan. Only the Raiders come close to level of pain Browns fans have, but even they have a championship in the last 50 years.
At least we aren’t aren’t the Titans!
Spergen Wynn. Could’ve taken Tom Brady right there Cleveland.
At the time, did anybody have any idea what Tom Brady would become (and those Browns weren’t exactly Belichick’s Patriots)?
The Browns existence made me feel a little better. Get it together Green Bay
“The Lions are lovable losers who just flop and suck when they are bad.”
You take that back.
Dave, this week has given you enough material for an entire month.
I can’t, but Brokaw definitely can.
https://twitter.com/BrokawInc/status/672117831320920064
I just want to tell you both good luck. We’re all counting on you.
Good grief.
Okay, so I am mostly interested in a completely different sport (grassdive). But my team also sucks and has been underperforming for years, becoming a laughing stock and people screaming for us to finally go away. But at least we have moments. This kick 6 is a kick in the metaphorical nuts. If it happened – and freak plays like this do happen all the time – it should happen to the Patriots and Packers and 49ers of the world. You know, teams who can laugh and say “well, it was good for us the other time”. Not the Browns.