1. IMPOSTORS. Ever see one of those shitty movies where a child goes missing for years, and then he returns to his parents and everyone is happy, until the parents soon realize that Little Junior wasn’t quite the same as before? His mannerisms are a bit off. He seems detached. Sometimes, at night, they find him sharpening a saw in the basement. Then they realize that the child isn’t their child at all. It’s a fucking cyborg disguised as a kid, or they realize the kid has been possessed by a three horned sand demon. That’s the New Browns. Everything I wrote about them three years ago still holds true today. They’re IMPOSTORS. They’re like the Talented Mister Ripley if the Talented Mister Ripley weren’t all that talented.
Now that Al Davis is cold and dead in the ground,Cheap Jerseys from china cheapnflnewjerseysusa this is single most depressing franchise in the NFL. The Browns, as presently constituted, don’t even feel like a team. They’re like a POW camp for NFL players hoping to one day escape to a real team. I wanted to go to a Browns game in person but it turns out that, in order to do so, you have to die and be sentenced to afterlife purification in order to find yourself at their home stadium. Many teams can stake their claim to having an awful history of quarterbacking, but take a look at the New Browns list:
I just . God, it’s so awful, isn’t it? It’s depressing. It’s genuinely depressing. BROWN is such an apt word for them. Watching this team is like being forced to sit through The Phantom Menace. They’re the sequel fanboys were hoping for, only the end product somehow made everything that came before it even worse. I know Browns fans are among the most loyal and devoted in football. But in all honesty, don’t you kinda wish they had never come back? There has to be a small part of you that wishes the New Browns had never been born. Far better to spend the past decade imagining having a fun, winning team instead of having to watch the toxic sludge this franchise is in reality. You might hate yourself for thinking it, but surely it crossed your mind whenever you saw Charlie Frye try to complete a pass.
2. Trent Richardson is doomed. You can hear the desperation when the Browns tell you that their new rookie running back will be back in time from surgery to start the season. They so urgently want you to believe that, but you and I know better. You and I know that the Browns locker room is a haven of filth and disease matched only by the outdoor toilets of central Mumbai. The Browns are like a fucking Robin Cook novel come to life. People just mysteriously fall ill and die all over the place. The team’s surgical instruments are all covered with black algae. Does this team even have a training staff? Is there some evil equipment manager who’s secretly a Steelers fan and throws all the Purell shipments into a nearby ravine? Cleveland is where players go to die. Richardson is never coming back. He’s going to lose all his limbs and his sight and hearing and he’ll be begging his nurses to kill him by shaking his head in Morse Code. SOS . Help meeeeeee .
3. Who will be catching the ball? I honestly have no idea. Is Frisman Jackson still there? No? Could Webster Slaughter have a son and let him play for this team? Because Webster Slaughter ruled. This team just burned a second round pick to take Josh Gordon in the supplemental draft, that’s how bereft they are at the position. They have no tight ends and whatever tight ends they DO put out on the field will die of staph infection by Week 7. The defense is puke. The rest of the division is vastly superior. There is nothing good that can come from any of this.
4. Let’s talk about the new owner. I haven’t gotten to the fact that the new Browns owner was a minority Steelers owner. JESUS. It’s like the final insult. Here’s a team that’s run by a half retired Mike Holmgren and coached by an empty vessel, and now it’s been purchased by the enemy. I don’t think Jimmy Haslam wants this team to succeed at all. I think he’s gonna cut the brakes on the team bus on the way to the opener. Then he’s gonna sleep with every Browns fan’s wife, then light up a cigar and cackle like a madman.
The name itself is synonymous with losing, ineptitude, and dipshit decision making. Yet, I still watch every week. Cause I’m a moron.
My wife and I are expecting our first child and I’ve been pestered by friends and family about whether or not I’m going to paint the nursery orange and brown (worst color combo in the NFL btw). My stock answer: “FUCK NO. I don’t want my child to grow up to be a goddamn loser.” That is how much the Browns suck, so much that I don’t want to pass this disease on to my son.
Quite frankly, I wish they never came back. Life was good in Cleveland, Sunday’s were free, the city always got the game of the week on TV. It’s hard to muster up anger anymore. If the Browns win the Super Bowl in my lifetime (a very unlikely scenario) it will not make up for all of the historical nut punch losses or The Suck Era. One final thought, I do not pray for many things but I do pray for this: May Art Modell receive a particularly painful and prolonged form of rectal cancer on his way out the door of life. Some may call this being bitter, others would call it being from Cleveland.
The Randy Lerner era was just like the movie Tommy Boy, that is if Tommy Boy was some horrible drama without a happy ending.
In the Cleveland version, Big Tom Callahan still died and left the family business to his son, Tommy. Only, Tommy didn’t care about the factory, the town, or the new brake pad division. He never had a Tony Robbins/chicken wings moment. Tommy just said “fuck it” and gave control to Beverly and Paul (who bled the business dry), and then wasted all of his time on sailing.
Ten years later, he finally sold out to Ray Zalinsky. The end.
At one point, this team was paying three coaches (Crennel, Mangini, and Shurmur) and three GMs (Phil Savage, George Kokinis, and Tom Heckert) because Randy Lerner decided that replacing the coaching staff and GM every season or two helped build continuity. When he finally decided that he didn’t want to play anymore in the sandbox that his dad built for him, Randy decided to sell the team to a guy who was a part owner of the Steelers. I don’t know why that bothers me so much; it shouldn’t because saying that the Browns’ biggest rival is still the Steelers is like saying that Nigeria gave the USA a helluva basketball game in this year’s Olympics. A team can’t be your rival if they dominate you in every way, shape, and form, year in and year out.
1. I sit in the DAWG POUND every year. Every women in a fifty foot radius looks and talks like Catelynn from Teen Mom. Every one of these women insists that she doesn’t have an accent because people in Cleveland don’t have accents. Every one of these women insists that she is attractive because she “looks like a real woman.” In reality, they look like wildebeasts and sound like extras from the Drew Carey show.
2. The Cleveland Municipal Stadium Lot tailgate looks like an orange and brown cross between Deliverance, Blade Runner, and a Bone Thugs and Harmony video. Chances are, you may get shanked with a sharpened toothbrush and/or see 10 15 Brady Quinn and Dave Zastadil jerseys.
3. The last good draft pick this team made was Webster Slaughter in the second round in 1986. Tim Couch over Donavan McNabb. Courtney Brown over LaVar Arrington and Brian Urlacher. Gerard Warren over LaDainian Tomlinson, Justin Smith and Richard Seymour. William Green over Ed Reed. Kellen “Harley Davidson” Winslow. Kamerion Wimbley instead of Haloti Ngata. Brady fucking Quinn. And now they draft a running back who needs knee surgery before a single pre season snap.
4. The league gave them the first pick in the draft in 1999 so they would come into the league and NOT be a doormat. Instead, they lost 133 of their first 200 games. And, yet, because Cleveland is such a hell hole, this team is somehow the pinnacle of Cleveland civic pride.
5. Josh Cribbs’ Twitter feed may be the most illiterate thing to happen to the English language since Jessica Simpson tried to write her own songs.
6. You can’t use the water fountains in the stadium after October, because the pipes freeze. Yes, they built a football stadium in Cleveland, Ohio and didn’t account for the fact that, you know, it gets cold as fuck in Cleveland, Ohio in the winter. How does that happen?
7. Their rivals are Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Could there be two more pathetic cities to be grouped with? That’s like being rivals in high school with the girl that talks in a secret dragon language and the guy who tried to start a Mystery Science Theater 3000 club.
You already KNOW why they suck on the field (Tim Couch crying, Derek Anderson throwing into quadruple coverage, Brady Quinn sucking cock like a circus seal on Molly, the D’wayne Rudd helmet toss, Brian FUCKING ROBISKIE, etc).
But why they really suck is that they are ruining my marriage. I live in NYC but fly back for the opener in Cleveland each year as I am a grade A masochist. But it doesn’t end with the Browns getting beat by the Bengals last year (oh, because Shurmur couldn’t get his defense on the field in time and BRUCE COCKSUCKING GRADKOWSKI quick snaps us and throws a 40 yard TD to AJ Green).
Now, I am so pissed off and piss drunk that I decide to go to a strip club in the flats and blow over $1,000 completely forgetting that my wife monitors my credit card statements like that dude in the Stasi in The Lives of Others. A few weeks later, the statement arrives and she goes apeshit (she’s from Long Island, so she loves to fight).
In the end, she doesn’t blame me. She blames the Browns for sucking so bad. She hates the Browns. But I’ll be at the opener against Philly on 9/9. THAT should be a fun one.
This transaction sums up the Browns. In the sixth round of the 2006 draft we got a fucking tank of a man Lawrence Vickers. This man was solid and he cleared paths wherever he went. Doesn’t start in ’06 but does in ’07. What the fuck happens, Jamal Lewis goes crazy for 1300 yards with Vickers leading. In 2008, he clears the way for another Lewis 1000 yard campaign. Then in 2009, he makes Jerome Fuckin Harrison look like goddamn Jim Brown the last 3 games of the season: 561 yards in 3 games. Jerome Harrison . In 2010 he decides that he will pave the way for Madden Coverboy Peyton Hillis. He got Peyton Hillis 1100 yards! But then the Browns outsmart themselves (like always) and decide to let the tank leave while he is entering his age 28 season. We didn’t need the guy. Let’s get another white guy, because if there is one thing Clevelanders fuckin’ love its talentless white athletes.
So we draft Owen Marcecic. Vickers paves the way for Arian and Ben Tate. Then all you hear is Browns fans complain and dream that if they could get Ben Tate we could solidify the run game. No! You! Fuckin! Idiots!
Consider the AFC North, for a moment. Ray Lewis is an accessory to murder. Ben Roethlisberger is a rapist. And the Bengals are just about running out of space to bury players’ bodies in their stadium, since their owner is too cheap to pay for a proper funeral. In any kind of world where a loving God existed, the Browns would be winning regularly. In a world where there was no God, each team would win some of the time. But only in our world, where God exists and is a colossal douchecanoe, does the team with the fewest criminals lose the most. That’s why the Browns suck: No other team in the NFL continuously proves the worst about the world.
N for my noose, or perhaps my gun.
And S is for Sunday: the day of the week I’ll get out of bed, put on a my Browns’ jersey, and drink my way through 60 minutes of watching a team whose offense has at most a total of one NFL caliber receiver in the whole lot, a rookie quarterback old enough to have Alzheimer’s disease, an offensive line that possesses absolutely no right side, and a running back tandem that is averaging 1 knee surgery for every 2.5 games played; and a defense that will not only always be on the field but that has an injury ravaged line, a linebacker corps that wouldn’t be able to make the cut at any of the DIII schools in the area, an already thin secondary, and that will have to go up against the likes of Vick, Dalton (x2), Fitzpatrick, Eli, Luck, Rivers, Flacco (x2), Romo, Roethlisberger (x2), Palmer, Cassell, Griffin, and Peyton. Seriously. 0 and 16 isn’t out of the question.
