Two decades of false promises are reason for healthy skepticism
It’s a new team in Cleveland, Browns coaches, players and fans will tell you. A new team with a new head coach and a new attitude. A new team that will be almost unrecognizable to the Steelers and their fans.
Idon’t know about you, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
We get our chance Sunday afternoon when the 4-1
Browns take on the 4-0 Steelers on the Heinz Field lawn in the biggest regular-season game between the teams since 1994.
Do you realize how long ago that was?
Ben Roethlisberger was a 12-year-old kid in Findlay, Ohio, at the time. Baker Mayfield wasn’t born.
“No bark, all bite.”
That’s the new mantra at Browns headquarters, a play on words with their rabid fans in the Dawg Pound at FirstEnergy Stadium in mind. Translation: Time to stop talking a big game and start playing winning football. That novel concept was sold by new coach Kevin Stefanski, just 38, the
former Minnesota Vikings offensive coordinator, who, compared to Freddie Kitchens, Hue Jackson and so many coaches before him, seems like a combination of
Vince Lombardi, Don Shula and Bill Belichick. It was bought by the players, who were sick of being ridiculed as laughable losers for too many reasons to list.
What the heck?
Let’s list a few, anyway:
• The Browns’ four wins match their total from the
2015, 2016 and 2017 seasons combined.
• The Browns haven’t made the playoffs since the
2002 season, the longest current drought in the NFL.
• The Browns have had just two winning seasons and that one playoff appearance in 2002 since rejoining the league in 1999.
• The Browns have lost 16 games in a row at Heinz
Field, last winning here in
2003.
And my favorite, by far:
• Roethlisberger still owns a partial claim to being the winningest quarterback at FirstEnergy Stadium. Mayfield finally matched him with 11 wins last Sunday when the Browns defeated the Indianapolis Colts.
It’s hard not to laugh at the Browns, isn’t it?
“I respect what they’re doing and what they’ve done in 2020,” Mike Tomlin said Tuesday.
It looked as if it would be another lost season for the Browns when they lost their opener in Baltimore, 38-6, in Stefanski’s debut. The team had the bite of a Chihuahua that day.
But the Browns turned into something resembling pit bulls when they won their next four games against Cincinnati, Washington, Dallas and Indianapolis. They did it with the NFL’s best run game, which still is potent with backup Kareem Hunt stepping up for injured Nick Chubb, and a turnover-happy defense led by defensive player of the year favorite Myles Garrett, he of the “freakish talent” in Tomlin’s words.
A win over the Steelers Sunday would take the Browns to another level.
This is the Browns’ biggest game since they met the Steelers — of all teams — in that playoff appearance after the 2002 season. That was the game at Heinz Field when their blitzing defense flummoxed Tommy Maddox as they built a 24-7 lead in the third quarter. But Cleveland coach Butch Davis ordered defensive coordinator Foge Fazio — a Pitt man from Coraopolis — to call off his dawgs and play a conservative game. Maddox and the Steelers roared back to win, 36-33, getting a huge break when Browns receiver Dennis Northcutt dropped a third-down pass that would have clinched the game. The late Fazio, one of the kindest, sweetest men in sports, was forced out in the aftermath and never forgave Davis.
The Browns had a similar outcome against the Steelers late in the 1994 season. Their coach was Belichick, long before he had Tom Brady and became genius-Belichick. The Browns were 10-4 and the Steelers 11-3 when they met at Three Rivers Stadium, the most recent time in the series that both teams were at least three games over .500. The Steelers defense was the difference in a 17-7 win, intercepting Vinny Testaverde twice and sacking him five times as the Steelers won the AFC Central Division title. The teams would meet again in the playoffs three weeks later with the Steelers defense once more shining in a 29-9 win, holding the Browns to 186 yards.
Sunday will be different, the Browns say.
“This one is for Myles,” Hunt said of Garrett, who was suspended for the final six games last season after his ugly helmet-swinging incident with Mason Rudolph.
“This one is for Cleveland Browns fans. This one is for a lot of things.”
I repeat: I’ll believe it when I see it.