2018 Browns' Chronicles: Week 5

By Kris Mead

 

The Browns not only won a game on a Sunday, the first in over 1,000 days, but, more importantly, they beat a division rival for the first time in three years! Although the Browns won in dramatic fashion, they earned the win against an extremely talented Baltimore team, primarily against its second ranked defense. However, not everyone could be happy and in this week’s issue of the “Browns’ Chronicles” I will examine the human rain cloud, better known as ESPN’s Cleveland Browns’ beat reporter – Pat McManamon.

Who is Pat? Pat is a native Clevelander, so I can’t dog him for being an outsider who only took the Cleveland beat writer job out of desperation, rather than actual interest into Cleveland sports. However, there is some level of argument that ESPN would like to layoff Pat, as they have been gutting their personnel for some time. If you need to see who ESPN let go, just tune into its up and coming rival FS1 and you’ll rediscover the same talking heads who once yammered their mouths on behalf of the almighty ESPN. It could also be there is just a lack of supply for beat writers licking their chops to cover the Browns. In turn, ESPN faces the economic challenge of a lack of labor which drives McManomon’s perceived worth “up” and gives him the “oompas” to keep writing garbage columns.

The article I will be critiquing is Pat’s analysis of the Browns’ week 5 win against the Baltimore Ravens entitled, Baker Mayfield, Browns look for hope from an ugly win. So right off the bat, Pat portrays himself as the guy in school who is friends with the losers, but wants to fit in so desperately with the winners that he’ll throw his own nerdy friends under the bus in order to achieve that gratification.  Just look at the passive aggressive title, “Browns look for hope from an ugly win.” Now, it is quite common for the words, “Browns,” “ugly,” and “hope” to be in the same sentence, but “Browns” and “Win” in the same sentence is about as common as President Trump not making an utterly dumb remark within a 24-hour news cycle. So then why must Pat combine the negative words with the positive words? Sure, Pat wants to come across as an unbiased journalist, but it seems more evident that Pat wants to subliminally distance himself from the “loser franchise” he covers, for fear his readers might view him a loser by association.  With that, let’s continue examining this shallow, uncharacteristically negative, ESPN Cleveland beat writer, shall we?

Pat then begins his article by recalling how the Browns, just last week, lost a game after scoring 42 points, but then, this week, only scored 12 points and yet won. This passive aggressive jab at the Browns inadvertently reveals Pat’s lack of understanding for the unexpectedness that is the NFL.  For instance, the Buffalo Bills lost to the Ravens by 44 points but then went on to beat the Minnesota Viking by 24 -  in Minnesota. Both opening sentences first state something negative about Cleveland and then are quickly twisted around to make it “sort of” positive. It’s as though Pat can’t believe the Browns could win, because the week prior they lost even after playing well.  The same can be said for the Bills and their Viking win, since the Bills lost so badly prior to the Ravens. However, and what Pat fails to understand, is that more often than not the NFL is unpredictable.  Previous week games are inconsequential to the week coming up. If this wasn’t the case the NFL would become an extremely monotonous, predictable form of entertainment. Actually, if the NFL increased in predictability, its entertainment value would, hopefully, decrease (what fan would want to wasting four hours of their Sunday watching something where the outcome is fairly certain?). Now, to be clear, there is some level of statistics which allow coaches to either change their upcoming week strategy or exploit their opponents’ weaknesses. In that way outcomes become a little more predictable.  Nonetheless, due to high levels of competition between each NFL team and the fact that even the smallest variable could cause a team to lose, the NFL is a highly unpredictable week to week.   

The next statement Pat makes, which is uninspiring, comes in the end of his third paragraph in which he says, “[a] team trying to change its culture . . . maybe can use a 12-9 overtime victory to propel it forward.” First, the very fact that Pat is certain a victory will assist a team trying to change its culture is utterly absurd. Pat, how would you suggest a team, that in the past two years has gone 1-31, best go about trying to change its culture? It wouldn’t require a half-baked and whitewashed FBI investigation to figure this one out, as the answer is simple: winning football games is how a historically bad team starts to change its culture. So, it isn’t that the Browns “maybe” could use a victory, but rather that need to have a victory, in any form, drives culture change. Secondly, the win in itself has propelled the Browns forward automatically for the simple fact that under Hue Jackson they have never won more than one game in a season - now they have doubled that. Another way to look at it is if the Browns would have lost, they would not have moved forward at all. So in turn, because they won, they automatically have propelled forward and now need to continue propelling forward by winning games. However, to suggest that if the Browns weren’t to win any more games this year then they would not have propelled forward from this win would be false.  Sunday’s win in itself is evidence of the team moving forward.

Next Pat does something that all non-Browns fans do – they reminisce on how bad the Browns have been. Pat goes on to provide anyone who has been living under a rock various examples of how bad the Browns have been. Thanks, Pat. I am quite confident that anyone choosing to read about the Browns is either a Browns fan or is having suicidal thoughts, and if it’s the latter, don’t waste your time giving them a history lesson.

Pat moves on to describe that “…when they [Browns] somehow pulled out the win, the outlook changed. For this team 2-2-1 is a quantum leap from 1-3-1.”  This phrase makes it seem that the Browns had some sort of 300 moments similar to when the 300 Spartan warriors “somehow” held back the thousand or so Persians from advancing on them. Now, I will give Pat some leeway here as he does go on to discuss how Baker, Denzel Ward, and Myles Garret’s play helped the Browns win.  But to say that this was a “quantum leap” is startling, to say the least. The reason for this is that the Browns are a team that is capable of winning 6 games, if not more. They became markedly better between this year and last year. For instance with the signing of Randall, Terrence Mitchell (although now hurt), and Jarvis Landry, the Browns sured up their pass defense and helped out their depleted receiving corp. Further with the Browns picking Mayfield, Ward, and Calloway in the draft they, again, became more talented than the year prior. It wasn’t a quantum leap that the Browns won.  It is more like a quantum leap that the Browns did not have some sort of unpredictable mishap cost them the game – multiple missed kicks (New Orleans loss) and inexplicable official miscues (Oakland).

So I congratulate the Cleveland Browns and especially to the rookies – Mayfield and Ward. The former for keeping an offense going even when it seemed over, and the latter for making game saving plays in crucial moments. That is what propelled the Browns to the win and what will continue to propel the Browns forward (although the Browns do need to cut the penalties).

Finally, I apologize for Pat McManomon’s constant pandering to the rest of the NFL fandom. Yes, in his article he does mention, briefly, about Cleveland’s growth, but he did so under a cloud of judgment in which he, involuntarily or otherwise, secretly wishes that the Browns would come back down to earth. It may be that Pat has become so accustomed to writing about losers that he isn’t quite sure how to write about winners. If this is the truth, then not only do the Browns need to use this win to “propel” forward and change the culture, but so does Pat.