2018 Browns' Chronicles: Week 12

This past weekend was a marvelous football weekend not only for myself, but for the majority of people in the great state of Ohio. The Ohio State Buckeyes not only defeated their arch nemesis, the Michigan Wolverines, but utterly routed them in what will become one of the best upsets in the historic rivalry. Then on Sunday the Cleveland Browns won their first away game since the 2015 season, by dominating their divisional rival, the Cincinnati Bengals. Both games were marvelous because they were overwhelming victories, they were upsets, and they absolutely silenced the critics.

Nothing has caused me more anguish this football season than watching Michigan roll past opponent after opponent and ascending the heights of college football excellence. The Wolverines named this season the “Revenge Tour” because throughout the year they were defeating each team who beat them the previous season – Michigan State, Penn State, and Wisconsin. Each of these wins were won handily by Michigan, and as Michigan’s talented defensive end, Chase Winovich, said, “The final stop on the Revenge Tour is Ohio State.”  To go one step further, Jim Harbaugh, Michigan’s head coach and who coming into the game was 0-3 coaching against Ohio State, guaranteed a Michigan victory.

On the other hand, Ohio State seemed like the most overrated team in college football after having difficulty defeating mediocre teams such as: TCU, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Maryland and then complete collapse in a blowout loss to Purdue. Ohio State also had to deal with the blow of its best player, not only on the team but in the entire country, in Nick Bosa having a season ending injury, causing him to recuse himself from school to prepare for the NFL Draft. Finally, the Buckeyes also had to deal with what became false allegations, that Urban Meyer’s former assistant coach, Zach Smith, who is no longer on the team, used racial slurs towards a former player. Those allegations were refuted but, suffice to say, it caused a distraction for the team.

Now take all the turmoil going on with Ohio State and juxtapose that against Michigan’s defense being ranked number one in the country, its offense humming with the likes of an efficient quarterback in Shea Patterson, and ESPN’s talking heads already writing them in as a College Football Playoff contender.   So it is no surprise that all of the College Gameday hosts picked Michigan to defeat Ohio State. However, they and the entire country, outside of Ohio, couldn’t have been more wrong. Ohio State played like the team that everyone knew they could be and Michigan was completely confused. Both talent wise and schematically Ohio State was the much better team throughout the entire game. In short, the “Revenge Tour” was cut short.

The Browns were similar in terms of knowing that they were a very young, but talented team. It just took a change in coaching, well really two changes as both Haley and Hue were let go, to fully release the talent on the field. At the end of the first half, the Browns were winning 28-7, holding the Bengals to less than twenty yards rushing. The Browns most likely could have egged on even more points if they did not go into protect mode on offense by just running the ball to preserve the lead. The final score was Cleveland topping Cincinnati 35-20 (the score makes the game look closer than it really was).

This game could be considered the Browns’ very own “Revenge Tour” as they were competing against their former head coach – Hue “Clueless” Jackson. That’s right after Hue got done doing his cross-country TV tour, in which he threw every Browns player and coach under the bus for his failure to win games, Hue was hired as a “special assistant” to Marvin Lewis, the Bengal’s head coach, whose only apparent talent is receiving contract extensions while not improving year after year. What Hue actually does lies somewhere between massaging Marvin Lewis’ feet to picking up Marvin’s Mercedes to making sure Marvin has a reservation at the local Chili’s after each game – win or lose. Needless to say, no matter what Hue’s actual duties consist of, the Browns wanted to beat their treasonous former head coach badly in the Bengal’s house. The Browns accomplished this goal with flying colors.

What has me very fired up, and this is most likely because I am a Browns fan, but live in Cincinnati, is the fact that the Bengals’ fans are shocked to have not only been beaten by the Browns, but utterly annihilated. Before the game started, one local radio announcer asked for prayers that the Bengals wouldn’t lose to the “helpless” Browns. Then once the Browns finished putting their final touches on an absolute beat down, another local radio show host stated, “that it is unbelievable that the Bengals lost to the Browns.” If anything both these comments reflect how naïve Cincinnati football fans are. They not only don’t realize that their team has absolutely no defense, but also the very fact that the Browns aren’t a bad team. They played surprisingly well against a much more talented Chiefs team, albeit still a loss, and then completely dominated the Atlanta Falcons the following week. So, like Ohio State, the only people who believed that the Browns were capable of completing such a feat were the Browns’ players, coaches, and of course, their steadfast fans.

So, I hope I stop receiving text messages from ex-girlfriends who are “congratulating” me on the Browns winning “a game.” As much as their congratulatory texts may appear to be thoughtful, they are nothing more than concealed pettiness.  These texts are an expression of “surprise” that the Browns could actually win a game. In reality I knew this team could win games. I predicted they’d win six. This Browns team is young, angry, and wants to do nothing more than beat every team on their schedule. They are a team that when they win, can no longer be patronizingly patted on the head and told, “good job winning a game.” Instead opposing teams’ fans must now be willing to accept that when they get beat by the Browns, it wasn’t a “fluke.” Their team was simply out maneuvered, out hustled, out played, and out manned in every facet of the game. So the next time a radio show hosts prays that his team beats the Browns to avoid the “embarrassment” of losing to the “Clowns,” he needs to start praying that his team doesn’t get “embarrassed” by the Browns.

 

On to Houston. Go Browns!