Denver (+1.5) at Cleveland
Hopefully I get this up before the game starts, but if I don’t just read it during the game because it will be more interesting and also, there are no commercials here. Also, also, I write the truth into being and so this could be a magical experience for both of us, which is the same thing I used to tell my drug dealer. Anyway, let’s just get to it.
In 1986, The Broncos came into Cleveland. They were losers, more or less, with a talented quarterback, but the kid hadn’t done much of anything, hadn’t won anything anyway. The Browns were confident, tough, ready to break through and march to the Super Bowl under young hotshot coach Marty Schottenheimer, which would be the first of many for him certainly. A Young Bill Cowher roamed the sidelines as a defensive assistant, Bernie Kosar controlled the flow of the offense just like he did in college at Miami, and a strong running game led by Kevin Mack and a bruising offensive line did the rest, keeping the defense fresh to deliver an ass kicking behind blue collar Bob Golic.
Naturally, John Elway took the ball down 7 with only 5 minutes to play and standing on his own 2 yard line, and methodically devoured the Browns soul, scoring a game tying touchdown, which the Broncos would build on with a game winning field goal in overtime to send Elway to the first of his 5 Super Bowl appearances. He would lose the first 3, but won the last 2, famously retiring after giving his entire body to the madness and destruction of football as he kept the ball, running for a crucial first down. This game was the catalyst for a career and a legend and an icon and persona which defines the Broncos team to this day.
The Browns? They never won a fucking thing.
Schottenheimer became famous as a dude who would build winning teams during the regular season only to piss it all away when the playoffs came. First with the Browns, then the Chiefs, and finally with the Chargers. And now he’s dead and he never won a fucking thing.
Bernie Kosar was a golden boy in the 1980s who famously led Miami to their first national championship in 1983, overcoming mighty Nebraska in one of college football’s most celebrated upsets, launching a football program into the stratosphere as it morphed into the Jimmy Johnson convicts with bling ringing on the field team who everyone hated and who won all the games and fucked your girlfriend too. Anyway, Kosar never could take the Browns there, as Elway sonned and silenced him on that fateful day. Later, Kosar could be found on TV slurring like a drunk 8 year old, giving everyone a glimpse at the fun filled glamorous life of a retired football player with CTE.
This game and many others that followed literally shrank Bernie Kosar’s brain. And I suppose that is a metaphor for what it did to all of Cleveland football. After all, this is the flash point where Cleveland got the shakes, the yips, the Failure Demons, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Before then, they still had enough of a proud identity left over from the Jim Brown days when he ran all over the league and also across the beaten bodies of racist hicks everywhere. But after this? After this, they became “The Browns.”
Insert wild and sad montage, old grannies crying in graveyards, Art Modell sticking his finger in a dog’s asshole in front of the kids, etc.
And now the Browns are a team trying desperately to erase a history which, ironically, isn’t even their own really since the old Cleveland Browns team left to become the Baltimore Ravens and exorcised their demons that way. But these Browns inherited… whatever the fuck spiritual hell that was left behind, like a kid taking on the name of a father he never knew.
And these Browns have just been shit on and shit on and shit on, and maybe it’s just the city, which famously never wins anything unless a generational talent like LeBron sacrifices all his happiness so he can drag them to a single hard-won title, or the fans, whose lunch pail Dog Pound persona is working class and like the working class, they get stepped on and shoved down into a hellhole they can never escape from. Or maybe it is just echoes of a ghost of a team that got weak-kneed and let John Elway forge his legacy right in their home. Or maybe Ohio is just a shithole and everyone who lives there deserves everything they get. We can argue on and on about this, but always remember, fuck Ohio.
Anyway, these new Browns have boldly flown in the face of all that misery. Baker Mayfield prayed at the altar of Kenny Stabler (a half drowned fishing boat down on Alabama’s Gulf Shore, beer cans floating in a helmet submerged) and got himself a great run game which echoes what the Browns were trying to do with Kevin Mack and Ernest Byner back in the day. (Byner is another name that induces curse shudders from Browns fans) And it has been going pretty well, the Browns have come up short a couple of times, but have shown they are right there with the AFC’s heavyweights.
So, naturally, Baker Mayfield has had his shoulder gnawed upon by Failure Demons. It was bound to happen as soon as I looked his way. He won’t be playing tonight, as Case Keenum, the wanderer who ironically once took the mantle of Elway heir in Denver and threw for almost 4,000 yards before they dumped him to Washington, steps in to replace him. Keenum is capable, certainly, but he is not the Spirit Warrior the Browns need, that their fans have clamored for. But he’s all that they’re gonna get, at least tonight. Mayfield will supposedly have surgery “following the season” which hints that they will try to grit it out with him and maybe make some Spirit Warrior shit happen with a wounded Snake, but it also could portend that the rest of the season will be a harrowing affair for this Browns team.
Of course, the Broncos aren’t doing much better spiritually speaking given their failed efforts to tempt The Devil Aaron Rodgers into becoming their quarterback for a few years. He had no interest in their Colorado Libertarian ways as a dyed in the wool communist from Berkeley, California. Really, I don’t know what The Devil believes in, he seems apolitical, just wants to fuck his famous girlfriends or at least have his publicists make him look like he is fucking his famous girlfriends, make soulless commercials that play on a loop in Hell, but he certainly didn’t want to go to Denver. I mean, if he did, he’d be there already, you know?
So, this game is really all about missing quarterbacks, past and present, about what could have been, about what has echoed down through the souls and the years from Elway and Kosar, but now will be decided in a game between Keenum and Teddy Bridgewater, which… I’ll just stick to my ghosts, thanks
Winner: Cleveland
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