Dear Sports Fans: I am coming to a revelation that maybe - just maybe - sporting contests have too many wildcard factors to be able to accurately predict with a scientific formula.
Yes, I know, the concept is groundbreaking and shocking, but there it is.
I mean, 9-6 against the spread is pretty decent, but the number of games that the HERO (Hutchison Erroneous Ranking Order) System saved me from picking wrong (Atlanta, Arizona) was offset by the games that it missed that I would have picked right given my own reign (Denver, Green Bay). So how is this infallible system just as fallible as human whim? I must not be using enough square roots.
With that whiskey-dick of a performance on Sunday, the Browns have not only eliminated themselves from playoff contention but dropped back down into the twenties in this week's rankings (#21). Cleveland had a scoring defense of 8 going into the contest, but a lukewarm talented 4th round rookie in his first ever start lit them up like Time's Square on New Years, causing them to drop all the way down to 15.
As we struggle to survive another season with the new-era Browns, one way we can try to get through it (besides alcohol or heavy medication) is to look back at the best individual weeks of the Browns’ new era to remember times in recent memory when this particular week didn’t suck.
My most basic reason for following sports is for the enjoyment of an entertaining diversion. I do not delude myself: I know that none of my Cleveland teams are very good; my pet saying continues to be, “it’s a process”.
The world has to turn, I get that. And when the world has to turn, the NFL has to play, I get that too. No one, least of all me, expected anything as important as football to really stop so that we can all pause and ponder the violent country we live in, a country where mass murder occurs with such frequency anymore that we've become as numb to it as another Cleveland Browns loss. We didn't stop for 9/11. We aren't going to stop for innocent children massacred by a mad man in an idyllic Connecticut town. The Cleveland Browns played on Sunday and lost in spectacular fashion. I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter. The outcome of the game will set the stage for another housecleaning in a facility that knows nothing but housecleaning and I'm still pretty sure it doesn't matter. So numbed am I by the events on Friday that it was hard enough to muster up enthusiasm for the game, let alone for figuring out once again what went wrong with the Browns.