They really don’t have a lot in common; you could say that they are just birds of a different feather. Both of these professional football teams could be defined as inadequate, provided you understand that it’s a relative term. Maybe disappointing is the word, because you would expect more. They play the same sport, and they even play in the same league of the National Football sort, but you’d never really say that the Dallas Cowboys and the Cleveland Browns are in the same “ballpark”.
However, in a phenomenon where “it can’t get any worse” meets “almost there”, the Browns and Cowboys will co-exist in Cowboys Stadium on Sunday. Some call it the Jerry Dome, but it will really be more of a Dysfunction Junction this weekend. On the surface, I couldn’t think of a bad football team that has less in common with the Browns than the so-called America’s Team, but I can’t shake how similar the two can be. Between the maniacal fans, an on-going question-mark with the Head Coaching position, front office concerns, and, most importantly, unfavorable results on the field, the NFL chapters in Cleveland and Dallas are two peas in a pod.
Of course, the Cowboys sit in a much more fascinating part of said pod, where they get to be media darlings and a national bandwagon favorite. They get Daryl Johnston and Troy Aikman doing color commentary on their games, or keeping them in the conversation when they’re doing color on other games. They have played in, and won, Super Bowls, but not since January 28, 1996; former Cowboys players speak of these Super Bowls in the same context that they speak of something that happened last Thursday. Whether they’re in first or fourth place, they are always a go-to for the talking heads on syndicated radio and television.
The Cleveland Browns were back in first place. They had reached the AFC Championship game three times in recent years, only to fall on hard times and bottom out as a last-place team by 1990. Upon signing young defensive mind Bill Belichick from the Super Bowl champion New York Giants, owner Art Modell now had (according to his public pronouncements) the last head coach he would ever hire in Belichick, along with the quarterback he considered a son in the wildly popular Bernie Kosar.
While Snot-Boogie was robbing every west-side Baltimore dice game that he could snag an invite to, and in the years following his untimely death, Avon Barksdale and his crew ran the drug trade in the fictional world of The Wire.
Some Browns fans are beginning to doubt the ability of Brandon Weeden to become a top-notch playoff-caliber quarterback in the National Football League. They are pointing to three other rookie QBs who have had more success this season than Weeden: Robert Griffin III of Washington, Russell Wilson of Seattle and Andrew Luck of Indianapolis. Wilson and Luck have each won six games, Griffin three games, and even Ryan Tannehill in Miami has won four. So far, Weeden's Browns have just two victories.
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.