I wasn’t about to waste another Sunday watching the Browns find new and torturous ways to lose football games. It was too nice a weekend and it’s deer season and a Sunday afternoon in the tree stand sounded a hell of a lot better than the inevitable so that’s where I was. But I was getting the play by play. Not from Jim Donovan or some network hack who’s so bad they give him Browns games, I was getting them from 12-year old daughter. So there’s that and a little love for the Buckeyes and Mentor Cardinals and a little hate for the Miami Marlins front office who somehow make the people who own our Cleveland teams look like humanitarians and geniuses.

It’s the Weekend Wrap.

Read more...

There will be lots of debate this week after the Cleveland Browns most recent loss, a 23-20 overtime setback to the Dallas Cowboys.

Talk over Pat Shurmur’s future as head coach. Talk about Brandon Weeden’s future as starting quarterback. Talk about Miles Austin’s fumble in overtime that was ruled an incomplete pass. Talk about another game that got away from the Browns in another season that is going to end like so many seasons before it.

“It felt like we could have won this game – multiple times,” wide receiver Greg Little said. “I guess we just need a spectacular play. To win a close game, someone has to make a play.”

Read more...

There might not be a phenomenon in all of pro sports that has the staying power of the Dawg Pound concept in Cleveland.  Though it’s origin comes with some controversy and its legal ownership is questionable at best, one name that even some of the most casual Browns fans tie it to is Hanford Lee Dixon.  In an attempt to motivate his defensive linemen to pressure the quarterback, he pulled a childhood memory of a dog chasing a cat down the dirt road by his house in Theodore, Alabama, and told the big men that “the dog needs to chase the cat.”

The former Browns defensive back explains in his memoir,  Day of the Dawg, how it all started at Training Camp in 1984 in response to quarterback Paul McDonald torching the defense in intra-squad scrimmages.  It wasn’t just McDonald and his “Paul McCartney hairdo”, but back-ups Terry Nugent and Tom Flick as well.  If these guys were doing this, what were Dan Fouts and (the recently retired) Terry Bradshaw going to do?

To congratulate the Front 7 for their aggressive play, their counterparts in the secondary would start barking at them.  Because the practices at Lakeland Community College were open to the fans, the concept caught on, much to the dismay of the Browns brass.  In the spirit of the ‘No Fun League’, he was scolded that the team was the Cleveland Browns, and not the Cleveland Dogs.  To counter, his friend and co-conspirator, Frank Minnefield, made a large Dog Pound sign to hang on the fence between the bleachers and the field of play, and the rest was history.

Read more...

Rare is it that a player in any sport says anything of great interest that when he does you want to just cut him some slack, leave the comments to dangle and just enjoy the fact that you don't have to write another "we respect our opponents" or "we're just going to go out there and try to have some fun" quote. But on the other hand, if said player in any sport is going to leave it out there dangling like a carrot at the end of a stick, said player shouldn't be surprised when someone comes along and tries to grab it.

Read more...