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.  They were bigger than the game; they didn’t worry about the fiends, their rivals, and most especially the law.  The fiends took an ass-kicking, the rivals were put in body-bags, and the law was nothing short of an inside joke in the Barksdale circles.

They were powerful and rich, and virtually untouchable.  Whatever they wanted, they took, and when they found themselves in a jam, they cheated to get out.  Most of the dirty work was performed by kids, but it took consummate professionals to take care of the most important jobs.  Intimidating and/or killing witnesses took a loyal soldier of the street, a guy like Roland Brice aka Wee-Bey.  The rules don’t apply to people like Wee-Bey, his real-life counterpart would be a dirty football player like Hines Ward, formerly of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

In fact, everything about the Steelers of past and present reminds me of Barksdale’s crew of local terrorists.  The Steelers thrive off of picking on the weak, an act we saw from the low-level dealers in The Wire’s very first episode, when a junkie tried to pass off a photo-copied $10 bill, and ended up in ICU.  Barksdale’s organization had friends in high places, from high price attorney Maurice Levy to the always slick Clay Davis in the State Senate; while the always slick Rooney family gives their Steelers high-powered connections to both the Commissioner’s Office and the Oval Office.

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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.

However, what is generally overlooked when discussing QB ratings and QB effectiveness is the impact of a good running game on the overall success of an offense, especially an offense run by a rookie quarterback.

All we’re hearing nowadays is how important a vertical passing game has become in the NFL. What we’re not hearing is the fact that a good rushing game is still vital to a good passing game — just as it’s been since the days of the Duluth Eskimos and Canton Bulldogs.

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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.

Since the Browns have returned they’ve lost games because:

• somebody took his helmet off too soon
• they blocked a potential game-winning field goal but didn’t subsequently recover the football
• there’s a delay on the instant-replay buzzer
• their game-winning field goal was waved off because the other team called time out
• the former receiver-who-caught-the-ball-was-forced-out-of-bounds rule apparently didn’t count when it’s a touchdown on the final play of the game

Bizarre defeats that other teams might suffer once every 10 or 20 years tend to happen to the Browns on an annual basis. And they’re hard to get over, especially at such a cruelly high frequency.

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There’s not much to wrap up this weekend. There’s no Tribe, no Browns, no Buckeyes. So what you get is what you get. You’re at the mercy of my mood and my temperament if you choose to continue on. And if you read this column regularly you’ll know that my mood and temperament are typically perfectly reflective of this city’s sports teams: 75% rotten with an occasional glimpse of hope.

It’s the Weekend Wrap.

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