Green Bay struggles at home against the Gabberts.  The Bears almost blow it vs. the Cams.  The only pick that everyone got right last week was the Browns in the home upset over the Riverses.  Thank you, crappy Cleveland weather and thank you, Robert Meachum.

As the days tick down to my wife's delivery day (appropriately "D-Day") and the end of sleep as I know it, the boys and I find ourselves at 55-62 (DJC), 54-63 (BT), and 53-64 (Me) after BT went 8-6 and DJC/Me went 6-8 in Week 8.  So, midway through the season, we are in a dead heat of mediocrity.  It's like watching Seth Rogen try to dunk.  Yes, boys and girls, it's that enthralling.

BT finished the first half with an Executive Lock record of 4-4, so even those "sure things" were as ordinary as a Steelers fan at a Golden Corral.

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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.

The vast majority of those of us able to access this type of column via the internet has absolutely no first-hand memory of seeing man land on the moon for the first time. We were either unborn, too young to remember it, or simply too young to fully appreciate its massive significance.

Consequently, we tend to take landing on the moon for granted, ranking it behind other, slightly more relatable generation-altering achievements like the internet or parachute pants.

Fortunately, the Browns’ blowout victory over the mighty New England Patriots two years ago gave the subset of that moon-landing-deprived group who are also Cleveland sports fans a general idea of what it must have been like to see Neil Armstrong do-si-doe across the sea of tranquility back in ’69.

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Coach Marty Schottenheimer was gone. It was a great run, but by now, many of the local fans and media had had enough. And since Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell tended to base public decisions on public opinion, Marty had to go.

To some extent, it was the coach’s fault.

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What is a miserable sports town? 

How about a city that’s never won a Super Bowl?  That’s something that’s certainly more miserable in this day and age than it was before the days of the internet or the existence of the Baltimore Ravens.  And, even then it stunk.  What about a few trips to the World Series in the last thirty years, but no World Championship banners to show for it?  Does that make for solid misery among sports fans?  Surely, if you factor in being “that city” that lost a professional sports franchise, people must immediately hear the name of your town and think, “what an awful place to be a fan”.

At least the weather here is incredibly awesome.  No, seriously, how could you not enjoy that weather on Sunday?

Okay, I admit it; that NFL game on Sunday was difficult to watch.  Only a Southeastern Conference apologist could justify anything about a 7-6 football game being great, but only when teams from ESPN’s beloved faction of college football are involved, certainly not an NFL contest between the Browns and Chargers.  Boy, the coach of that football team sure doesn’t look like he has a clue, and at the end of the day, he was the loser, regardless of what the scoreboard said.

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