We’ve expected (and feared) that this day was coming for a few weeks now, but that still didn’t make it any easier when we heard the news.

Cleveland Browns rookie quarterback Brandon Weeden will sit out Thursday’s game against Chicago, the final preseason friendly on the schedule as well as the last opportunity for Weeden and the rest of the rookie-infused offense to work together at game speed.

“He’s not going to play,” coach Pat Shurmur said on Tuesday when asked about Weeden. “For the most part, the guys that are ones will play very little if at all. There are a lot of things that we think about when we go and decide who is playing. I think about injury for the first game. I think about guys that need to show us more and guys going out there that want to compete and try to make this team. There’s a lot that goes into it.”

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To be a sports fan is often to live in the sometimes conflicting and complementary worlds of cynicism and denial. The more our teams disappoint us, the more cynical we become about their prospects. Yet we also deny the underlying reasons they disappoint, holding them to subjective standards they often aren't capable of achieving.

In Cleveland, these attitudes coexist, running deep, wide and long. To be a Cleveland fan is to be a cynic based simply on the almost complete lack of success by any of its three major franchises. No coach gets hired, no trade gets made, no player gets transacted without it invoking some sort of cynicism.

Yet despite the cynicism they embrace and endure in Cleveland the fans remain hopeless romantics in deep denial over a what it would take to make them less cynical in the first place. Instead we expect success simply because there are players wearing the name "Cleveland" on their jerseys.

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I certainly don’t want to play the role of Eeyore, the gloomy stuffed donkey of the Hundred Acre Wood, but I’m fairly certain the high point of the Browns’ 2012 season has come and gone.

It wasn’t when they drafted Trent Richardson or Brandon Weeden and it wasn’t when “Flying J” Haslam bought the team. It occurred very quietly over the summer on an ordinary day when a couple of Teamsters got up on a ladder with a power drill and some big fiberglass numbers.

As a result, within the Browns’ much-ballyhooed “Ring of Honor,” there finally is a notation of the franchise’s most cherished achievements. In the same font and size as the revered names that make up the Ring are the eight seasons in which the Browns won a league championship:

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1954 1955 1964

To which Browns fans gasp, “It’s about time.” For this marks the first time ever - either at CBS or old Municipal - that the Browns’ eight league championships have been enshrined outwardly to spectators inside the ballpark.

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If the seed of doubt can be planted, a controversy can exist.  Regardless of what Cavaliers fans might have once considered Mike Fratello’s Mark Price or Terrell Brandon dilemma at point guard to have been, the quarterback in the game of football is basically the only position in all of sports so directly associated with the word controversy.  Without exception, you cannot win without someone great at the position, so the seed of doubt is often planted.

We are no strangers to this, when it comes to the Cleveland Browns.  I’m guessing it’s been that way since Otto Graham called it quits; even Bernie Kosar wasn’t eternally immune to it.  We don’t need to re-hash those duct tape covered Tim Couch jerseys that most of us have seen by now, the ones where the names of every quarterback from Detmer to Delhomme (and perhaps beyond) have been scribbled on duct tape, then dismissed with a single dark black line through them.  In retrospect, years where the quarterback situation included the names Frye, Anderson, and Quinn were less controversial than they were just plain sad. 

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