The Cleveland Browns lost last Sunday, and this is a bad thing. We want to see the Browns win on Sundays so we can feel vindicated investing not only the three hours spent watching the game, but all the hours spent watching training camp practices and preseason games and reading about who the new gunner will be on punt coverage and all the other minutiae involved in religiously following an NFL team. When the Browns lose it makes us feel…whatever the opposite of vindicated is.

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The Cleveland Browns take their Pro Bowl-laden roster to Pittsburgh today to close out the 2013 NFL season against the Steelers.

Pittsburgh is holding out slim hopes of making the playoffs after an 0-4 start to the season, while the Browns are battling for yet another high draft pick after starting out the year at 3-2.

Today could be the final game in a Browns uniform for several players, most notably Alex Mack, T.J. Ward, D’Qwell Jackson, Greg Little and Brandon Weeden.

With any luck, the game will also mark the final starting appearance by quarterback Jason Campbell, who will be looking to join the elite group of Cleveland quarterbacks who faced the Steelers in their final game as Browns quarterback.

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There is a point in every team's season, it doesn't matter the sport, doesn't matter if the athletes are paid, where it becomes clear that ultimate success will not be achieved. What separates good organizations from the bad is how their players respond in those circumstances.

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Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, yet expecting different results.  I don’t know how many aspects of Cleveland Browns football that could apply to, but the easiest thesis to write on the Cleveland Browns is that they’ve never gotten it right at quarterback, and for that reason alone, nothing else could have ever gone right.  Look, that’s obviously a way to over-simplify 15 years of dysfunction, but it’s a good place to start, and one cannot possibly overstate how imperative it is to have a functional quarterback, in order to have a successful franchise.  People that don’t follow closely enough call it an obsession with finding a quarterback, but the rest of us understand; finding that cog is the beginning the middle, and the end in the NFL.

The Browns have had 15 draft days, and have come away with zero successful franchise quarterbacks, despite having the first overall pick twice, and few drafts without an opportunity to make a selection in the Top 10.  Those high picks have been made available to them, because they fail to win enough ball games to drop down much further; it’s a matter of cause and effect.  Because they do not have a quarterback, the effect of 11 and 12 loss seasons put them into advantageous draft positions.  While they haven’t exactly whiffed on every top pick they’ve made in the last 15 years, they haven’t even stumbled backwards into anyone above average to play the position, on draft day, and that might just violate some laws of probability.

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