Written by Jeff Rich

---

It was definitely in play longer than it needed to be.  We wondered if the next victory would come courtesy of the Cavaliers or the Browns, and that’s certainly a question that we can entertain again since the NBA season tips off in Cleveland in a few weeks.  What’s worse than that is considering whether Terry Francona would lead a Cleveland team to victory before Pat Shurmur.  No one expected much from the Browns this year; we all hoped for a few wins, but I doubt anyone would have bet their life on the Browns winning at least one.

For those who did bet their lives, the governor called in with a reprieve for them by sending reinforcements from the southern part of the state to spare the NFL’s Northeast Ohio chapter the type of futility that was seen on other shores of Lake Erie not long ago.  This was not the closest call the Browns have had with the infamy of a Blutarsky, but we almost would have been more willing to accept it from the 1999 team in their inaugural Expansion year.  John McKay’s 1976 Bucs had that going for them; Rod Marinelli’s 2008 Detroit Lions did not.

Like most Browns fans, I feel relieve that we’ve been spared the embarrassment of 0-16, and that’s good enough for the moment.  This isn’t a time to get crazy, and start thinking about 11-5 or playoffs, but we also shouldn’t believe that Sunday’s 34-24 win over the Bengals was the high point.  It’s just time to enjoy knowing that our team was the best team on the field on Sunday.  Now, I’m not one to get on board with “the Draft is our Super Bowl” mentality that our friends who root for that team in Western Pennsylvania like to brand us with, but I don’t need playoffs or even meaningful December football right now.  I just needed that first victory.

It’s a step in the right direction, but a necessary step that every single NFL team, except the 2008 Detroit Lions, has taken since the NFL went to a 16-game schedule in 1978.  The fact is, the longer the season goes on, the more likely it is to happen, even though it’s really only happened twice in modern history.  Those Lions, with Jim Schwartz at the helm, were in a precarious situation the following year; improved with Matthew Stafford on board, but they were still not entitled to any Ws.  They picked up their first victory in 20 tries in Week 3 of the 2009 season with a decisive 19-14 win over Washington.  They finished the season 2-14, but I have my doubts that a team on a 26-game losing streak would have had the intestinal fortitude to overcome a 24-3 deficit in the second quarter, even if was the brown pants Browns on the other sideline.

That 38-37 victory over Cleveland on November 22^nd 2009, a collapse that was humiliating in these parts, would be their last until October 10^th of the following year, but 2-14 gave them a lot more to build on than 0-16, that’s for certain.  The 2010 season didn’t appear to deliver much promise either; the Lions entered their 13^th game of the year with the Packers at a 2-10 mark, but came away with a 7-3 victory against an Aaron Rodgers-less Green Bay team, then won their final 3 games to finish 6-10.  How about that 4-game season-ending winning streak?  Does that sound familiar, Browns fans?

Instead of following up that strong finish with a 5-11 season like the Browns did, the Lions actually made something of themselves in 2011.  Many of you will remember that they came out of the gate 5-0, and though they limped to the finish line, their 10-6 record was good enough to clinch a playoff berth.  In fact, the winless Buccaneers of ’76 took a similar path in the aftermath of finishing winless, winning 2 in ’77, 5 in ’78, and reaching the NFC Championship in 1979 after a 10-6 regular season.  So, recovery is possible, but it isn’t about the destination as much as it’s about a very specific part of the journey, and going winless for an entire season on any level is a really raw deal for the paying customers.  Even with the bar set incredibly low, they have to give us one, just one.

"We'd save everyone the time and trouble if we just went out and shot ourselves."

Lou Brown (Major League)

I’ve actually never been a fan of a winless team, but I’ve lived that nightmare.  I book-ended my “nothing-to-write-home-about” playing career, hanging zeroes in the win column in my first and last seasons of play.  It stinks, and you start to take it home with you eventually.  Around the half-way point, you start worrying that it’s going to happen, and in my case, it did…twice!  At least, the Cleveland kids that went to Ignatius or Glenville, or perhaps Ohio State, experienced some level of football joy, even if it did all go “splat” when rooting for the Browns on Sunday.

While I could argue that the Browns have spent a lot of their history going the wrong way down a one-way street, they have never quite hit that wall of ineptitude hard enough to join those Bucs or that Lions team of 2008.  If you figure this season as incomplete, the Browns have been fortunate enough to win at least two games in every one of the 62 years of their existence.  We mostly know about the scares of 1999 and 2011, but Forrest Gregg’s 1975 team tempted fate for nine games, and they would have been the first winless team, before winning three of their last five to finish 3-11.  If you’re like me, too young to speak wisely about 1975, the 2009 season might be remembered as one that was quite terrifying to a fan that trembles at the thought of a winless Browns team.

They positively stole a game in Buffalo in Week 5, a 6-3 win courtesy of a Roscoe Parrish fumble on a punt return at the Buffalo 16 with 2:59 to play.  Derek Anderson was 2 of 17 passing in that one, and the Browns punter, Dave Zastudil was legitimately the player of the game.  Had they not won that game, they might have been 0-12 hosting the Steelers with their standard December taxi-squad, and would have been more likely to finish 0-16 than 5-11.  After a while that losing can get to be an acquired taste, and sadly, it doesn’t bother you as much and you forget what if feels like to win.  It was probably like that for my high school, which saw two graduating classes go wire-to-wire (4 years) without winning a game.

The 2012 Browns now have that taste out of their mouth.  0-16 is off the table, and we are actually in that rare situation as Browns fans, where we can speculate about a winning streak.  What lies ahead for the Browns is a trip to whatever they call Indianapolis’s home stadium, then home games against the struggling Chargers and suddenly crippled Baltimore Ravens.  No one can realistically talk playoffs, even if you actually can visualize the team being 3-5 during their Bye Week, but I think we all have found that we’re no longer searching the schedule for winnable games.

We can now see that we root for a team that’s capable of winning football games, and I do mean that in the plural sense.  Make no mistake, just because there are more games that are “winnable”, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t all very much “losable” also.  The Browns are nothing, if not inconsistent, and for the time being, that’s a polite way of say that they’re a bad football team. 

After the bye, they go to Dallas, and the Cowboys are very capable of their own brand of dumpster fire, even in their own building.  At 2-3, the Fighting Romos are technically just a game better than the Browns, but the transitive property doesn’t bode well for the Browns here when you compare their game against a common opponents.  Both lost tough games in Baltimore, but the Cowboys went to New Jersey and took down the Champs in a game that the Champs typically don’t lose.  The Browns went in there, and lost 41-27, which is pretty typical for Pat Shurmur coached teams.

There are the two games with Pittsburgh, who is obviously struggling, but the Browns have been their slump-busters of late.  Maybe we’ve turned the corner, but nobody is holding their breath on that one, or those two, I’m sure.  Can the Browns win in Oakland?  Sure.  But, can they be humiliated by these Raiders?  If you know the Browns, you know that it’s absolutely possible.

The home game against Romeo, Hillis, and the Chiefs looks a lot better than it did in August or even a week ago, but the Redskins look to be a taller order than RGIII naysayers like myself would have thought them to be.  It’s hard to say whether they can weather the Broncos or Patriots on the road in December this year, but one things for sure…

They won’t be entering either game without a win, and public enemies #1 and #2 will not be hammering the final nail into the coffin of such a winless season.  Even with what some would consider a less than inspiring win over the Bengals at home, that fear of 0-16 is out of play, and off the table.