Written by Jeff Rich

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There’s very little that we can do about it.

As I sat with my fellow Marines in that middle school lunch room, we knew that we would be able to do nothing if some juvenile delinquent decided to dump a tray of food on one of us.  Sure, some ballsy pre-adolescent would face a series of consequences, but it would serve as little consolation for being humiliated during our efforts to provide community service of some sort at that northern Georgia institute of learning.  Of course, the children were completely respectful, no such incident occurred, but it got me thinking.

How fortunate I was to not be that victim of incessant bullying in my youth, or as a young member of the military in the south.  Of course, I was forced to pay my dues in the form of being a Browns fan, especially being a Browns fan in the present day.  I’ve never been forced to surrender my lunch money…well, perhaps once, if you’ll allow me to consider that beloved, scrappy team of my youth as “lunch money”.  In that case, Baltimore took my lunch money 17 years ago, and has since pestered me in a way that’s made it difficult to let things go.

You see, I’m not one to hold a grudge; really, I’m not.  I’m a proponent of letting the sleeping dogs lie, but not when those dogs happen to be sleeping in my bed for nearly two decades.  It’s bad enough to forfeit you lunch money, even on a daily basis, but the part of NFL history where the Browns and Ravens have been forced to coexist has made it as if that very lunch money sponsors a new form of humiliation every week.

They couldn’t have just put them in the NFC.  They couldn’t just be too unnatural of a rival for Pittsburgh.  They couldn’t just resume the decades of hard luck that plagued them as an NFL franchise in Cleveland.  No, the people of Baltimore were given the gift of a perennial contender, painlessly reaping the benefits of that season of turmoil that Cleveland fans suffered through in 1995.  Allegedly, they won some sort of championship in 2001, but I believe I went shopping that day, so I don’t know. 

Yes, that stunk and felt unfair on multiple levels, but it was also a long time ago.  If it ends there, with Art holding up some sort of prize, it’s probably over by now.  It ends there if the Browns are part of that fairy tale called parity, part of the rotation of AFC North Championships and playoff berths.  Even Cincinnati has been a guest at the party three times in the last seven years.  In all but three of those seasons, the Browns have had sole possession of last place in the AFC North.  In the meantime, Baltimore has occupied the top spot in four of those seasons.

At least, the Browns will always have 2007, the year the Ravens finished dead last, while the Browns tied the Steelers for the top spot with a 10-6 record.  If that’s not the most misleading statement I’ll ever write I don’t know what is; that tie for the top spot equaled exactly zero playoff games for the 2007 Browns, who immediately regressed in 2008.  If we spent too much time enjoying the Ravens following up a 13-3 season with a 5-11 season that included a Week 15 loss to the 1-15 Dolphins, we missed the part where their season point-differential improved from -109 to +141 from ’07 to ’08.

Even in 2007, the season where the Browns did finish 10-6, they were only +20, and that was the Browns best season since returning, in terms of Wins and Losses.  That positive differential came on the strength of a 27-13 victory in Cleveland and a 33-30 comeback in Baltimore later in the year.  That bizarre game in Baltimore was played on November 18, 2007; the next time the Browns take the field in a game that counts, five years will have passed since they last defeated the Ravens.

Without those 2007 victories, the Browns are now 5-21 in the other 13 years of playing a home and away set of games with the Ravens.  Hell, I don’t really need to manipulate things to make things seem worse than they are, 7-21 is bad enough.  We’re the Youngstown State to their Ohio State; even William & Mary is more competitive with big, bad Maryland.  When I was a kid, the Browns had lost 16 straight at Three Rivers Stadium.  Now, I just wish the Browns were relevant enough in Steelers lore for a streak like that to matter.  The Ravens took that away from us, and they have a ten game streak of their own against the Browns, and we don’t even need to qualify that streak by declaring the location.  Half of them happened in our backyard, Cleveland Browns Stadium.

Our backyard is our own Alamo.  The Ravens are 10-4, though they are 11-3 against the Browns in whatever they call their home digs.  They’ve been shut out 3 times, all at home, by the Ravens; 12-0 in 2000, 35-0 in 2003, and 16-0 on Monday Night in 2009.  In another 4 of the 28 contests, they were held in single digits.  I have a hard time figuring out which of the 21 losses have been the worst.  The Monday Night game in 2009 wasn’t too bad on the scoreboard, a 16 point shutout, but it spoke volumes about how the Browns weren’t ready for prime-time (and still aren’t).  That 35-0 game a few days before Christmas in 2003 stunk, but what’s worse about that one was that Jamal Lewis’s 205 yard effort wasn’t even his best performance against the Browns…in 2003.  Not to take away anything from a 2066 yard season, but he did gain 500 of them against the Browns in 120 minutes of outscoring the 5-11 Browns by 55.

Maybe it’s just a case of “what have you done for me lately”, but the losses to Baltimore under Pat Shurmur’s charge resonate with me the most.  In Pat’s first contest with the “old Browns”, concept that he “gets” because he understood the anguish of the St. Louis fans losing the Cardinals in 1988, the Ravens outplayed his inept offense, but it was not exactly a heartbreak.  It was just a case of a good team taking down a bad one.  The second time around though, the Browns would hang tough, and a single penalty stuck out as the straw that broke the camel’s back in the game’s final minutes.  Phil Taylor’s offsides penalty was just the first of three games that the Browns conceded by way of the yellow flag when the offense has no intention of snapping the football.

In six contests with the AFC North’s axis of evil, Shurmur has kept his team in all but one of them for three full quarters, and found ways to lose all six.  All of the talent in the world, which the Browns don’t exactly have, can’t circumvent a guy like Shurmur on the road to victory.  Even the most malicious bully couldn’t inflict the pain that Shurmur has brought to Browns fans in just 25 games.

Just because we fight back every now and again, because we go beneath the type of people that we’d all like to think we are in order to cheer the injuries of Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs, it doesn’t mean we aren’t always getting our asses kicked by that move.

Maybe I should get real about how valuable that lunch money really was.  It was 7 playoff appearances in my lifetime, 3 gut-wrenching AFC Championships in that time span, and a 60 year building on a landfill.  Worthless memories in the eyes of those spoiled with great football in the present day, but they were my worthless memories, and I can’t even have those.

Instead, I just end up wearing that cafeteria lunch on my lap…twice a year…going on fifteen years now.  And, there is very little I can do about it.