Written by Jeff Rich

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Some things just aren’t worth talking about.  They either bore you or frustrate you.  Though they have bored others and certainly frustrated us for many years, we still talk about the Cleveland Browns.  Some are healthier than others about it, but for the disturbed soul, mine is present and accounted for, we don’t stop talking about them or thinking about them.

People question our motives and wonder why we do it to ourselves.  Some just tell us to stop, as if we enjoy the self mutilation that the hoping and wishing entails.  There’s not a word in the English language that describes just how pathetic it has been, and that just disappoints our friends and acquaintances.  No one really hates us for it; that’s the worst part of all, not mattering.  If they think we’re bitter and misbehaved, that’s fine, but our football matters.  It always has, and anything you have to say to the contrary is just fightin’ words.

Finally, with an owner that we don’t really know yet, a General Manager who suddenly has our collective approval, and a Head Coach that gained a miraculous stay of execution, our beloved Cleveland Browns are relevant.  On the surface, it’s business as usual; at least to look at the current NFL Standings, the Browns are still holding down that fourth seed in the American Football Conference’s North Division with four wins and eight losses.  We’re only three quarters of the way through the season, but most would still define that as not enough wins.  Frankly, we’ve had enough with “not enough”; it hasn’t been enough to be part of any NFL conversation outside of Northeast Ohio.

A funny thing happened to the Browns on the way thinking about the next year’s draft.  It started a few weeks ago on a day like any other that had me listening to Christopher Russo on Mad Dog Unleashed on the commute home; he was talking shop with John Madden.  With limited time, he could have asked the legendary coach and former announcer anything about any of the 32 NFL teams, yet he chose to ask the name behind the video game how he felt about the Browns.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Mad Dog, he’s a bit of a snob about what piques his interest in all of sport, emphasizing only what’s relevant, so I was a bit surprised to hear him go there.  Madden had good things to say; he loved their defense, and indicated that things were going in the right direction.  If you’re new to the subject matter here, the results would indicate that the right direction is a foreign concept to the Cleveland Browns and has been for quite some time.  Actually, as a rule of thumb, any and all optimism related to Cleveland sports is to be taken with a grain of salt.

Once upon a time, the Browns played on a Sunday, and then again the following Sunday without losing either contest.  I even double-checked my math to verify that in both contests, the one against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Cleveland and then the one against the Raiders of Oakland, our beloved Browns had a greater number of points.  The defense made stops at critical times and took the ball away when present the opportunity to do so.  While some things remain the same, the offense didn’t necessarily go out of their way to take advantage of some advantageous situations; they did just enough to achieve victory.

It is just enough, it might be a small victory at this point, but it’s honestly one our finer small victories.  You never like to admit it, but it has gotten progressively easier to get used to the losing.  For us, the ones who don’t play, coach, or do anything that affects the outcome on Sunday, the losing isn’t easy, but we don’t have to wear it, even though the weirdoes of my ilk tend to do so anyways.  However, it’s the ones getting beaten, battered, and concussed that don’t have a real world outside of the mystical orange and brown entity that consumes our non-reality.  There has to be some real shame, even if it’s not completely their own doing.

The Cleveland Browns have not lost a football game since November 18^th.  When they take the field against Kansas City on Sunday, three weeks will have passed since that unfortunate result in Dallas.  That’s basically an eternity.  So much time has passed that known muck-raker Colin Cowherd of ESPN Radio fame has hinted that there’s a future for the Browns.  This is the same guy that saw a young team go 10-6 in 2007, then call it “fools gold”.   I don’t love the guy or his show, I learned of his fading cynicism from something that someone else posted on social media, but you have to love it when the non-believers start believing in your cause.

Why do they believe?  I mean, we always want to believe that the unknown might become something wonderful, but we know that things are to be taken with a grain of salt anywhere near the junction of I-71, I-77, and I-90.  In the absence of knowledge, we have belief; we see the term Believe-land and love it.  At least I love it.  Then, there’s the eyeball test that begs the question, is this the beginning of a good football team?

Every good football team needs a good quarterback.  There’s simply no denying that, and no matter how long we pin our lack of a real NFL product on the actions of the late Art Modell, that conniving scum of the earth has done little to plague the Cleveland Browns quarterback situation since taking his affairs to the land of The Wire seventeen years ago.  That’s a question that is still unanswered in Cleveland as far as I’m concerned, but there’s a silver lining to this enigma at the moment.

I can’t say for sure that Brandon Weeden won’t be “the guy”, even though you’d be a lunatic to say that he is that, right now.  As much attention as he does get, being an anomaly as a 29-year old rookie and a 1^st round quarterback to boot, the fact that he isn’t Andrew Luck or Robert Griffin III keeps him out of the brightest spotlight.  His numbers, 13 TD/15 INT/2820 YARDS, don’t make Weeden’s star shine any brighter than his 4-8 record, but he is the best.

Being the best quarterback the Browns have in 2012 invites a lot of politically incorrect similes, but I’m sure you get the point.  If you take the microscope off of Weeden, you will notice that there’s reason for the national attention, but also reason for doubt; don’t ever lose sight of that grain of salt, Cleveland.  Everything starts with a good offensive line, and the Browns not only have one of those, but it’s super young too!  Joe Thomas is the old man on the block in his sixth season, but he’s still younger than his rookie quarterback…and in a good way.  Take 1^st round picks Alex Mack and Mitchell Schwartz at face value and be grateful for a 5^th round project like Jason Pinkston turning into a Day 1 starter at Left Guard; that eliminates an area that can be such a big question mark for so many teams.  Basically, it gives a team that’s building, a solid foundation. 

In addition to attempting quick fixes on a foundation of sand, the irrelevant Browns of our past never managed to put any consistent playmakers on the field.  These new Browns, the ones worth talking about, haven’t necessarily had enough time to put together of body of work that sells us on consistency, but there are signs of better times to come. 

Montario Hardesty, commonly thought of as a reach for Tom Heckert, has been a ghost for two seasons with the Browns.  Add Trent Richardson to the mix, and suddenly you have the unknown commodity from Tennessee adding a bit of spark to the running game while the young superstar from Alabama catches his breath.  Arguments can be made, whether you’re buying Josh Gordon as a premier receiver in this league or not, that the Browns 2^nd round pick in the Supplemental Draft has forced Greg Little and Mohamed Massaquoi to go out and earn their paychecks as receivers for the gun-slinging Brandon Weeden.

Because the offense, though not light years away, isn’t quite adequate, a lot has been asked of Dick Jauron’s defense.  There are not a lot of superstars to carry the load over there, and honestly, if it hasn’t been one thing with this unit, it’s been another.  The absence of Joe Haden and Phil Taylor to disciplinary action and injury hasn’t gone unnoticed, but those guys are back and things are better.  Haden has missed five games, and the Browns lost every last one of them; on the list of reasons that the Browns failed to achieve victory in those contests, you couldn’t omit his absence from that list in any single game.  They are 4-3 with him on the field; that math isn’t complicated.

With Taylor back on the field, the Browns are somewhat formidable up front, but there’s a noticeable deficiency in talent in just about every other aspect of the defense.  In the past, the national pundits would have dismissed this unit on the whole.  Now, it appears the answers may outweigh the questions, which means there’s light at the end of the tunnel. 

We all know how much it stinks to here about the process and how many years away we always are, but it now appears, considering the recognition (as limited as it is), that something is working.  We aren’t thinking about draft position or who the savior might be, but winning games.  Maybe Peter King will write about them, maybe they’ll be a topic on PTI, and maybe a video game cover will be more than a stuff-the-ballot-box-gimmick.

Maybe, we’ll get something more than a token story about our Browns from the national media.  Maybe, NBC will start flexing into us.  Maybe, we aren’t that far from seeing the Browns play in late January and early February.

For now, it’s just nice that people are noticing them.  Those media types in New York, not for nothing, I’m not saying; I’m just saying.