Written by Jeff Rich

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Maybe, it’s just because we haven’t gotten over the move.  Maybe it’s the blood on Ray Lewis’s hands, or at least his suit.  But, maybe enough time has passed.  Did Browns fans, the ones that find a way to make every happening in the NFL rotate around Cleveland Browns football, find themselves rooting for Peyton Manning and the Broncos last weekend?

To a further extent, were we okay with John Elway’s team having their day in the sun once again, even if Elway was in a suite, wearing a suit.  It’s been a while since Bud Carson’s last playoff game, and even longer since the more popular games Browns-Broncos games that featured “The Fumble” and “The Drive”, but the result was always the same.  The Denver Broncos would go on to lose the Super Bowl every time, while Browns fans wondered why the universe kept doing them like that.

Were we to gain peace of mind from those humiliating Super Bowl losses that Elway and Dan Reeves, his head coach, would go on to experience?  We could play the hypothetical game with those Bronco Super Bowl losses either way; would it have been worth the while, just to lose the Super Bowl, or we would have played a lot better than Denver on the big stage, right?  No matter how you approach it, it’s a circular conversation that ends with reality hitting us in the face; the Browns have never played in a game branded the Super Bowl, a branding that began in 1966.

By the time Elway had his day, his days actually, Browns fans had bigger fish to fry, and Elway was able to navigate his way through the AFC playoffs for the fourth and fifth times in 1997 and 1998 without the obstacle or existence of anything known as the Cleveland Browns.  By the time the Browns were resurrected from the aforementioned move, Elway had hung them up, but ghosts of their past would still haunt them.

We all know the story of Bill Belichick, the last Browns Head Coach before the move, who was fired by the Baltimore organization before their braintrust came up with the “Ravens” name.  In fact, we know the stories of most of our ghosts including Nick Saban’s college success, Tom Dimitrioff’s good run in Atlanta’s front office, and of course the alleged Super Bowl that Art Modell could claim in 2001.  Once Modell sold off what he had left in the team (in 2004), and the last Cleveland Brown, Matt Stover, was gone (in 2008), the Ravens should have been just another team. 

By then, Cleveland should have a new team with new memories to aid us in forgetting what was lost, but most of us know the rebooted Browns well enough to know that not to be the case.  Modell sold the team to Steve Bisciotti in 2004, and Stover left the Ravens after the 2008 season, but one final piece to the puzzle of closure remains; Ray Lewis was taken by the Ravens with the 26th pick in the 1996 draft.  The undersized linebacker from Miami was their second first-round pick in their inaugural season; the first was used on Jonathan Ogden, a tackle from UCLA that would anchor their offensive line for the next decade.

The Browns were the fourth-worst team in football, struggling at the impossible task of playing football amid rumors of relocation, in 1995, which netted the new regime in Baltimore the Top 5 pick for Ogden’s services.  So, there’s that, but Ogden retired five years ago.  The thing about the other pick was Eric Metcalf, and how he was traded to Atlanta (with the 26th pick) for the 10th pick in the last draft of the first carnation of the Cleveland Browns.

With Kyle Brady off the board, taken 9th by the Jets, Belichick no longer wanted to be drafting 10th, and moved the pick (used to select JJ Stokes) to San Francisco for a late first, a third, and a fourth in 1995, plus the Niners first in 1996, a pick that we all know the Cleveland Browns wouldn’t live long enough to see.  Baltimore took Lewis with that pick.  All the Baltimore talk aside, the actual football that Browns fans had to suffer through, 5-11, in ’95 helped build the foundation of what made Baltimore great in the early 2000s.

Lost in all of the resentment, and we’ll leave the story of how Lewis was involved in a double homicide for another time, is that Denver never stopped kicking the Browns asses.  The new Browns are 0-6 against Denver since returning in 1999, but we can’t even pin the woes against Denver on expansion.  Since defeating the Broncos in Denver on a Monday Night in 1990, the Browns have dropped 10 straight to their Rocky Mountain nemesis.  That Monday Night game was played so long ago that ABC was promoting the show “Coach”, and controversy sparked when Jerry Van Dyke, one of the show’s co-stars, made some comments that were taken negatively by Cleveland viewers.

The Browns defeated the Broncos at The Stadium in 1989, the front-end of a two-game regular season winning streak against the team from Colorado, but dropped the AFC Championship 37-21 to the Broncos the following January, in a game that has no nickname.  Prior to that 16-13 win on October 1, 1989, the Browns had lost 10 straight to the former AFL team that donned mustard and brown once upon a time, going back to 1975.  In all, Denver leads the series, including the three AFC Championship games, with 22 victories in 27 tries.

Every Browns Head Coach, from Riverboat Sam to Pat Shurmur, has lost to them.  Chris Palmer took his 2-4 team out there in 2000; they were down 20-3 at the half in a game that saw Brian Griese look like Elway, and finished with Spergeon Wynn under center for the Browns in a 44-10 loss.  Butch Davis’s 4-9 team fared a bit better in 2003, a game that saw passes from Dennis Northcutt, Frisman Jackson, and Brant Boyer; the Browns kept Jake Plummer from channeling the ghosts of Elway, but Clinton Portis torched them for 139 yards on the ground in a 23-20 loss for the Browns.  Romeo Crennel dropped two to Denver; one with Charlie Frye, the other was Brady Quinn’s debut start, which was spoiled by Jay Cutler’s 400 yard performance, but really by Brandon McDonald’s ole approach to playing defense.

I was fortunate enough to attend Eric Mangini’s road debut in Denver in 2009, the first time the Browns would wear those solid brown pants in the regular season.  Needless to say, I came home with more stories about Eric Cartman’s favorite dining location, Casa Bonita, than I had about the football game.  The game started off well enough, as Browns games sometimes do, when Lamont Jordan was stripped by Blake Costanzo on the opening kickoff, and Brady Quinn got to start the offense at the Denver 22.  After a nice catch and run by Braylon Edwards got them to the 7, the drive stalled and Phil Dawson kicked the first of his two field goals, which would equal all of the Browns scoring in that 27-6 loss.

Pittsburgh lost to the Bears that day, so that’s something.  As a matter of fact, my fellow Browns fans opted to walk back to the hotel to watch that, rather than sticking around to watch Peyton Hillis and Corell Buckhalter find the end zone to put the game on ice for the home team.  Back then, we were still bitter, and the Denver fans were not shy about reminding us why.  I’m fairly thick-skinned, and can take a little ribbing, but it got out of hand.

“If it’s brown, flush it down.”  How novel, you see, because brown is the color of poop.

“Hey look!  Byner’s going to fumble again.”  Now, this guy was obviously a historian of the game, thanks for throwing that in our faces in 2009.  Earnest Byner, the Browns hero right up until that moment, was stripped by Jeremiah Castille on January 17, 1988 at the old Mile High Stadium, which I noticed was a parking lot by 2009.  On a personal level, I have a lot of bitter running through me, so I went to Denver with an open mind, but the benefit of the doubt served this group no good.  This statement is based on experience; Broncos fans are dicks and there’s a reason no one likes them.

What sticks out from that trip was a brief conversation I had with a Browns fan at the breakfast buffet.  Now, keep in mind, that I lived in Arizona, where the home team has little following, even with the added bump of the Cardinals going to the Super Bowl the year before.  I said something about the locals really supporting the team, which angered my brother in fandom, “(Forget) them; they owe it all to us.”

I was game; I wasn’t sure if that was true, but I bought in to that.  After 11 years of the new Browns, I was ready to cling to some history.  Sure enough, Broncos history doesn’t read very well before the days of John Elway besting us on our own field in 1987.  Their entire ten year run in the AFL reads like, well, the rebooted Browns; nine losing seasons were highlighted by a 7-7 season in Year 3.

In 1977, with Craig Norton at quarterback, Red Miller’s team was 12-2.  They took down Pittsburgh and Oakland in the playoffs before running into a buzz saw that wore stars on their helmets in the Super Bowl.  Denver went to the playoffs a few times after that, but were one and done every year, until a comeback win over the Patriots on January 4, 1987.  That 22-17 win at Mile High punched their ticket to Cleveland the following Sunday.

With the score tied at 13, Bernie Kosar hit Brian Brennan down the left sideline and Brennan broke away from Dennis Smith for the 48-yard score.  The Browns led 20-13 and, after Denver mishandled the ensuing kick, it appeared the Browns were headed to the Super Bowl.  The fans were going crazy, and it was a scene like no other that I’d ever witnessed in Cleveland.  I was reminded of that scene on Saturday, watching the Denver fans cheer their team, who needed just one more stop after having to punt with 1:15 left.

By the time Joe Flacco took possession on his own 23, there were just 69 seconds left in the career of Ray Lewis.  Finally, “some closure on the whole Baltimore thing,” I thought.  I even took a moment to realize that I want the Broncos to win, even with Elway in the suite, even in those orange jerseys.  I’m realizing that I don’t have any beef with Denver, and we’re about a minute from clipping that final hangnail, as the last object of our Baltimore disdain would walk into the sunset.

First Down: Flacco, incomplete looking for Dennis Pitta.  1:05 left.

Second Down: Flacco runs for 7 yards, not exactly Elway-like. :51 left.

Third Down: Desperation heave by Flacco towards Jacoby Jones on the right sideline, and it’s caught!  70 yards, touchdown, game tied.

There’s no way that he should have been able to catch that ball behind Rahim Moore.  Now, this couldn’t have been as long, as orchestrated, or as memorable as the sequence of plays that broke the hearts of Browns fans two decades ago, given the limited ability of Joe Flacco, but if Browns fans ever wanted to see Broncos fans suffer a drive, this is as close as it gets.  Yet, we don’t get to enjoy it.

Too much time has passed, so much so that we can’t enjoy The Drivers being driven.  Little did we know that losing football games wasn’t the low point, but losing a football team can never be forgiven.  With Modell in the ground, and Ray on his “last ride”, we can’t ease up on the Ravens as Browns fans.  Their very existence will forever allow them to thrive off of our broken hearts.