Written by Jonathan Knight

---

Many people believe it’s unhealthy to revel in the failure of others and celebrate a rival’s suffering and disappointment. I have no doubt that’s true. 

It’s also unhealthy to drink your own urine.

But when you’re stranded in an endless desert, you haven’t had anything to drink for 47 years, and it’s all you’ve got, you’ll gladly drink piss. And it will taste like a margarita.

Such is life for Browns fans around Super Bowl time. Though we have nothing to gain or lose from the outcome, we naturally choose sides and silently (let’s be honest...jealously) root for one of the teams to reach the promised land we can only dream of.

Tough call this year: we can side with modest, hard-luck New York City or cast our lot with soft-spoken, not-at-all-self-absorbed Boston, both of whom have waited as long for a championship as you did the last time you used self-checkout at Giant Eagle.

For most of us, the tie-breaker is Bill Belichick. To see him hoist another trophy above his trollish, dried-apple head would be the cherry atop a season-long sundae of pain. 

So...go Giants, I guess.

But even if the Patriots lose in the same spirit-crushing fashion as the Baltimore Ravens did in the AFC Championship (heh-heh), it’ll be difficult to whip up any true sense of celebration. Similarly, if New England wins, the scar tissue we’ve built up around the incision where Belichick removed a good portion of our human resiliency won’t allow there to be any real pain.

Super Bowl XLVI may not be one, but over the years there have been a handful of Super Bowls that have evoked real emotion for Browns fans, both good and bad.

The 5 Worst Super Bowls for Browns Fans

5.. Super Bowl III: Jets 16, Colts 7 (1968)

To be sure, part of this agony was watching pretentious New York City somehow adopt the role of underdog and win yet another championship. But mostly it was seeing the upstart Jets from the goofy AFL completely outplay the team that had annihilated the Browns in the NFL Championship two weeks earlier.

The 13-1 Colts, thought going in to be perhaps the greatest club of all time, had pimp-slapped the Browns 34-0 in Cleveland to win the NFL title. Browns fans would have taken solace in a Baltimore Super Bowl romp, knowing that the best team won and that the Browns had gone as far as was humanly possible.

But then a loudmouth New York quarterback guaranteed victory and went on to make the Colts (and by extension, the Browns) look silly.

A fitting start to our Super Bowl era.  

 

4. Super Bowl XL: Steelers 21, Seahawks 10 (2005)

By the 21st century, we’d accepted the Steel Curtain’s four NFL titles of the 1970s as embarrassing but ancient history, like the Johnstown Flood or Watergate. We had moved on, comforted by the reality that we hadn’t been forced to experience the torture of a Steeler victory parade in more than a quarter-century.

Then the bastards came out of nowhere in 2005 to win three road playoff games to get to the Super Bowl, where they got to play the underachieving Seattle Seahawks, coached by your friend and mine, Mike Holmgren.

After the Steelers’ hopelessly boring victory, countless droves of new Pittsburgh “fans” were instantly hatched and came crawling out of the woodwork with stories about how they had an uncle who’d once driven on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, therefore they’d always followed the Steelers.

Thanks for nothing, Holmgren. 

 

3. Super Bowl XXI: Giants 39, Broncos 20 (1986)

It should have been us.

This was the first time Browns fans ever sat down in front of their televisions on Super Bowl Sunday and could honestly say without hyperbole that our team deserved to be there. And while we certainly weren’t rooting for John Elway and Co., watching them knock off the Giants would have brought some sense of satisfaction and closure.

Instead, Denver spit the bit, getting obliterated for the first time in what became the holy trinity of Super Bowl blowouts. The elusive Elway was suddenly not so elusive and got dropped like a calf at a rodeo for a safety, Rich Karlis missed an even shorter field goal than the one he missed to beat the Browns, and the Broncos gave up 30 points in the second half alone.

And they called us chokers.

 

2. Super Bowl XXII: Redskins 42, Broncos 10 (1987)

This one still hurts like a bitch.

1987 was our shot, our window of opportunity. Not only did we have our best team in an era of good teams, but the NFC’s top three clubs had all been upset in the playoffs, leaving just vulnerable Washington to represent the conference in the Super Bowl.

But The Fumble left us home alone on Super Sunday watching the Broncos once again piss down their legs on the big stage, this time against a clearly inferior opponent. Denver even jumped out to a 10-0 lead, but then the Redskins somehow scored five touchdowns in the second quarter to turn it into a typical Bronco Super Bowl bloodletting.

Of the five Super Bowls the Browns came within a victory of, this is the one they absolutely would have won.

Dammit.

 

1. Super Bowl XXXV: Ravens 34, Giants 7 (2000)

The events leading up to this little episode are so bloodcurdling that it seems like an abominable, sweaty nightmare. That we still haven’t woken up from.

Bad enough the Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens. Bad enough Brian Billick spurned the Browns to take the Ravens’ head coaching job in 1999. Bad enough the Ravens dominated their first four meetings after the Browns returned. 

Bad enough Ray Lewis killed two guys from Akron and got away with it. Bad enough the 2000 Ravens made the playoffs with Trent Dilfer as their quarterback while the Browns went 3-13 with marginally-less-horrible Doug Pederson. Bad enough that through an amazing collage of choke jobs, the wild-card Ravens wound up in the Super Bowl against a mediocre Giants team.

But for fucking Art Modell to win a fucking Super Bowl five years after setting fire to Cleveland on his way out the fucking door?

No.

Just no.

It didn’t happen and we refuse to accept that it did.

 

The 5 Best Super Bowls for Browns Fans

5. Super Bowl XXX: Cowboys 27, Steelers 17 (1995)

In the final indignity to cap an autumn filled with plagues of Biblical proportions, as the Browns were packing their boxes and loading up the U-Haul for the trip to Baltimore, the Steelers reached their first Super Bowl in 16 years.

Granted, our spirit was pretty well broken by this point and we were more interested in the special hour-long episode of Friends after the game, but it was still satisfying to watch the gritty Steelers fall short to glitzy Dallas thanks to Neil O’Donnell forgetting what team he played for.

Knowing it was possible for Pittsburgh to finally lose a Super Bowl helped show Cleveland that it was possible to survive three years without football.

 

4. Super Bowl XVI: 49ers 26, Bengals 21 (1981)

Today we forget just how humiliating 1981 was. The Kardiac Kids had collapsed, now losing nail-biters instead of winning them, and in one season plummeted from Super Bowl contention to 5-11 (or as we’ve come to know it, “Lerner Land”).

Meanwhile, our snot-nosed, freckle-faced, 13-year-old stepbrother came out of nowhere to get to the Super Bowl before we did. And, oh yeah, they were owned by a former Browns coach who we fired. And coached by a former Browns coach. Who we also fired.

Luckily, the San Francisco 49ers were to the 1980s Cincinnati Bengals what the Broncos were to the Browns, and Joe Montana & Co. delivered the first of their four titles in the decade with a not-as-close-as-the-final-score-sounds victory to deliver at least a morsel of justice.

 

3. Super Bowl XLV: Packers 31, Steelers 25 (2010)

This was like a refreshingly cool breeze on a stifling summer day. The Browns had just finished another miserable season and hired their second inadequate coach in two years, the Cavs had just lost a game by 55 points, and we were still pissed off about “The Decision.”

So to see the strutting Steelers get tripped up just short of their third title in six years was exactly what we needed to get us through another long winter of discontent.

 

2. Super Bowl XXIV: 49ers 55, Broncos 10 (1989)

You can’t say John Elway never did us a favor. Not even Jesus and his disciples were going to beat the ’89 49ers, so when the Broncos out-classed the Browns in the AFC Championship to earn the right to get eliminated execution-style in the Super Bowl, somewhere deep inside we sighed with relief.

Sure, it would have been nice to at least get there, but at what point do the cons of a Super Bowl appearance outweigh the pros? In this case, it was right around when San Francisco scored its seventh touchdown.

We watched Elway get smashed around and the Bronco defense get ripped apart and not only got the gratification of their misery, but also the appreciation that it wasn’t us getting mopped.

 

1. Super Bowl XXIII: 49ers 20, Bengals 16 (1988)

Seven years after the Bengals’ first Super Bowl appearance, they returned, and everything about it felt the same. The Browns had again fallen heartbreakingly just short of a conference championship the year before and were forced to watch the Bengals go from a double-digit-loss team to 12-4, then cruise into the Super Bowl primarily because the rest of the AFC decided to take the year off.

To see Boomer and Wicky Wacky and Shufflin’ Ickey take home the Lombardi trophy three weeks after the last legitimate head coach the Browns have ever had walked out the door would have been too much to take. And it looked like we’d have to when the Bengals took a three-point lead late in the fourth quarter.

Once again, God bless Joe Montana, who put together a drive actually far more impressive than The Drive (11 plays, 92 yards in less than three minutes) and hit John Taylor for the winning touchdown with 34 seconds left to keep the suicide rate in Northeast Ohio at a manageable level.

For the first time, we got to witness one of our rivals suffer a heartbreaking loss on a national stage. And it was delicious. 

 

Does this make us horrible people? Probably.

But the piss sure tastes good.

Follow @jknightwriter