After the Browns managed to masquerade as an actual professional football team against the Chargers on Sunday, luminary journalist Terry Pluto wrote an article titled “Forget Wins; a reasonable goal for the Cleveland Browns — don’t be boring in defeat.” I’m going to put aside the fact that the article itself is primarily a play-by-play of fans’ reactions to various individual performances on offense. I’m also going to ignore that in the final paragraph he states that Sunday’s game gave him “some reason to pay attention” — you know, other than the fact that he’s being paid by the city’s primary printed news source to report on the games.
Instead, I want to throw a spotlight on the attitude represented by the title of the article.
I think I’ve made it abundantly clear by now that I recognize that the Browns are a really awful football team. If given the option, I would prefer that they lose competitively rather than being utterly dominated. But the way they’ve been playing this year, I might really prefer if they just forfeited the rest of their games and started scouting for the draft full-time. Had they beaten the Chargers yesterday, I might have taken it as a sign of the apocalypse.
Of course, that didn’t happen. The Mayans were wrong. The world keeps marching on.
I’d be much more willing to accept the idea of a moral victory if this was game 2. But it was game 12. Seventy-five percent of the season is in the books. So let’s do a quick checklist.
The Browns have been on the correct side of the final score once in those twelve tries — and in that game they scored a grand total of 6 points.
They went 0-6 in division play.
Our supposed running back of the future was knocked out for the year in some kind of pad-free, gladiatorial “opportunity session” in the opening weeks of the season.
Our just-hired GM barely made it to the halfway point of the season before being canned by Alpha Dog.
Our defense allowed the Detroit Lions to post 38 points and a win.
Our offense has posted 7 or fewer points in 7 of the 12 games played, including 4 of the last 6.
In short, this is not a team on the upswing.
On some level, I appreciate the fact that Pluto is looking for some kind of silver lining. But don’t pack your own crap into a sugar cone and try to sell it to my city as Rocky Road.
Cleveland is a city starved for championships. Not only that, but we’re a city that has gone for extended periods of time without even being competitive in certain sports, especially when it comes to the post-Modell Browns. Everyone knows this.
But poor performance is not an excuse to stop demanding excellence. Have we suffered through this dismal 2009 season with the hope of eventually topping out at 8-8 some time in the future? I certainly haven’t.
Here’s what I would prefer to being entertaining in defeat: being boring in victory. The Cavs have won their last four games by 16, 17, 14, and 15. Not exactly nail-biters, but I could watch those types of games every other night for the rest of the season. (I’d also argue that those games weren’t boring because there was a lot of entertaining play involved in getting the Cavs those leads, not to mention their unexpected bloodlust against Milwaukee.)
I get that the Browns aren’t going to get back to the Super Bowl in one season. But the idea that we can look at losses as progress is something I’m just not willing to accept.
Is this a revolutionary idea? No. Would I consider it one of my best columns? Definitely not. But I’m standing by it.
-T
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