Monday Night Memories: Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Cleveland Browns - December 31, 2017
December 31, 2017
The defining word of the 21st century might be grift. Entire industries have been cannibalized and turned into pyramid schemes. Online, social media allows people to build entire lives that are only tangentially connected with reality. In politics, the business of fundraising has overtaken even the appearance of governance, and even if you are opposition to the growing fascist movement, opportunists are waiting with a reason for you to reach for your wallet. Sports is part of the same society we all are and is not immune to either grifts or grifters. One such grifter is Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam. Haslam bought the Browns for their listed value of one billion dollars from Randy Lerner in 2012. A Tennessee native, Haslam had no strong emotional connection to the Browns or to Cleveland in general, but he was under federal indictment for fraud as part of an investigation into his company, Flying J Travel Plazas, and becoming a sports owner was a good way to change the first line of his Wikipedia entry.
Browns fans weren’t concerned about this, and this piece will not argue that they should be. The only thing fans ask of owners is that they not be cheap, not be crazy, and that their vices be mild and boring ones. Compared to the miserly Mike Brown, the mercurial Jerry Jones, and the fire hose of scandal and uproar coming from Daniel Snyder and Washington’s franchise, Haslam seemed relatively drama-free. What’s a little rebate scam between friends? But Haslam was proving to be more King Stork than King Log, firing coaches quickly, leading abrupt about-faces in roster building, and intervening in the draft room. In 2014 Haslam personally ordered the drafting of hyped but troubled quarterback Johnny Manziel in the first round, and said he was inspired to by an exchange with a homeless man who recognized him on the street and said, “Draft Manziel.” With distance, this is an obvious lie and attempt at mythmaking in advance, but in the moment he sounded capricious and insane, vaguely like Caligula. Manziel was out of the league within two years.
After yet another housecleaning, Haslam named a new coach and new general manager for the 2016 season, promising patience and forbearance. The new coach was Hue Jackson, former Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator and Oakland Raiders head coach, generally thought of as a sound offensive mind. The new GM was Sashi Brown. Brown had no experience directly in football, but he was a Harvard law graduate who served as general counsel for the Jacksonville Jaguars for seven years, and in a vice-presidential position with the Browns since 2013, and had a clear plan of action once he took over. Borrowing from basketball GM Sam Hinkie, Brown decided that the roster as it stood needed a complete teardown, letting useful veterans like Alex Mack, Mitchell Schwartz, and Dante Whitner go in free agency. The key thing was to get a franchise quarterback, and since neither name at the top of the 2016 draft captured Brown’s imagination, the thing to do was trade down and acquire as many picks— “draft capital,” in the new language of roster building-- as possible. The 2016 season would be a total write-off; 2017 would be the year when the Browns made their move, and, picking at or near the top of the draft, would pick their quarterback.
It’s possible that you’ve spotted the flaws in this already. To write off any year in a sport where the average career is slightly more than three years is to whistle past a graveyard. The veterans cut to make room for younger names could have still been useful. One of them, center Alex Mack, is still playing today, and made three of his six total pro bowls after the Browns cut him loose. There are many successful teams throughout league history who got that success with a quarterback who was little more than a caretaker; there is no need to dramatically give up on a season based on not having an elite quarterback. All these flaws are so obvious that it may be tempting to conclude that they are the product of design and not oversight, of an intimidated and frankly, overmatched, executive, hoping for the benediction of his boss’s newfound patience, to create a baked-in reason for more patience. In other words, it sounds like Sashi Brown was running a grift.
The 2016 Browns season was somehow worse than projected, and it was projected as a season where the men in charge openly didn’t care about winning. On the verge of becoming the second 0-16 team in history, the Browns lucked out when the Chargers missed two field goals in the fourth quarter to win a 20-17 squeaker. None of the young players brought in impressed, with first round pick Corey Coleman a bitter disappointment at wide receiver. For all the talk of youth movements, 37-year-old Josh McCown got three starts at quarterback. Even after they avoided the ignominy of losing every single game, there was one more indignity. The Steelers, having already clinched a playoff spot, rested their key starters in the final week against the Browns. The Browns did take them to overtime, but still found a way to lose, even in the face of total indifference.
Jimmy Haslam had promised patience, and he delivered patience. Neither Brown nor Jackson was fired despite 2016 being a Superfund site. 2017 was supposed to be the sudden emergence after the year of cocooning, and Brown was much more aggressive in free agency, signing receiver Kenny Britt and the interior line help that seemed unnecessary the season before. With three picks in the first round, a new quarterback was expected, but they waited until day two to draft DeShone Kizer. The picks each made sense individually; Myles Garrett is a current all-pro, and the other two picks, Jabrill Peppers and David Njoku, were athletes of rare capability, but which is it? Is a franchise quarterback the only important thing, or something that can be delayed indefinitely while looking for complimentary pieces? Were they that convinced that Deshone Kizer was the answer, and why were they the only ones who seemed to think that, passing up multiple future Pro Bowler quarterbacks, and passing on future MVP Lamar Jackson three separate times? A dark thought began to crop up: maybe the tanking would be going on indefinitely. Maybe this was all a gambit to stay employed indefinitely by always promising gratification the next season.
Here I need to address you directly, reader. I hate tanking. I hate “The Process.” The whole idea of setting up athletes to lose reads as cruel to me. It robs fans of time, the only thing we all have, and the only thing we can’t get back. Tanking feels like a cousin to the latest obvious scam, the NFT, where people pay exorbitant amounts for formulaic subpar art, no different than a custom avatar on a message board. But having an NFT has nothing to do with whether the art is skillful, stirring, or personally significant; it’s all about a supposed exclusivity. That exclusivity, already dubious before you remember that even Macs can right-click now, is a proxy for social cache, something completely detached from the actual mental process of art appreciation, just as sports fans who Trust the Process can sound like experts who see the game behind the game when they talk about completely ephemeral things unconnected to the action on the field, things like draft capital and salary cap space, while spending their Sundays watching M*A*S*H reruns. But there’s something about sports that’s reassuring and beautiful and it’s something that comforts me on the darkest coldest days. It’s something that’s not true in art galleries, boardrooms, courtrooms, or the floors of stock exchanges: the truth always has its say. The results of a game can’t be excused, dismissed, spun, or wished away. For four months out of the year, on one day of the week, for three hours, in spaces no longer than 360 feet and no wider than 160 feet, things are exactly as they seem.
So, with that bias fully owned up to, back to our narrative. Browns fans had one thing to comfort them as 2017 started: it couldn’t possibly be as bad as 2016. But like the man once said, when you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more. It was clear from day one that Deshone Kizer was not the answer at quarterback, and Hue Jackson went out of his way to make clear that he had nothing to do with that pick. He slammed him in press conferences for staying out late, pulled him at the end of games for his equally ineffective backups, and agitated for a trade for A.J. McCarron, a Cincinnati Bengals backup who Jackson had experience and some success with as a coordinator. That trade was agreed to and set to go through, but somebody messed up the paperwork. McCarron remained a Bengal, despite having his bags packed. If there’s one thing the Sashi Brown front office should have been good at, it was paperwork. It was too simple a mistake to just be a mistake. Jackson suspected sabotage and stopped talking to Brown, or anyone in the front office.
Desperate to save his job, Jackson now talked about what a bad idea the tank year was, and how he, the lone voice of reason, had tried to stop everyone else. Like everything else in this bird skeleton of a story, Jackson’s words rang hollow, but if the intent was to save his job, it worked. Brown was fired on December 7, with the Browns sitting at 0-12 for the second straight year, but Jackson was allowed to stay on. The Browns soon became the first team in history to go 0-13 in successive campaigns, then 0-14. Jackson and the Browns had one last chance to avoid infamy, against a Pittsburgh Steelers team that, having already clinched a playoff berth and a first-round bye, was resting starters.
Landry Jones had a brief but odd career in the NFL. As Ben Roethlisberger’s backup in Pittsburgh during the longest healthy stretch of Ben’s career, Jones was only really called on when the game was out of hand or did not matter. As a result, three of his five starts were in games against the Cleveland Browns; this was his last game in the NFL. Jones and the Steelers began the game with an easy touchdown drive, ending in a reverse to receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey for twenty-nine yards. On defense the Browns did have an impressive first quarter, with an interception by Jabril Peppers and a goal line stand preventing a second Steeler touchdown, but the Browns offense was actively harmful, “gaining” negative fifteen yards in the first quarter. Kizer was sacked three times and failed to complete a pass. When Jones found rookie JuJu Smith-Schuster for a second score early in the second quarter, there didn’t seem to be much suspense left in the Browns’ pursuit of futility.
The second quarter proved much more fruitful, with Kizer finding Josh Gordon for a deep completion which took the Browns across midfield for the first time. This set up an easy run for Duke Johnson to get on the board. The next Cleveland drive, Kizer hit Rashard Higgins on a slant route, and Higgins beat his man and outran everyone else for a fifty-six-yard touchdown, the longest reception for the Browns all year. Before Pittsburgh could put it back out of reach, Jones was sacked and fumbled. The halftime score was 21-14, and the Browns got the ball to start the third quarter. Kizer was four for four on this drive, finding Higgins again in the end zone to tie the game. Before unfamiliar hope could spread its tendrils in Cleveland brains though, JuJu Smith Schuster took the ensuing kickoff to the house for a touchdown to make it 28-21. The Browns managed to respond with a long field goal on a drive where Kizer converted a third and fifteen with his legs, but after that, the magic ran out. A short catch and long run by Duke Johnson ended with a lost fumble. On the next drive Kizer was intercepted. With two minutes left and one last chance, Corey Coleman dropped a well-thrown ball on 4th and two to end any possibility of a comeback. The Browns were winless and untied, joining the Detroit Lions as the only 0-16 teams in league history.
The Browns ended 2017 looking like a smoking crater. They had gone 1-31 in a two-year span, something that had never been done before. If you added 2015 to the figures, the Browns had won four games in three years, meaning wins came to Cleveland slightly more often than Baby New Year. And the fans of Cleveland, led by internet personality Aaron McNeil, held an 0-16 parade. About 3,200 fans showed up to take part in the procession led by floats made of garbage. The fans wore outlandish costumes, held up goofy signs, and proceeded in a big circle around the city of Cleveland, to represent zero. Some members of the Browns were upset about being the butt of a joke, but I think it’s beautiful, and it shows a way forward for all of us as we move through the world of grift. They can lie to us all they want, but they can’t make us believe them, or take them seriously. So hold close to your wallets, friends and beloveds, but hold your joy loosely and in the throat, and let it out with a laugh if you feel even slightly moved to do so.