Monday, November 2, 2015

Blogapalooza Day 2: May as Well Get This Over With

The Browns.

Yes, I'm going there. This will probably be my only Browns post and now is as a good a time as any, coming off a terrible loss yesterday to Arizona. (I was going to link something there about the game but it's all so pathetic that I'll let you look on your own should you need a reason to get really bummed).

I didn't grow up a Browns fan. I was raised in Toledo and though I was a Detroit Tiger fan, I never took to the Lions. My dad was a Browns fan but for some reason I liked the Vikings. I think it happened because one year they were on TV two or three times (back then there were only one or two games on TV on a given Sunday) and they had the Purple People Eaters defense. I thought that was cool.

But upon moving to Cleveland I gradually shifted to being a Browns fan, which was easy enough because in the '80's they were watchable, Even when they broke your heart they did it with style.

Maybe when they left town we shouldn't have wanted so badly for them to come back. Maybe we should have let the NFL give us a make-up franchise a few years later and name it something else, like the Rockers or the Perch. The Cleveland Perch. I like the sound of that.

Since Cleveland fans love misery only slightly less than they do their Browns, one fan/blogger did something amazing and a little masochistic. He ranked every Browns loss since 1999, the year they gave us back the Browns.

As you might expect, blow-out losses to teams who were very good, like the 2007 Patriots, ranked very low on the list. Last second losses and losses teams they really should have beaten rank higher. The top ten is littered with losses in ways that were unimagined by the inventors of the game, ways that only the Browns could accomplish.

You know, I can't even say I recommend the list, because it's sad. Just sad. But I think maybe it's something that needs to be experienced, passed on, like an oral history of an indigenous people.

Okay, so I've done my obligatory Browns post for NaBloPoMo. Unless, of course, they manage to out-do themselves in some way, which is probably even odds.


2 comments:

  1. I think that Browns fans and Leaf fans should form a support group. The utter atrociousness of our hockey franchise over the last almost half century is the stuff that ballads are written about. The only positive coming out of the Leafs dreadful start (1 win in their first 10 games) is that it has been masked by the Blue Jays magical run. Nobody has really noticed or cared much.

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  2. We could combine the two teams in a big Yahtzee cup, shake it all up, and spill half in Cleveland and half in Toronto and end up with exactly the same results.

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