Tampa Bay Buccaneers/Tori Richman Photo
For years, journalistic responsibilities and ethics prevented caring—at least openly—which team won the Super Bowl. In retirement, it has been different. I can acknowledge if not slobbering affection for the Cleveland Browns at least a firm attachment. I may be an Oklahoman at heart but my head and the rest of my body continue to be part and parcel of Browns Country. One problem: The Browns never reach the Super Bowl.
Never have. Never . . . I was about to type will. But that might not be true for much longer. The New Browns look different. Time will tell. In the meantime, I find myself having to adjust my criteria for determining with which team to align in Super Bowl 55. (Don’t you hate those damned Roman Numerals? Do you think they were popular when the sport was Christians vs. Lions in the Coliseum?) Once choosing a team was easy.
Since I grew up in Oklahoma and loved football, and Oklahoma does not have a professional team unless you count the University of Oklahoma Sooners, my allegiance has been to any team from the geographical proximity of where my heart will always be. That once included the St. Louis Cardinals, but they moved to Arizona; the Kansas City Chiefs, who began life as the Dallas Texans but long have been my guys even if another name may be on the horizon; the Dallas Cowboys, who have had any number of great Oklahoma players, not the least of which was offensive tackle Ralph Neely. (You may not remember him but Neely was so good he was voted to the NFL All-Decade Team of the 1960s. He was a consensus All-American at OU.) The man could block a granite wall, knock it down (or on its butt, if it had one), and not breathe hard.
Proximity continued to work a year ago when the Chiefs went to the Super Bowl and defeated the San Francisco 49ers. I did experience a bit of indecision. When I was forced to move to Northern California during my sophomore year in high school, the 49ers became my adopted team. (It was a long drive to Kansas City to see the Chiefs.) I attended my first National Football League game at Kezar Stadium where I witnessed quarterback John Brodie picking apart defenses as the late, great Howard Mudd protected him from marauding defenders who would tear off his helmet and head. In the end, however, my heart (always ahead of my head, it seems) was with the Chiefs because of the old guy, Andy Reid, who is their coach. Old guys should stick together.
I do not consider The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni an old guy (after all, he was born in 1964, the year I graduated from high school), but recently he wrote incisively, as usual, about how, as a Denver Broncos fan—yuk, anyone Browns hates Denver (The Drive, The Fumble)—he decided to support the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He sided with the old GOAT (Greatest of All Time) quarterback Tom Brady, because at the end, “I want to know and crow that I watched, in real time, an athlete of unrivaled majesty who settled that fact at a juncture when America, brought low by its weaknesses, needed a show of unimaginable strength.” While I agree with this after Trumpian Time, Bruni comes to this believing that “no other quarterback in the history of football comes anywhere close” to Brady’s nine Super Bowl appearances and six wins.
Mr. Bruni, have you ever heard of Otto Graham? I take offense when football time begins only ASB (After Super Bowl) and BSB (Before Super Bowl) is like doo-doo on football cleats. Not only did Graham quarterback the Browns to 10 consecutive professional championship games and win seven, even if the first four were in the All-American Football Conference, before the Browns migrated to the NFL, but he also accomplished this during the only 10 years he played. Old-time players went on to lives after football, not because that is who they were but because it is what they had to do to survive. They did not make the multiple millions of dollars that Brady has each season since Moses allegedly hauled down the mountain stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written to inform our lives. Graham coached the Coast Guard Academy, then served as athletic director, teaching young men to be as good at what they did as he had been. (That isn’t easy and even Graham did not always succeed. When he coached the Washington Football Team, the results were poor.)
Frank Bruni aligns himself with Tampa Bay because of Brady, an old man as quarterbacks go. I do the same but because of Bruce Arians, who at 68 will be the oldest coach ever to guide a team to the Super Bowl. He previously helped Pittsburgh win a Super Bowl as offensive coordinator, with a then young QB, Ben Roethlisberger. His twisting, turning road back to this climactic game has had its pock marks. Though a 2017 book he wrote with Lars Anderson is titled The Quarterback Whisperer, the New Cleveland Browns fired him—along with the rest of the staff—after he had worked to get Tim Couch, the reconstituted team’s first quarterback, off on the right foot. Every coach since the Browns returned in 1999 until Kevin Stefanski arrived in 2020 has been fired.
Despite guiding as quarterbacks coach, offensive coordinator, and head coach some of the best to ever work behind a center—Peyton Manning, Roethlisberger, Carson Palmer, Andrew Luck, and now the GOAT himself—Arians’ aggressive “No Risk It, No Biscuit” philosophy has not always earned applause. He once was booedduring the parade after his Steeler offense won the Super Bowl. He didn’t receive a chance to be the head coach until he was 61, and then only as an interim replacement in Indianapolis for Chuck Pagano, who was undercoming treatment for leukemia. Only after he won NFL Coach of the Year did a team—Arizona—offer him a job as head coach.
When after five successful seasons, including two trips to the playoffs, Arians health deteriorated and he stepped away. After cancer surgeries and recovery, he could not even get an interview with the Browns for “the job I always wanted.” Some even seemed to think it unbecoming that he would campaign publicly for his dream job in a city he loved for the fervor around and devotion to his game. John Dorsey handed the job instead to Freddie Kitchens, and both of them were fired a season later. Where would the Browns have been had they turned to Arians? It is unanswerable, but Arians is where he always wanted to be—back in the Super Bowl as head coach.
A year ago it was easy to want to see Kansas City’s Andy Reid, another older hyper-aggressive coach, fill the missing slot on his illustrious résumé—Super Bowl Champion. Now, it is Arians’ turn and the players who love him, especially his new old quarterback, are thinking of him as much as of themselves.
“This is his dream,” Brady told the media at the Super Bowl this week, including NFL.com Columnist Jim Trotter. “I don’t think about what it means for me. I do think about what it means for everybody else. It’s an amazing achievement for BA. I’m so happy for him. BA is truly one of my favorite people in the world. . .”
That, to me, sounds as if Arians already has won a lasting victory. He is truly loved.
