National Football League teams resist looking into the futurist’s crystal ball as if it will explode in their faces. One of the league’s most-oft spoken, if unwritten, rules is: Do Not Look Ahead. Teams in your rearview mirror may be closer than they appear to be.
Since I used to be a sports columnist, I have no respect for such prohibitions. I flail against them. I lash out wildly. Censoring my forward thinking cannot possibly be allowed in a nation that still has a First Amendment that protects freedom of the press.
I beat the drum to advance the Cleveland Browns’ steadfast campaign to solidify a second appearance in the NFL playoffs since being reconstituted in 1999. But for a scallywag owner within and Baltimore filchers without who learned team thievery by losing one, there might not have been a hurtful break in Cleveland football history. (Do not misunderstand: I have long believed and will continue to believe that despite all his financial malfeasance, Art Modell is not the only scoundrel in that story. His finances looked like the Rubik’s Cube of the NFL. But Cleveland leaders, with criminal indifference toward Modell, contributed to this nightmare for the league’s best fan base.)
So welcome to the Funny Farm (title of a book once written by late friend Jay Cronley of the Tulsa Tribune, which also ended up on the list of late, great newspapers). In lieu of a long recitation of the Browns’ impressive workmanlike 20-6 victory on a primetime Sunday night evisceration of the depleted New York Giants, I want to not only acknowledge a dodged playoff-seedings bullet but also catch one between my teeth. (What? You’ve never heard of a Super Hero Blogger before? I need a cute little uni.)
The Jets, this week’s second consecutive New York foe, are the Browns doppelgänger. By shocking the Los Angeles Rams, not that long ago an up-and-comer then contender, the Jets not only pushed their pathetic record to 1-13 but avoided the dreaded, fiery 0-16 horse collar Hue Jackson donned in 2017 like the show pony he was. Claiming he would improve the 1-15 of 2016 or take a Lake Erie plunge, he ended up all wet—as usual. He spouted off during a Hard Knocks episode on HBO that he drove the Browns bus and ended up in the ditch, He was an accident waiting to happen at every turn.
Hue Boo-Boo Jackson was no Kevin Stefanski. Stefanski has been able to produce a winning and admirable season with COVID-19 trying to kill everyone while he put together a team by Zoom and osmosis. He gives unflappable a new meaning and his team’s accomplishments and avoidances—like a trap loss to the Giants—have resulted in recognition far and wide and from those who study the Browns most closely.
Marla Ridenour, Akron Beacon Journal columnist, understood that “the consequences of a loss against the New York Giants were staggering.” This is when other teams of Cleveland’s expansion era would have collapsed like a cheap folding chair. Fissures did show. Wide receiver and team leader Jarvis Landry made a surehanded catch in the back of the end zone and then undercut it with a 15-yard taunting penalty. That made what has become no-longer-gimme extra-point kicks an even more daunting one of 48 yards. It doinked off of the right upright and might have cost lesser Browns teams. But it did not cost this one. The national media noticed. Even though he omitted the Browns from his Schein Nine, a list of the teams most likely to win the Super Bowl, Adam Schein, NFL.com contributing columnist, applauded present and future: “I’m actually pretty obsessed with these Browns. This is a long-downtrodden franchise that’s finally on the rise under first-year head coach Kevin Stefanski. Cleveland can run with authority. Baker Mayfield is hot. Myles Garrett is special [or will be when he fully recovers from COVID-19]. The future is bright!” Schein is not the only one who sees it.
Listen to Peter King (Football Morning in America on nbcsports.com) on Baker Mayfield: “This is the player GM John Dorsey swore he was getting with the first pick in the 2018 draft—the guy who goes on a hot streak in big moments of the season (the last four games in the 10-4 Browns’ playoff drive: 10 touchdowns, one interception), the guy who can hide even little mistakes with excellent plays. Example of the latter: With tight end David Njoku open at the goal line for a short touchdown late in the second quarter, Mayfield instead chose a covered Jarvis Landry trolling the end line at the back of the end zone. Mayfield fired a perfect throw. . . . After a weekend of watching the Bills and Browns and Ravens and Titans rout foes and look like serious January threats, I don’t think Kansas City’s going to have an easy road to its second Super Bowl. Cleveland’s run game and Mayfield’s maturity as a player will make Cleveland a tough out.”
If, of course, the Browns can just get there. Maybe it is really true, what Sinatra once sang about New York—that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Now we will see in what should be a surefire win but suddenly may not be what it seems. This may be the shakiest futuristic question: What are the Jets thinking and feeling now that they may have spent their future on a nice but comparatively wasted victory.
Their 23-20 win at the Los Angeles Rams prompted gasps. It cost the Jets the No. 1 choice in the NFL Draft, which could be a generational quarterback, Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence. Both the Jets and the Jacksonville Jaguars are 1-13 and could finish 1-15. The only way Jacksonville loses is to win. There is no reversing the tie-breaker outcome. Jacksonville prevails based on the fact it had the “easier” schedule given the lower winning percentage of its opponents. The Jets already have proved they follow the Herm Edwards’ dictate regarding tanking: You Don’t. “You play to win the game.” The Jets don’t have a reason to back off against the Browns. They also cling to the hope that quarterback Sam Darnold can emulate Baker Mayfield’s improvement.
In the victory over the Giants, Mayfield again demonstrated he can both manage a game and put the outcome on his shoulders; there is plenty of room there for both the chip (nobody loves him enough) and the team that needs the bullet passes that he is throwing to the right-colored jerseys, unlike a season. It was there to see, if only a person looked, as Stefanski did and predicted for Mayfield: he’s ready to ascend. And now Mayfield is taking his team with him into a different orbit, if only the Browns can do what the Rams could not when, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, the Jets became the second 0-13 team in NFL history to win a game in which they never trailed. The first, ESPN’s Dan Graziano points out, was the 1962 Raiders. But that is history, and this is about the Browns’ future. It may not be in perfect focus but it can be seen it from here.
