Your Average Joe: Another Nightmare About to Begin
By JOE GILROY
Now that the Cleveland Browns have officially won the off season, the rest of the league can set their sights on the goals that a normal franchise focuses on – division championship, conference championship, Super Bowl championship.
As for the Browns, it’s business as usual. Following an unusual amount of good decisions by the Cleveland Browns front office that started on draft day and seemed to point to better days ahead, things once again returned to normalcy.
If I were to point to just one thing that turned all the good karma back into the dumpster fire that we all know and begrudgingly love, it would be the release of Joe Haden. As a disclosure, I am a huge Haden fan, so maybe that is me wearing my heart on my sleeve, but since his release the Browns have had a slew of questionable decisions, injuries, bad luck, or just “Cleveland Brown-ing” happen. Yes, I made that word up and
have a patent in the works.
Since the Haden release, we have seen the number one overall pick in this year’s draft suffer a high ankle sprain that will keep him out indefinitely, Cleveland Browns histrionics would suggest that we won’t be seeing this guy for a while. If that weren’t enough, fellow line mate Danny Shelton has been all but ruled out for the opener. Just hours before signing with the Browns, T.Y. McGill was arrested for marijuana possession at a hotel in Charlotte. McGill had been released the day before by the Colts, maybe the Browns thought they were signing T.Y. Hilton.
Then there are the moves that were made before Haden was released that didn’t look horrible at the time, but since Haden’s departure things have happened to illuminate them for the disaster’s that they are.
The most obvious is the Terrelle Pryor move. Instead of paying Pryor what he was worth, the team decided to play hardball, err, “Moneyball” and lost out to the Redskins. The Browns were forced to look elsewhere to save face and signed Kenny Britt, a career underachiever to a 4-year, $32.5 million contract. The kicker in the whole thing is that the Redskins got Pryor under contract for a 1-year $8 million deal. So, essentially if you’re keeping score at home the Browns tried going to the bargain bin and wound up paying more for a lesser talent.
Unfortunately, that is not the most embarrassing Pryor debacle we had in Cleveland this off season though. No, that distinction goes to the Calvin Pryor incident, that saw the team give up a quality player on the field and an even better man in the locker room and more importantly in the community, when they traded Demario Davis for Pryor. On Thursday, Calvin Pryor was released after getting into a pre-practice scuffle with WR Ricardo Louis. The details are sketchy, but it is believed that Pryor never ingratiated himself to coach Hue Jackson and that is why he was cut, while Louis remains on the roster.
I could go on and on with the recurring nightmare that is being a lifelong Cleveland Brown fan, but I will leave it at this, while they appeared for a short time to resemble a professional front office the Browns will enter week one as a team that clearly is no better than the 1-15 train wreck from a season ago. Every position group, except for the offensive line, will be either equally as poor or, dare I say it, even worse.
Of course, this is all on paper and just my opinion. Perhaps, some of the guys step in the absence of Shelton and Garrett or DeShone Kizer lights it up with a weak receiver group and leads the team to a string of victories. I would love to be proven wrong on this, but I believe we are all in and beginning our run to another Cleveland Browns off season title.