“Hope, Hype, and Heartbreak: The Browns’ Tumultuous 1995 Season”
The expectations for the Browns this season are not very high at all.
They are so low, in fact, that if the club duplicates last season’s 3-14 nightmare, no one would be the least bit surprised.
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But a season sometimes turns out much different — even much, much, much different, in fact — than you think it will, both positively and negatively.
And while, as you’ve been reading here, it is the 40th anniversary of the Dawg Pound, it is also the 30th anniversary of something exceedingly less joyful, the 1995 season, which started with so much hope and ended with nothing but hopelessness.
In its always much-anticipated season preview issue, Sports Illustrated in 1995 predicted that the Browns would get to their first Super Bowl and lose 31-14 to the San Francisco 49ers. That actually made a lot of sense. The 49ers for the previous decade and a half had been one of the best teams in the NFL. The Browns had finally broken through in 1994 in Bill Belichick’s fourth season as head coach, finishing 11-5 behind one of the league’s best defenses and earning a wild-card berth, making the playoffs for the first time in five seasons. Looking at that, then, it was easy to project that the Browns would take the next step and get to the big game — and in their 50th season in Cleveland, no less. How cool, huh? An impressive 3-1 start in 1995, culminated by a 35-17 home rout of a very good Kansas City Chiefs team guided by former Cleveland head coach Marty Schottenheimer, served only to heighten the optimism.
A slump ensued in which the Browns dropped three straight games, but then, a day after the Cleveland Indians lost Game 6 and with it the World Series to the Atlanta Braves, they earned a thrilling 29-26 comeback victory in overtime at Cincinnati, inspired by rookie quarterback Eric Zeier, that evened their record at 4-4 and appeared to put them back on track.
Five days later, on a Friday night as the Browns were wrapping up preparations for the rematch, at home, with a bad Houston Oilers they had already beaten six weeks earlier, news broke of the club’s impending move to Baltimore at the end of the season.
The Oilers won going away, 37-10, and it only got worse from there as it was the beginning of a six-game losing streak. The Browns finished 5-11, the inverse of their record the year before, and a fight began to save them from leaving town.
The current Browns aren’t headed anywhere near that far away — possibly only to Brook Park down the road. This fall, it would be nice if they just ended up somewhere else other than last place in the AFC North for the second straight year.
Steve King
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