It will be exactly 70 years ago Thursday, on Dec. 8, 1946, that the Browns finished their first-ever regular season with a 12-2 record by blasting the Brooklyn Dodgers 66-14 at Ebbets Field.
It was their second game in just five days – five days, mind you, and both of them on the road on opposite ends of the East Coast to boot – but that’s another story for another time.
It’s also the most points the Browns have ever scored in any game, but you would never know that because the organization doesn’t recognize any of the statistics from the team’s four seasons in the All-America Football Conference. That, too, is another story for another time.
But both of these other stories for other times, especially the latter one, bleed perfectly into the theme(s) of this story.
That this is the 70th anniversary of the Browns being born, and there is no one – absolutely, positively no one – who knows about it, or at least no one in power who cares about it enough to do anything about it.
And what a real shame that is.
This is a good time to mention that here in this space – for the second time, I might add – because the Browns on Sunday at FirstEnergy Stadium entertain the Cincinnati Bengals, whose owner, Mike Brown, is, of course, the son of Paul Brown. Paul Brown was the founding owner and coach of the Bengals after having been the founding coach of the Browns.
I say all this because apparently there is no one in the present Browns organization who knows or gives a hoot about it.
There are several things for which these expansion-era Browns are known, and none of them are good:
*They can’t figure out how to win games, especially at home.
*They can’t figure out how to acquire good quarterbacks.
*They can’t figure out how to hire good head coaches.
*They can’t figure out how to hire good general managers.
*They do as little as possible when it comes to recognizing their heritage, and this failure to even acknowledge, let alone celebrate, a signature-year birthday of the team is yet another in a seemingly endless embarrassing – and sad and disappointing – examples of it.
What say you?
