A DAY, A GAME AND A WIN FOR THE AGES
By STEVE KING
As I keep saying, and writing, over and over — and as all of us reporting on, and commenting about, this team need to keep saying, and writing, over and over — is that it is impossible to tell what will happen late Saturday afternoon and into the evening when the Browns play the Green Bay Packers at storied Lambeau Field on national TV.
Do the Browns, what with all losses because of COVID-19 protocols, and after the gut-wrenching defeat to the Las Vegas Raiders only last Tuesday, have enough good, and available, players left, and do they have enough emotion and fight left, to pull off the upset?
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And do the Packers, who are seven-point favorites, have enough emotion, and want-to, after clinching the NFC North title last weekend, to give it their all?
Or, in the cases of both teams, will the fear of embarrassing themselves in front of the whole country — on Christmas, no less — with a less-than-stellar effort, be enough of a motivation for them to get themselves in gear?
I believe the last one is true, but again, who knows?
What I do know is this, and it that in this 75th anniversary of the Browns, this is the 70th anniversary of their biggest win and most important game, ever.
It was on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, in 1950 that, in their first year in the league, they won the NFL championship with a thrilling, come-from-behind 30-28 victory over the Los Angeles Rams at Cleveland Stadium. Behind by eight points, 28-20, late in the fourth quarter after quarterback Otto Graham fumbled the ball away on a bad center exchange, the Browns rallied to win on Graham’s 14-yard touchdown pass to running back Rex Bumgardner and then, with 28 seconds left, Lou Groza’s 16-yard field goal.
The NFL hard-liners kept insisting that the Browns, who had swept to four titles in four seasons in the All-America Football Conference from 1946-49, couldn’t, and wouldn’t, compete with the teams from the bigger league. The Browns privately seethed about this, but if they had lost to the Rams, then they would have proven their critics right and would have no ground on which to stand. But by winning, they silenced their doubters and set a standard for excellence for decades to come.
That win, and everything it led to, with championship game appearances in each of the next five years, leading to two titles, created the best fan base in all of pro sports and has kept it there. It is the genesis of why Browns fans are … well, Browns fans.
In longtime Browns beat writer Steve Doerschuk’s outstanding series of stories in the Canton Repository to commemorate the 75th anniversary, the win over the Rams so long ago is the one single event around which those tales, those teams and those men he describes, revolve.
Without it, everything is different, and less.
But it is not different, and less. It is what it is, and that is good.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours, and enjoy the game against Green Bay.
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