The Browns won a league championship in each of their first five years of existence beginning in 1946, the first four coming in the All-America Football Conference and the last one being earned in the NFL, to which they moved in 1950.
Then came the 1951 season. Everything was the same except one crucial factor.
The Browns made it back to the NFL Championship Game, once more against the Los Angeles Rams, whom they edged 30-28 the previous year at Cleveland. The rematch was at Memorial Coluseum, and this time, after the teams went back and forth all day, the Rams prevailed 24–17 on a 73-yard touchdown pass from Norm Van Brocklin to speedy wide receiver Tom Fears in the final minutes.
The Browns had finally dropped a title game, and as such failing to win a league championship for the first time, and they were not at all happy about it.
For starters, Warren Lahr, the venerable cornerback who was beaten for the game-winner, was beaten up internally and externally gor months. Failing to execute in the clutch was unacceptable when you played for those iconic Browns, who were filled with great players who had built their legacy on winning not just games, but championships as well. Failing to do made any season, including that one in 1951, a complete and utter failure.
Head coach Paul Brown was beside himself with frustration and disappointment. He said the team had gotten soft with all the winning and had lost the drive and focus necessary to be a champion. As such, he vowed to spend the entire offseason looking at every facet of the Browns operation to see where changes, and improvements, needed to be made.
I bring all of this up because the current Browns are so far removed from this type of mindset that you can’t even quantify it. They are light years apart. They don’t have a burning desire to succeed in any way, shape or firm. They don’t want to win the Lombardi Trophy. They are more than happy in getting a participation trophy, such as the one that is handed out to the team that is the most under the salary cap in the NFL, something about which the Browns beam with pride.
The fans care more about success and winning than the people running the Browns do. They displayed that yet again by doing nothing to fortify the roster before the trading deadline arrived late Tuesday afternoon. That includes failing miserably to do whatever it took to pry from the Washington Commanders a much-needed quarterback in former Brown Jacoby Brissett and a dynamite defensive end in former Ohio Stater Chase Young, who would have paired with end Myles Garrett to make an outstanding defense even better.
Indeed, what is the Browns’ mission statement? It certainly isn’t, “Just win, baby!,” and it should be. It must be.
That’s degradation of duty — a personal affront to the best fans anywhere.
This supposed “all-in season,” so named by the Browns’ pronounced desire to do anything and everything to win, make the playoffs, get to the Super Bowl for the first time and win a championship, is anything but that. It is “all-in” only in the fact that all the team’s higher-ups and decision-makers are all in on the ruse and hoax that they actually have a fervent passion and desire about the only thing in big-tone sports that matters, and that is to win and keep winning.
Steve King
