WHEN THE QUARTERBACK DERBIES END, THE WINNING HAS A CHANCE TO BEGIN
The Browns are in the news everywhere, both locally and nationally.
That’s a good thing when your name is always out there, right?
Sure.
Well, at least the vast majority of the time anyway.
But not this time.
For the Browns are now in the news for all the wrong reasons. It’s because, once again and seemingly forever, they have a quarterback derby, and a provocative one at that, involving two people who, for entirely different circumstances, are well-known to even the most casual of fans. On one hand, there’s Deshaun Watson, whose seedy reputation precedes him. Ugh. And on the other hand, there’s Shadeur Sanders, who is as popular of a player as the Browns have had in recent years, and whose father is a polarizing figure. That’s an interesting combination.
Browns coach Todd Monken, who knows a heckuva lot about quarterbacks, will eventually choose one of them. That will end all the chatter and intrigue, but only for a while because, in the opinion of many, there is no guarantee that either player can hold onto the job for any length of time.
With all that having been said, then, for the Browns to ever have a chance to get to where they want to go — that is, to the Super Bowl for the first time, and then to win it — they have to get to the point where they are in the news because their quarterback situation is settled and solid for the foreseeable future, they are playing exciting football and they are winning games, a lot of games.
Quarterback derbies catch everyone’s attention, but in essence, they are just a circus that takes the focus away from the much more important things such as the team gelling, maturing and improving.
That’s been the history of the Browns in this forgettable expansion era, stuck in the swirl of controversy, unable to escape to normalcy, such as what those great Cleveland teams had, and enjoyed, during that successful run through the last half of the 1980s.
These current Browns need to go back to the future — as quickly as possible, please — and stay there. Then and only then will the Browns be taken seriously.
Steve King
