OK, at the end of the day, what does all this mean?

Plenty.

As I’ve written several times already, it will always be my belief that if safety Don Rogers hadn’t died just before training camp was slated to open in 1986, the Browns would have won that AFC Championship Game with the Denver Broncos.

That, in turn, would have quenched that Browns’ incredible thirst to get to the Super Bowl for the first time, which then would have kept head coach Marty Schottenheimer and star running back Earnest Byner in town and perhaps resulted in another Super Bowl trip or two, and maybe even a championship.

Think about that for a minute, the Browns with no pressure to get to the Super Bowl – no 800-pound monkey on their backs – because they would have already gotten there.

Whew!

Double-whew!

That would created a much, much different climate in the city as it related to the Browns. The fans would have gotten what they wanted with their football team. They would have been satisfied, and giving.

That would allowed a new stadium for the Browns to be built, or Cleveland Stadium to be refurbished sometime in the late 1980s or, more probably, the early 1990s as the city was gearing up to build new stadiums for the Indians and Cavaliers. Because this is a football town, always has been and always will be, the Browns would have moved to the front of that line like royalty, not thrown to the end of it like a beggar, which is exactly what happened as city leaders miscalculated Brown owner Art Modell’s plight, and desperation.

With all that having happened, then, the Browns would have been an untouchable for a city like Baltimore looking to woo a team. Even with a pry bar the size of the Terminal Tower, the Browns couldn’t have been uprooted. It just wasn’t going to happen, not even with a guy like owner Modell, who, as we now know, wasn’t at all the Cleveland-friendly guy we thought him to be.

But just the opposite occurred, with Rogers’ untimely death being the single event that set into the motion the long series of events that landed the old Browns on the East Coast, Cleveland without a football team on the field for three long seasons and the nightmarish nearly two-decade period that’s been the expansion era.

We sure could have done without any of that, which would have been the case had just one man — Don Rogers – not passed away.

Well, do you agree?