A lot will happen over the next 4½ months to change the way we look at these games, but here are some quick, initial, week-by-thoughts on the Browns’ 2017 regular-season schedule that was released on Thursdayevening:
*Sept. 10 – vs. Pittsburgh Steelers – How much would a win over Pittsburgh jump-start the Browns efforts to get off to a fast start? Answer: considerably.
*Sept. 17 – at Baltimore Ravens – Two consecutive games against these usual AFC North heavyweights will give the Browns a real good idea of just where they’re at and how far they still have to go.
*Sept. 24 – at Indianapolis Colts – Head coach John Pagano, a former Browns secondary coach, quarterback Andrew Luck, the son of former Cleveland St. Ignatius High School star Oliver Luck, and the Colts are at home and will be looking to rebound after two straight 8-8 finishes.
*Oct. 1 – vs. Cincinnati Bengals – If Hue Jackson’s former team is going to become a force again after going just 6-9-1 last season, then it absolutely has to beat the Browns head coach’s current team.
*Oct. 8 – vs. New York Jets – Like Pagano and possibly also Baltimore’s John Harbaugh, whose team was only 8-8 last year, Jets head coach Todd Bowles, a former Cleveland defensive backs coach, may be in a win-or-else situation this season after last season’s 5-11 nightmare.
*Oct. 15 – at Houston Texans – The Brock Osweiler Bowl, in his old stomping grounds, no less. There are all kinds of jokes that beg to be told, but we can’t do that because the situation is much more hideous than it is humorous.
*Oct. 22 – vs. Tennessee Titans – A game against the team now playing in the city where the Oilers called home for 35 years, followed by a game against the team that used to be known as the Oilers. Somewhere former Oilers head coach Bum Phillips is smiling.
*Oct. 29 – vs. Minnesota Vikings in London – If a person attending the 1969 NFL (now NFC) Championship Game between the Browns and Vikings had said that the two teams, nearly 50 years later, would play a regular-season game against one another in a soccer stadium in London, he would have been laughed right out of Metropolitan Stadium.
*Nov. 5 – bye – It’s the halfway point of the season, so this couldn’t have come at a better time.
*Nov. 12 – at Detroit Lions – It was 60 years ago, in 1957, when the Browns and Lions met in the NFL Championship Game.
*Nov. 19 – vs. Jacksonville Jaguars – The Browns and Jags are the only two NFL teams not to get a primetime game this season. That tells you everything you need to know about the state of the two franchises.
*Nov. 26 – at Cincinnati Bengals – Paul Brown Stadium is where things went horribly wrong for the Browns when, in the next-to-last game in 2007 and needing only to beat a struggling Bengals team to clinch a playoff berth, they lost 19-14 and have never really recovered.
*Dec. 3 – at Los Angeles Chargers – Putting “Los Angeles” right next to “Chargers: hasn’t been done since the AFL’s first season in 1960.
*Dec. 10 – vs. Green Bay Packers – If the Browns are really struggling at this point, then there may be a lot of Cheeseheads at FirstEnergy Stadium.
*Dec. 17 – — vs. Baltimore Ravens — This will mark the 22nd anniversary of the original Browns’ last game in Cleveland before moving to Baltimore and becoming the Ravens. It was Dec. 17, 1995 when the Browns defeated the Bengals 26-10 at Cleveland Stadium.
*Dec. 24 – at Chicago Bears — The last time the Browns played a regular-season game in Chicago, they lost 30-6 on Nov. 1, 2009, after which an angry Randy Lerner stood outside the visiting locker room in the bowels of Soldier Field and talked about his desire to find “a competent football man” to run his team. Instead, he hired Mike Holmgren.
*Dec. 31 – at Pittsburgh Steelers – Playing Pittsburgh in the last game of the year is where Browns head coaches come to die. The Browns need to distance themselves from that kind of dysfunction and get to the point where these finales against the Steelers are winner-take-all affairs for the division championship.
