The Browns get another challenge – another big challenge, that is – when they play the Baltimore Ravens on Thursday night at M&T Bank Stadium.
It is their only nationally-televised game of the year. That’s what happens when you lose. Nobody outside of Northeast Ohio wants go see you play. But the NFL says that everybody has to have a Thursday Night Football game every season so to give the have-nots, like the Browns, an opportunity to show the whole country wat they have, or don’t have.
The challenge, then? It is: What do the Browns do with this golden opportunity to prove that they’re better than their 0-9 record?
But just as it is a great chance, it is also a huge risk because the Browns could be exposed. And that would be a nightmare. For it’s one thing to lose a game that is being telecast only regionally. It’s another thing entirely to lose in front of all your friends, family members and fellow NFL players. You can’t hide on national TV. Everybody knows it. Everybody sees it.
Browns head coach Hue Jackson was asked on Tuesday if there is extra incentive for his players because of the national focus. He usually gives good answers to even the toughest questions. But this time he didn’t. He gave a gobbledy-gook answer, one with enough of that good, ol’ football-speak to choke an elephant. Translated: He said next to nothing worthwhile.
“Our guys have tried to do that every week, and sometimes it does not go that way,” Jackson said. “This is football. This game is really fickle, and I think we all understand that. Our guys, if I can say anything about them, they fight. They play hard. They do everything we ask of them. No one is perfect. Football is not perfect, but our guys try and that is more than you can ask for sometimes in certain situations.
“This team has been through a lot, but they keep on swinging. Do we want to go out there and win the game? Yes, we are not going there just to show up. We are going there to win the game. It is a division game against a division opponent, a good football team that is leading the AFC North, and we have to go play well to do that. That is what we are looking forward to doing.”
Yes, I hear all that. But I know – and you know – that it isn’t that way at all. Certainly, there will be more incentive to play well and win because the game will be seen from coast to coast, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and all points in between.
Behind closed doors, it is what Jackson is telling his team, that this is a draw-a-line-in-the-sand game. He will have the Browns revved up, but he doesn’t want to say that, or imply that, in public. He’d rather undersell and over-produce.
The Browns can play like a team that is resigned to being 0-10 at the end of the night, or one that wants desperately to get a win and be 1-9.
Which Browns team will show up? Will the Browns rise to this new challenge – the only one like this that they’ll get all year? Or will they melt under the hot lights and get swallowed up?
We’ll find out soon enough.
