We hope you have enjoyed this robust 1-5 start by the Browns, because it will likely get worse — much worse, in fact — before — or if — it ever gets any better.

The Browns ran up the flag on their 2024 season on Tuesday, signaling “No mas!” and “We surrender!” It came with the trade of their No. 1 wide receiver, Amari Cooper, to the Buffalo Bills for NFL Draft picks. Instead of buying pieces to bolster their roster for a spot in the playoffs and a run to the Super Bowl, as almost everyone both inside and outside of Northeast Ohio thought they would be doing, the Browns are instead selling them off — peddling them to the highest bidder — as they set up shop at the biggest yard sale on the Great Lakes. Cooper will not be the only one sent away. There will also be others, you can rest assured. We just don’t know how many, or who, yet. But stay tuned.

It’s yet another negative offshoot of the presence on the roster of quarterback Deshaun Watson, who, with his crippling salary, his historic lack of production and the Browns’ refusal to sit him, know matter how bad he, or it, gets, has deep-sixed the franchise for the foreseeable future.

Thank you, Browns General Manager Andrew Berry, thank you very much. Your trade for Watson is an all-timer for buffoonery. You are the exact kind of person for whom the adage, “When you think you’re always the smartest person in every room into which you walk, what you instead find 100 percent of the time is that just the opposite is true,” was written. Your haughty, passive aggressive and holier-than-thou attitude is your mantra, your calling card. It is sickening to watch.

So, too, is the realization that when you meet the media at some point and are asked about all of this, you will bob and weave like Muhammad Ali, dodging the two-ton elephant in the room that you take so much pride and joy in never addressing in a responsible way, and you will instead pat yourself on the back for acquiring more draft assets and managing the salary cap with the expertise, deftness and dexterity of a surgeon.

The problem, though, is that they don’t hand out a trophy for that at the end of the season. They do, however, hand one out for winning the Super Bowl championship, and the Browns are so far away from that right now that it isn’t even funny. They need to first figure out how to score an offensive touchdown.

And that — winning regular-season games and division titles and postseason games and conference championships — is the only thing that matters.

Wonder if John Dorsey would be interested in coming back to Cleveland?

Steve King