A HOLIDAY, A TRAGEDY AND THREE FORMER BROWNS QUARTERBACKS
By STEVE KING
Holiday, tragedy and three former Browns Quarterbacks:
A little bit of this and a little bit of that as the Browns, while celebrating the holiday, continue to get ready for Sunday’s game against “Hapless” Hue Jackson and his Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium:
*TWO DIFFERENT OBSERVANCES – Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving Day, but it’s also the 55th anniversary of President John Kennedy being assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. That was on a Friday. In a move that then NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle would later say was the greatest regret of his tenure, he ordered the league schedule of games that Sunday to be played. So, two days later, on Nov. 24, the Browns, in front of 55,096, their second-smallest home crowd of the regular season that year, defeated the Dallas Cowboys 27-17 in one of the weirdest games in both teams’ histories. The fans were subdued. They applauded politely when the Browns made good plays, but did little cheering. Like everyone else in the country, they were still thinking about their fallen president. That experience was what drove NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to postpone, by a week, the weekend schedule of games after the 9-11 attacks in 2001. Some interesting side notes: on Nov. 25, 1963, the day after the Browns beat the Cowboys, Kennedy’s funeral was held. Also that day, a boy by the name of Bernard Joseph Kosar Jr. was born in Youngstown. It was 12 days later, on Nov. 13, 1963, that Vinny Testaverde, Kosar’s teammate at the University of Miami and the man who supplanted him as quarterback of the Browns in 1993, was born in Brooklyn.
*SPEAKING OF FORMER BROWNS QUARTERBCKS …: Colt McCoy, who was taken by the Browns in the third round of the 2010 NFL Draft and played with them through 2012, will start for the Washington Redskins at 4:30 p.m. Thursday in their all-important road game against their arch rivals, the Dallas Cowboys. He got the job after Alex Smith was lost for the season with a broken leg suffered in the 23-21 loss to the Houston Texans last Sunday. The Redskins are in first place in the NFC East with a 6-4 record, a game ahead of the Cowboys (5-5). The implications – for both teams – of winning this one are obvious, particularly since there will be only five games left. It’s also the case with McCoy. This is, as Redskins head coach Jay Gruden called it, “the opportunity of a lifetime” for McCoy, especially in that it will be played in Arlington, Tex., which is 200 miles north of the University of Texas, where he starred from 2006-09. Other than sticking around a long time, McCoy hasn’t done much in his NFL career. He can re-write that narrative by coming up big beginning Thursday and pushing he Redskins’ lead over Dallas to two games. I hope he does. From those three seasons he spent with the Browns, we all remember him as being a good guy, and good guys deserve good things to happen to them.
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