Why not the Browns?

Indeed, why not the Browns?

Why can’t this be the season when they get to the Super Bowl for the first time, or perhaps even take a step further and win the NFL championship for the first time in 59 years?

I keep thinking about this, running these questions through my head as the Browns head back to the AFC playoffs for the first time since 2020 by meeting the host Houston Texans in a wild-card round game on Saturday.

Since the Browns last won it all by routing the heavily-favored Baltimore Colts 27-0 in the 1964 NFL Championship Game, they have been trying to repeat that. And so many times, I thought they would do so. No, rather, I was sure they would do do. We all were sure of it.

The Browns made it back to the NFL title game in 1965 with a better team than they had the year before, and were supremely confident in going to Green Bay to play the Packers. But a muddy mess of a field caused by an overnight snowstorm took away the Browns’ big advantage in speed, and they lost 23-12.

They got to the NFL (now regarded in this Super Bowl era as the
NFC) Championship Game in both 1968 and ‘69, rolling into it, in fact, after big victories over the Dallas Cowboys both times in the Eastern Conference Championship Game.

Doug Adair, the news anchor on Cleveland’s Channel 8, said on the newscast on Friday night before they played the Colts at Cleveland Stadium in 1968 for a berth in the Super Bowl, “I think the Browns will win, and I don’t think it will be close.” He was right, sort of. They lost 34-0, and it wasn’t even close. The 1969 Browns were even better than they were in ‘68 and seemed on their way, but they ran into a strong Vikings defense and the freezing-cold of Bloomington, Minn. and lost 27-7.

That kind of confidence for a Browns victory in the playoffs — a series of victories, in fact, leading all the way to the top, did not return until that Kardiac Kids season of 1980. Week after week after week, quarterback Brian Sipe and the guys pulled out victories. The stars seemed to be all aligned in just the right way for the Browns to go to the “Siper Bowl,” but they ran out of magic in the final minute against the Oakland Raiders at home in the divisional round with an interception in the end zone, resulting in a 14-12 loss.

In 1986, after they pulled out a 23-20 double-overtime win over the New York Jets at home in the divisional round, the Browns seemed destined for a trip to the Super Bowl as they got ready to host the Denver Broncos in the AFC Championship Game.

“Is there anyone in Northeast Ohio who thinks the Browns will lose?,” Akron Beacon Journal Browns beat writer Ed Meyer wrote in his prediction for a Cleveland victory. He was right. Everyone thought the Browns would win. They were sure of it. But they lost 23-20 in overtime.

That disappointed everyone, but did not dissuade anyone. The Browns and their fans, cognizant of just how talented this team was during the Bernie Kosar era of the last half of the 1980s, were confident that if they just kept banging on the door, they would eventually get in. But it didn’t happen.

All those,m seemingly sure bets covering all those years, and all those times getting stopped short, one way or another.

I don’t know about you, but the best things in my life haven’t come when I was all prepared and ready to get them. They came seemingly out of nowhere, as if they had just dropped out of the sky. I didn’t see them coming at all.

And I think it could also apply to the Browns. All those years when we expecting them to make it, they didn’t. And then in a year like this, when everybody kind of gave up on them because of all the injuries, especially at quarterback, I think they have a real shot. Go figure. If they’re ever going to make it, I am convinced it will happen in a year like this, when no one could’ve imagined it as recently as a month ago.

All the experts say the Browns will be a tough out in the playoffs. They’re the team that nobody wants to face because they have a dominant defense, they are explosive on offense and they have a time-tested quarterback in Joe Flacco.

So, then, why not the Browns? Why can’t it finally be their time?

For the 1964 championship game against the Colts, our family went to relatives in Bellaire, Ohio, near Wheeling, W. Va., to watch the game on the CBS affiliate in Steubenville, Channel 9. Back then, the telecast of any NFL game was blacked out within a 75-mile radius of the game site. Bellaire is almost 170 miles from Cleveland, so we were well beyond the blackout area.

When the game was over, I distinctly remember stepping out onto my great aunt’s front porch. I looked out toward the big hill off in the distance that, via State Route 214, led up to Rose Hill Cemetery, where all my relatives are now buried. I kept thinking that as far as the eye could see, the Browns were champions. There was no team anywhere that could beat them that season.

But at that time, if someone had told my nine-year-old self, that, when I got to be 68, I would still be waiting on that next championship, I might’ve been so shocked that I would have fallen off the porch.

Perhaps we have all been waiting too hard, with too much energy and conviction, if there is such a thing. Perhaps we just need to be open to it happenNing when we didn’t see it coming.

Why can’t the Browns do it this season? I can’t come up with a good reason.

Maybe that’s the best part of this great story, that it had to come to this. We would — we will — enjoy it so much better this way.

Steve King