Marty Schottenheimer’s finest game in Cleveland
By STEVE KING
Just like it’s been said that first impressions, last, it’s also been said that last impressions, last.
That’s the case for Marty Schottenheimer, who passed away on Tuesday due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease at age 77.
His last regular-season game with the Browns was his best game as head coach of the team from the midway point of the 1984 season through ’88.
It was a little over 32 years ago, on Dec. 18, 1988, and the Browns were hosting the Houston Oilers at Cleveland Stadium in the regular-season finale. It was Cleveland weather, Browns weather — 20 degrees and a 7-degree wind-chill at kickoff, with a light snow that lasted all afternoon — but it certainly didn’t look to be the Browns’ day, and at the most inopportune time.
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The 9-6 Browns were in a win-or-go-home situation in terms of making the AFC playoffs for the fourth straight season — this time, for the first time, as a wild card. The 10-5 Oilers, who had already clinched a wild-card spot and had beaten the Browns 24-17 six weeks earlier at the Astrodome on Monday Night Football, got off to a great start, taking a 10-0 lead in the first quarter. When they increased the margin to 23-7 with 9 1/2 minutes left in the third quarter, the stadium was dead and, it appeared, so were the Browns.
Their only points had come on a 10-yard fumble return for a touchdown by rookie defensive lineman Michael Dean Perry in the second quarter. The offense was going nowhere — well, yes, it was, in one case, in that it was going backward when quarterback Don Strock’s first-quarter pass was intercepted and returned 36 yards for a TD.
The 38-year-old had been coaxed out of retirement and signed while coming off a golf course as an insurance policy, then was pressed into duty six days earlier in a MNF road loss to the Miami Dolphins when Bernie Kosar was knocked out of the game with an injury. It was the second time that Kosar had been lost to injury, and the fourth time that a Browns quarterback had gotten hurt, also losing first Gary Danielson and then Mike Pagel. It was, ass such, the most injury-riddled season in terms of quarterbacks in Browns history. You had to see it to believe it.
Strock, a long-time back-up quarterback for the Dolphins, was rusty, and it showed.
Indeed, the Browns, who needed points — a lot of them, and in a hurry — to save their season, were up against it.
What happened next was truly special.
NEXT: A complete about-face.
Marty Schottenheimer’s finest game in Cleveland
