“Frozen Fate: How Brutal Weather Helped End the Browns’ 1980 Super Bowl Dream”
These are the type of things you think about as the Browns get ready to move to a brand-new domed stadium in 2029.
Since they began playing in an outdoor stadium on the shores of Lake Erie in their first game ever in 1946, the Browns have used the weather — cold, windy, icy and snowy, just plain, ol’ nasty any number of times — to their benefit. It has been their 12th man, freezing out foes and causing them
to slip, slide away with a defeat.
But there was one time when the weather worked to their disadvantage. They got way too much of what they wanted — the weather was too bad, incredibly bad, the worst for a home game in the history of the team, and that’s saying something in this climate — and it cost them dearly, possibly keeping them from making their first Super Bowl appearance.
I’m talking about the 14-12 loss to the Oakland Raiders in the 1980 AFC Divisional Playoffs on Jan. 4, 1981 at the stand-up freezer that was Cleveland Stadium that day, known better as “the Red Right 88 game.” The Kardiac Kids’ storybook season ended in nightmarish fashion when the Browns, eschewing for one more play a field-goal attempt on a day when the weather conditions made kicking extraordinarly difficult, tried to score a touchdown with a Brian Sipe pass into the end zone intended for tight end Ozzie Newsome that was intercepted by an extra defensive back named Mike Davis with less than a minute left.
The temperature at the 12:30 kickoff was zero, with a windchill of minus-37. But that was in the “heat” of the day. By the time that fateful play occurred three hours later, it was much colder. Sam Rutigliano, the head coach of the Browns at the time, said it took him three weeks to get full feeling back in his legs after standing on the sideline for three hours.
The weather was so poor that it negated the potent Cleveland passing led by Sipe, who in 1980 broke nearly every single-season team passing record en route to winning the NFL Most Valuable Player award. For the season, he completed 60.8 percent of his passing attempts for 4,132 yards and 30 touchdowns with 14 interceptions. Against the Raiders, he had — by far, it wasn’t even close — his worst performance of not just the season but also of his 10-year Browns career, hitting on just 13 of 40 attempts (32.5 percent) for 183 yards and no TDs with three interceptions. The 12 points was the second-fewest total of the year for the Browns.
Had the weather been just ordinarily bad for that time of the year, I am of the firm conviction that Sipe would have been much, much better, the offense would have been much, much better and the Browns overall would have been much, much better, enough so to win the game.
A victory would have advanced the Browns to the AFC Championship Game against the San Diego Chargers on the road. Rutigliano — who should obviously know better than me — has always contended, “It would have been a bad match-up for us. We would have lost.” But I would have taken my chances with a Browns team that almost always found a way to win that season.
What makes the loss even tougher to take is that 1980 was one of two seasons when it seemed that the stars had all aligned themselves in just the right way for the Browns to go to the Super Bowl. The other season was 1986 when the Browns fell 23-20 to the Denver Broncos in overtime at Cleveland in the AFC title contest, better known as “The Drive game.” The weather had nothing to do with that defeat. The Browns lost because they couldn’t hold a touchdown lead late in the fourth quarter.
Weather will not be a problem once the Browns get to the dome.
For that 1980 team, the dome will come 49 years too late.
Steve King
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