When the Browns made the trade with the Pittsburgh Steelers to get wide receiver Sammie Coates on Saturday, nobody on either side thought it was odd, or extraordinary.
The Browns needed a young wideout with potential, and the Steelers, tired of waiting on Coates to develop, needed to get him the heck off their roster. So Coates – and a seventh-round pick in the 2019 NFL Draft — went to Cleveland, and a sixth-rounder in 2018 went to Pittsburgh.
Coates will get a chance to play immediately. He could really help the Browns. Other than that, it was just another trade.
Back in the day, though, any deal between these two longtime, bitter rivals – even one involving only sweat socks and chinstraps – would have been stop-the-presses news. Certainly, there was mutual respect between the organizations, but the feeling wasn’t so warm and fuzzy that they could barter with each other – not much, anyway. You don’t do business with the enemy.
Come on, do you think Coke and Pepsi, General Motors and Ford, and McDonald’s and Burger King trade anything back and forth? Of course not.
The most significant trade between the clubs was in 1968 when the Browns sent a group of players to Pittsburgh for quarterback Bill Nelsen, who helped lead Cleveland to two consecutive NFL Championship Game appearances. Other than that, pretty much the only thing the Browns and Steelers ever traded was punches.
In 1981, the Steelers tried to “sneak” backup quarterback Rick Trocano, from Brooklyn High School in Cleveland and the University of Pittsburgh, through waivers. In many cases, it’s just a procedural move and teams just let the player pass through without claiming him, with the understanding that the other teams will do the same for them in return if the situation presents itself. But the Browns claimed Trocano, which infuriated Steelers head coach Chuck Noll, a product of Benedictine High School in Cleveland and a former messenger guard with the Browns. It made Noll so mad, in fact, that he purposely ran up the score on the Browns the next time the teams met, winning 32-10 in Cleveland late in that 1981 season.
Now in the expansion era, anything goes, apparently. The teams trade back and forth like it’s the stock market. In fact, this is the second Cleveland-Pittsburgh deal in two years. In 2016, the Browns sent cornerback Justin Gilbert to the Steelers for a 2018 sixth-round pick, which they returned to Pittsburgh in the trade for Coates.
Gilbert was the same abysmal failure with the Steelers that he was with the Browns. He was an equal opportunity annoyer. If Coates does likewise for Cleveland, then this “flurry” of trades between the teams just might come to a screeching halt.
Then there’s the case of defensive lineman Orpheus Roye. The Steelers drafted him in 1996 and he played with them through 1999, after which he signed a big contract with the Browns in free agency. He was with Cleveland from 2000-07 and then released. The Steelers signed him and he played with them in 2008 before retiring.
Yikes! Roye was a Benedict Arnold for both sides.
When the Browns released veteran cornerback Joe Haden last week, he signed with Pittsburgh. Perhaps he’ll cover Coates next Sunday when the teams open the regular season in Cleveland, just like he covered Coates the last two seasons when he was with the Browns and Coates was with the Steelers.
Can something so bizarre actually be happening? Is there nothing sacred anymore?
This is like the movie, “Back to the Future Part II,” in which Doc Brown proclaims to Marty that there’s a parallel 1985. Perhaps there’s a parallel 2017 and we’ve unknowingly stepped into it through some time warp.
In any event, Chuck Noll must be turning over in his grave over all this, while Doug Dieken and Joe “Turkey” Jones are no doubt trying to keep from getting sick on themselves.
