This week is right where the Browns want to be.
No, not where they actually are, with, as the result of being so bad for so long in this expansion era, they have five picks in the top 65 overall in the 2017 NFL Draft and are using this week to continue to prepare for it.
It’s great that they have all the picks. It should help them get better – a whole heckuva lot better. But it’s not so great in that they have to get a whole heckuva lot better. It’s no fun for anyone involved being at the very bottom of the league. It’s a nightmare.
Rather, this week is where the Browns want to be – desperately so, in fact – only if they were the Indians or Cavaliers.
Coming off last year, in which they came oh, so close to winning the World Series, the Indians headed into the start of the regular season this week as the sexy pick of a lot of experts to take the next step this season, finish the job and win it all. If the Indians are ever going to break their now 69-year streak of no World Series victories, this would appear to be it. Again, according to the “experts,” the stars are all aligned in just the right way for that to happen.
The expansion-era Browns have gotten love entering the season only twice, in 2008 after they had finished 10-6 the year before and just missed the playoffs, and in 2003 after they made the postseason the previous season for the first and only time since their rebirth in 1999. But that hope – that faith, that promise – was built on fool’s gold. It was a shooting star. The 2008 and ’03 seasons turned out to be unmitigated disasters.
Let’s hope that the same fate doesn’t befall the Indians. What they did last season is far, far beyond what the Browns did in 2002 and ’07, so at least the baseball optimism emanates from real substance. It is validated.
And the Cavaliers, of course, after winning the NBA title last year and breaking the city of Cleveland’s 52-year drought of major pro sports championships, are in the last full week of the regular season. They play their finale next Wednesday.
Soon all these seemingly endless string of games, some of which, against the bottom-feeders, never get the full attention of the NBA’s best teams, will be out of the way and the Cavaliers will begin focusing entirely on the playoffs. Even with the way they’ve struggled since the beginning of March, there is great anticipation for, and optimism about, the possibility of the Cavs repeating.
Like they are in comparison with the Indians, the Browns are a long way behind where the Cavs are this week.
But here’s the interesting thing about all that: the conversation on the Northeast Ohio radio sports talk shows is focused not on the great Cavs or great Indians, but rather on the great chance the Browns have to just get better.
Yes, this is a football-first area. It always has been, and it always will be, which no doubt steams the Indians and Cavs.
