In this incredibly unbelievable Browns season, there is an incredibly unbelievable fact that stands out from all the other incredibly unbelievable facts.
That is, though the Browns will be in Houston, the former NFL home of Deshaun Watson, their $230 million man, for a wild-card round AFC playoff game on Saturday against the Texans, he is not even in the storyline — at all. It’s not so much anymore that he’s non-descript because he’s been lost for the season after undergoing shoulder surgery — that tale has come and gone, and will be dealt with again in the offseason — but rather it’s because the memory of his brief contributions has been obliterated by the performance of the Browns’ 38-year-old man, and his replacement, quarterback Joe Flacco.
If somebody had told you that any of this — let alone all of it — was going to happen in the way it did, you would have told them that they were delusional. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, you can’t make this stuff up. No one would . . . well, believe it.
This is not the only playoff game this weekend filled with all kinds of crazy scenarios. In Detroit, the major storyline for the Lions’ NFC wild-card round playoff game against Los Angeles on Sunday night, is that former longtime Detroit quarterback Matthew Stafford will finally get to play a postseason game at Ford Field, and it will come as a member of the Rams. In addition, Lions quarterback Jared Goff took the Rams to the Super Bowl.
In Houston and in Cleveland, it’s Flacco, a former longtime Browns villain as a member of the Baltimore Ravens, now a Cleveland hero as he leads the team into the playoffs against Texans sensational rookie C.J. Stroud, a former Ohio State quarterback turned villain — for this one time only.
Watson? He’s a non-entity in all of this. He’s not even a bit player in this production. He could stand on the sideline and hold a clipboard, but there’s that bum shoulder that will preclude that.
We can only hope that the hype for both big events doesn’t supersede the games themselves. Sonehow, I don’t think that will happen.
Steve King
