I fully intended to watch just 20 minutes of this one, certain the game would be far out of reach by then and the performance as dismal as ever.
To this point, I had watched about seven and a half quarters of Browns football over four games during occasional lunch outings. They are just too painful to watch all the way through anymore.
At least the Browns and Steelers looked like they belonged in the same league in this one, and the Steelers limped off the field knowing they'd been in a real football game. Until the final three minutes, that is, when the Steelers showed us why they're the Steelers and the Browns turned back into a big orange pumpkin.
As I watched the game, probably my one and only full game of the season, the following thoughts came to mind.
- Watching Owen Marecic get pushed around by yet another team — and suffer his second concussion of the season — you have to again wonder why the Browns let Lawrence Vickers go. Vickers is a cement truck. Marecic is a Tonka truck.
- Whatever Peyton Hillis's struggles this season, he'd probably still be respectably muscling his way through a defense behind Vickers' smashing blocks regardless.
- From what I've seen and read, Pat Shurmur seems overmatched in every game. He's entirely too predictable. I think Mike Holmgren wanted someone from his own coaching tree to mentor and mold, which is why Eric Mangini had to go, but Shurmur is making all the first-year head coach mistakes that all of our other first-year head coaches made. And what fan has the tolerance for that — again?
- I love Josh Cribbs but, man, does he talk too much about his role in each week's game plan.
- What does it say about the season that our most memorable moment thus far is a comic declaiming the "Factory of Sadness"?
- What does it say about the season that our "big fix" thus far has been the release of long snapper Ryan Pontbriand?
- What does it say about fan desperation that we have such huge soft spots for our long snapper, punters and kickers?
- Is it just me, or do you also think the "Factory of Sadness" guy jinxed Pontbriand?
- I wish the Browns had a player like Brett Keisel. He's like Bob Golic and Lyle Alzado rolled into one.
- When the Browns sent Ben Roethlisberger into the locker room, I got nostalgic for the day Turkey Joe Jones dumped Terry Bradshaw on his head. Then James Harrison almost popped Colt McCoy's head off like a dandelion bloom. (Why, why, why did they send McCoy back in?!)
- My friends in Chicago sometimes ask me if I ever think of the Baltimore Ravens as "the old Browns." No ... but I'm starting to think of 1996 to 1999 as the Browns' "glory years."
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