Imagine Being A Browns Fan

 

Wrap your mind around this scenario. You’re a native of Cleveland, minding your own business in the late 90s (no, I’m not going to look up the exact year that the Browns moved, bite me), possibly in a good mood, maybe even eating a hoagie on a park bench taking in a nice sunset out over Lake Erie, when you find out that Art Modell has absconded to Baltimore with your beloved NFL team. You then have to wait a couple years to get another team, while your ex, rebranded as the Ravens, almost immediately started shitting out super bowls when they landed in Baltimore. Ed Reed could have been on your team. Instead you were adding failed QBs to an overcrowded t-shirt.

Fast forward 25 years, not only are the Ravens still good, but now they have one of the best QBs in the NFL and go to the playoffs every year. And your expansion team, still named the Browns (a quick aside: y’all coulda changed the name! You didn’t have to stay named after your in state rival’s fail family. Mike Brown is the human extension of your franchise!), trades a bucket of picks to the Texans (quite the mystery how they got so good so fast) to debase yourself by signing noted sex criminal Deshaun Watson to a hilariously large and rather naive guaranteed contract. Now the reasonable thing to do would be to walk away from your Browns fandom for a couple years. Or……you could root for a sexual predator. Should be an easy choice. And yet, it wasn’t for a lot of Browns fans. Not only did they root for him but some also defended him and a select few even went so far as to make light of why he had to settle over 20 lawsuits against him. All that just to watch him stink it up every game he played for you. It’s telling that when Deshaun got hurt yesterday it made me sad, not because of the injury, because he can fuck off, but because I wanted him to continue playing to essentially guarantee that the Bengals would win. The Browns hitched their wagon to his dying star, and now he is so untradeable because due to him sucking at football, and his contract is so unwieldy that he’s basically marooned your franchise on the loser belt in the trash nebula. Right where the Browns belong.

Burrow's Teeth

 

Joe Burrow had regular teeth in college. He won a national title with perfectly normal teeth. He looked very fucking cool sitting there smoking his cigar in the LSU locker room with those teeth. He was still working with the same set of denticles while his knee got mangled his rookie year in Cincy. 

When he shows up for his second year with the Bengals, he shows up not only with a better, less cowardly knee, but with some big ole fresh dice in his mouth.

Now why did he do that? Did he blame his old obsolete teeth for his knee injury? Maybe. Seems like a fairly logical jump to make considering Ohio’s Motto until their centennial in 1903 was a classic in Midwestern serenity, “Lean in the Tooth? Might as well be Dead.”

What else spurred him towards the decision? Here’s my theory, which has zero holes.

I think Joe visited a witch of the woods when his knee was jacked, and the old crone looked into her orb and began slowly incantating, “The Great Conjunction’s thirst is only slaked through sacrifice and rebirth,” until the tiny murmur became a din echoing around the forest from one swaying tree to the next.

Then he went to New York City and met with some piece of shit ad exec with slicked back hair and a white bathing suit that told him if he wanted to be the next face of Bose Headphones he was gonna need “Dangerous Nights” teeth.

Joe put two and two together. The witch was talking about sacrificing his old teeth on the altar of the Great Conjunction, and be reborn on the banks of the Ohio with beautiful new chompers. It was settled, he went and got new whitewalls and things started clicking. Deep playoff runs. Quarter billion dollar contract. Dominating the runway Kramer-style in a backless black suit at Paris Fashion Week. The teeth play.

On the darker side of the ledger, since Joe’s gotten these new teeth, there have been some troubling, monkey paw-esque developments, which tends to happen when you involve witches. He was forced to take a proof of life photo with Trump. That was, umm, not ideal. Although I’d chalk that one up to his guy Bosa really wanting a photo with the Big Man, and Joe getting stuck at the wrong place and wrong time. There is also the whole Aftab putting a hex on the team debacle that needs a counterweight.

I think Joe knows what needs to be done before September. Roll the bones again. Continue the cycle of sacrifice and rebirth the witch whispered into the cosmos, and change up. This time, go even bigger, get the teeth that Jim Carrey has when he wears The Mask. Those are super bowl winner teeth. Get some teeth big enough that if they bit a horse’s haunches the horse would rear back in anguish but eventually have no choice but to show begrudging respect.

The Aftab Curse

 

The Bengals had already beat the Chiefs heading into the playoffs. They had bounced them out of the playoffs the year before. Ja’Marr Chase had their secondary lashing out at perceived and real threats. The Chiefs as a whole were sitting at home at night stewing over whether the only recently competent Bengals were really the team that had their number. And they were right to be looking in the mirror and ruminating on if it was over for them just as quick as it had started. Heading into their AFC Championship game with the Bengals in late January of 2023, things were a little wobbly for Reid and Mahomes when it came to playing us.

And then, something really fucking stupid happened. Actually ‘happened’ isn’t the right word, since happened sort of makes it sound like the thing just aperated itself out of nowhere. Something really fucking stupid was planned and executed in the least well thought out, most hamfisted fashion, and may have altered the trajectory of the Great Conjunction for at least the last year and change.

As far as I can tell, Aftab and possibly Lis Smith, an infamous democrat consultant rumored to be working for Aftab at the time, decided to cast the Bengals asunder by committing to film a seminal work in their tone-deaf, problematic, and positively juiceless mayor-before-a-big-game “trash talk” video. When I saw that video I knew we were cooked in the AFC Championship Game, and then after the game when Kelce got to rightfully call Aftab a Jabroni, we entered a phase of cookedness that’s usually only reserved for bible characters and the federally indicted. I mean, last year was a farrago of crossed signals. The dynamic trio of Eli, Vonn and Jesse left. Burrow got hurt, played his way back to health and hope, and then got slammed to the ground so hard on his wrist he couldn’t grip a football. Big Irv’s talent got squandered. The defense fell apart. And eventually we missed the playoffs. This year remains cloudy. Hopefully it was only a light 13 month curse that momentarily swerved us off our path to eternal glory. If anything can do it, bringing Vonn home, the flash point of the conjunction, has to help the winds of change turn back in our favor.

Or maybe Aftab dropped us back into the abyss where we found ourselves wandering for decades after we injured Bo Jackson. We’ll find out in a couple months!

YOLO...or...Be All Pragmatic and Shit

 

On the pod I think I’ve talked about the concept of holding two competing ideas in your head at once even though they contradict each other, well that’s kinda where we are with the duality of the Tee franchise tag situation. We’ve been talking about it for a full year and I still haven’t really decided what the correct course is. I mean, in my heart of hearts I know what I want. But it’s sort of a, ‘god that Big Buford would really hit right now’, versus ‘that juicy, delicious, sauced up affordable cheeseburger is bad for your health!’ Do you want to watch one more year of Tee and Ja’Marr and Burrow making it nigh impossible to stop the offense when it’s fully clicking, or is the rational side of your brain screaming, “TRADE HIM FOR PICKS! WE CAN’T LET HIM WALK FOR NOTHING!” Both sides are right, just depends on what vantage you have of the prism. And honestly, I think fans should be able to be selfish and in the moment by saying I want more Tee on the Bengals, the future be damned, and not have the savvy serious folk intone that you’re a sweet summer child for not trying to flip him for picks. 

Here’s where I’m at: I don’t think it’s particularly enjoyable to only think about cap numbers and the draft and roster construction. Seems like a miserable way to consume sports. I think it’s more fun to not worry about shit as a fan. I don’t give a fuck what the Benagls cap number is, I just want them to be good next year. We can figure out the down the road shit…down the road. Each season is its own story, it has its own narrative arc, and when one season is unfolding, I think people should just enjoy it. So for next season I would like Tee to still be a Bengal because that will make the viewing experience more enjoyable to me, the center of my own universe.

I mean, I kinda omitted the obvious solution to all this, which is that they could have handed Tee a long term contract and figured the rest out later. But…the Mike Brown family and his shifty doppelganger son and meh daughter and Jos A Bank Suit salesman lookin ass son-in-law always cry poor when it comes to ponying up. Kinda an aside but I blame fantasy football for the rise of the fan that would rather be the GM than one of the players. Too many excel-heads out there. Like why ever take Mike Brown’s side when it comes to players getting paid. Why ever say that someone is overpaid? Stop pocket watching. Get your own numbers up. Where was I though, oh yeah, I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s cool if you want Tee for one more year, and it’s also cool if you think you have to trade him for the future posterity of the team. Just don’t talk to me about it though, cause I want more Tee as a Bengal, consequences be damned.