My Sad Browns Jersey Collection

 

I'd like to take a break from the ever present need to predict Doomsday events for America's Worst Run Sports Franchise, your Cleveland Browns, to bring you up to speed on my expanding Browns jersey collection.  You might ask yourself, "Who would buy a Browns jersey as the team has failed to produce anyone you'd want to personally align with unless you ignore Jim Brown chucking his girlfriends out of apartment windows?".  This is a fair question.  I have spent a number of years loosely aligned with the organization and got to see behind the curtain.  You don't want to look back there, but I was forced to do so.  That led me to participate in a number of client events where I needed to be supportive of the Browns.  I used to have season tickets in the dawg pound of the old stadium, but that wide eyed enthusiasm left me a long time ago when I realized what the Cleveland Browns were all about after I started working closely with the team.  So, how did I wind up with a sad Browns jersey collection?  Let me take you back a few years to when I needed a Browns shirt for a work event...

I used to sell radio sponsorships on WMMS for the Cleveland Browns/Clear Channel.  I first sold these in 1999 when the Browns "returned" for the Browns Radio Network.  That was sort of fun as our sales manager understood the sports sell and would give us team access to help bring in clients and forge an attachment to the organization.  That guy totally got it.  He would set you up to succeed.  It's a lot easier to sell a Tim Couch Monday Night Football sponsorship when you could personally ask Tim to sign a ball for you to give to the Regional Marketing Director of Hooters.  The luster of that team return wore shockingly thin quickly as by the 2001 season the business community had returned to their somewhat historical position of "Fuck those guys, but show me the package".  The NFL is consistently committed to making Win/Lose deals for themselves over their clients and partners, and anyone that dances with that devil knows it.  Still, I have a bit of a soft spot for those 1999-2002 doomed teams of undermanned players that found themselves randomly in the worst Pro Football situation in history.  There were some good guys on some very bad football teams.  I have so much 1999-2003 Browns gear that is horribly dated and ugly, I can't tell you.  The Browns Radio Network sales staff had it coming out of our ears. 

Let's move ahead a few years.  I then sold sponsorships on WEWS for Browns Presesason Games and the occasional regular season game that would fall on ABC-TV.  This was an entirely different experience as the management team there had fallen under the spell of the glitz of pro sports and was happily led around by a dog collar by the team with a constant refrain of "Thank you sir, may I have another".   The team made the deal worse and worse for the station with each passing season and the station management just lapped it up.  These NFL franchises prey upon businesses that get caught up in the excitement of standing near the white hot sun of attention that an NFL franchise brings.  Key decision makers will give away EVERYTHING just to make sure they don't fall out of favor and risk losing their foursome at the annual Browns team golf outing or a Draft Day Party promo golf shirt.  We used to get these road trips with the team that were absolute gold for selling in prospects.  The station could give two clients a year the one thing these powerful potential business owners couldn't get, a ride on the team plane, staying in the same hotel, and taking charter buses back and forth with the players to the away stadium.  You'd go along as the rep, and it would build a rapport with customers.  As a salesperson, you just had to make sure the Browns salespeople didn't poach your clients as they were focused on doing.  However, within a couple years, the two WEWS manager guys concocted a story that the Browns "demanded" that only those two guys could go on these junkets.  Suddenly, it was their annual Boys Trip.  When the Browns went to London the first time, they whipped up this excuse that they had to go on that trip without even taking clients with them because the Browns "wanted to talk about the preseason TV deal".  You know how hard it was keeping a straight face in that meeting?  Let me tell you, the Browns put in as much thought about the next season's preseason games ten months out as you do on what paper towel brand you buy at the grocery store.  It was one of the most baldfaced lies I'd ever heard delivered with a straight face in my time in Corporate America.  Those guys just wanted to go to London with the BROWNS!    

During this time at WEWS I couldn't scare up a plastic mini helmet for a client much less a Browns shirt for myself to wear.  I used to have to call old radio friends to get my clients game tickets and training camp passes from their stash.  WEWS pathetically pretended they were "partners" with the Browns as they waved this Browns flag on the flagpole right under Old Glory.  Meanwhile I'm trying to shill overpriced spots on meaningless preseason games with the team providing us zero resources.  As part of the deal for airing rights to preseason games, the station used to get season tickets presumably for use by the entire sales staff for clients.  In reality the cute salesgirl that had the sales manager wrapped around her finger got 40% of the station tickets, with the managers taking a weekly pair as their own personal season tickets.  Those salespeople that were out of favor (or perhaps you could say any men on the staff over the age of 40) couldn't reliably get tickets, Training Camp passes or meaningful merchandise to help them sell.  In my last five years at the station I got two pair of tickets, the last being when Joe Flacco was a Jet and beat the Browns last minute in that Super Brownsy loss in 2022 where they lost an onside kick.  My last Browns game before that was in 2018 when the Browns beat the Panthers when Cam had a broken shoulder.  It's sort of incredible that in the last six years of my eighteen years there in total, a senior sales rep of the "official broadcast TV partner of the Cleveland Browns" was only able to secure 2 pair of tickets to a potential 48 games despite requesting them all the time.  Hey, that's the way it was when your Passive Aggressive Sales Management Team turns on you.  They fucking hated me.  Consequently, I never needed any Browns gear because I never went to any games.  As the 2010s became the 2020s, I had ZERO Cleveland Browns wearables.        

So when did I finally get a shirt?  And why do I have so many now?  As I mentioned, I had that 2018 game I miraculously scored tickets to, so I knew I needed a shirt to wear to that game.  Stunned I was going, I realized I just didn't have a thing to wear (said in a dramatic Southern Belle accent).  Now I didn't want to get any of the team's usual shitty gear at the team shop.  Let's be honest, orange and brown are the worst team colors in maybe all of sports.  I certainly wasn't going to buy some overpriced Browns golf shirt corporate wear crap.  That's when it hit me.  I needed to track down an old jersey of one of my favorite Browns "legends".  In this case, I'm talking about Brandon Weeden, my all time favorite Browns QB.   He was an incredible player because when he took the field anything could happen.  Please note, I'm not saying anything good, I'm just saying anything.  That shovel pass turnover Weeden made at home in his last season here was maybe my favorite play ever by the "New Browns".   After a quick Ebay search, I had secured my anchor Browns shirt, an official Brandon Weeden jersey for $20 out the door.  Score.

So after a few years of futility had passed, the crew I watch the games with on TV had come to the conclusion that maybe why the team was losing was because the Weeden jersey was "unlucky".  The jersey was cursed.  This is why the Browns were losing.  Now, I could counter with the fact that the team has drafted poorly, had questionable coaching, and shot themselves in the foot with the worst free agent signing in history, but maybe they had a point.  I decided I needed to get a new jersey to "shake it up" and bring some good luck to the team.  This was when I acquired my Justin Gilbert jersey.  Gilbert is a criminally overlooked Classic New Brown.  He was taken #8 overall in the 2014 draft, the same one where he was overshadowed by the later first round pick of Johnny Manziel.  The Browns GM in 2014 was Ray Farmer, one of the most smug executives I've ever met.  I personally witnessed him talking down to the owner of Liberty Ford who questioned why they had drafted Gilbert and Manziel, and Farmer sneered that this guy didn't know what he was talking about. It turned out that the car guy did.  Farmer was then fired the next year and has been effectively out of football ever since, which makes sense because he took Gilbert over Odell Beckham, Aaron Donald, Kyle Fuller, Ryan Shazier, and CJ Mosely.  Gilbert played one shaky year in Cleveland, got suspended for substances, got traded to Pittsburgh for a sixth round pick, got in 11 special teams plays, got cut and played Arena League ball five years later.  He is in the conversation for the worst Browns draft bust of all time.  I figured that would be the jersey that could turn the team fortunes around.  

Shockingly, this was not the case.  The Browns kept losing.  That's when I went out and got my Wonder Kicker jersey.  Any faithful readers of this column will understand my fascination with Cade York.  York was picked in the fourth round of the draft, and all training camp the only thing the media could report on was what a kicking savant this kid was.  Godammit, this Cade York kid can kick them in from 80 yards I tell you!  They chased away the previous kicker Chase McLaughlin (see what I did there?) and got ready for the good times with Wonder Kicker.  Week 1 Wonder Kicker came though on a long last second 58 yard kick to beat future MVP Baker Mayfield and his Panthers, and it looked like everything was coming up roses for York and the Browns.  Then he went 23-31 over the season and got waived the following year.  York then bounced around to practice squads on Tennessee, Giants, back to the Browns, the Bengals (where he missed a potential game winning kick in Week 17), and is currently out of football after marrying a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader and becoming a Born Again evangelist.  It's got to be tough to be thought of as "washed up" as a 24 year old, but the NFL is cruel.  By the way, Chase McLaughlin who the Browns ran out of town?  He's been a rock solid kicker in Tampa for the last three years and just hit a 65 yarder the other week.

After yet another disappointing set of results with the York jersey, I set out to find a new surefire winner.  It should be noted that I never spend more than $25 and am fully committed to only wearing players that capture the True Spirit of the Cleveland Browns.  This is why my Antonio Callaway jersey really caught my eye.  I was stunned that any had ever been made.  In Callaway's sophomore season he got suspended from the Florida football team for "schoolwork".  This, shockingly, turned out to be false information from the Florida Athletic Department when some journalists discovered in about 15 seconds that Callaway had been suspended due to sexual assault.  The charges mysteriously went away when an ex-Florida jock that was a donor to the football/basketball teams that was the judge on the case on campus dismissed them, but Callaway decided to enter the draft anyhow.  The Browns drafted him in the 4th round, and he became a starter when they traded Josh Gordon.  He caught 43 passes and 5 touchdowns that year, but then promptly got suspended for banned substances, showed up late to meetings and practices, faced another ten game suspension, got arrested for a suspended license/weed, and then got released.  He bounced around some practice squads, the XFL and got released from the Cowboys after getting arrested again.  I think of him as sort of a classic Brown in that he let you know who he was going to be when he got in the building, they took him anyway, and he flamed out after a bunch of drama.  This could have just as easily been a Devonne Bess jersey if I had seen one.

So that didn't turn the tide either, so now I'm excited to don this new positive vibe jersey of DTR.  He's close enough in our memory banks to remember him as a dude that was way too skinny/brittle to play QB and thus always injured, but you can't doubt his toughness.  He was a "pretty good" college football QB that was so marginal a NFL prospect that even when the Browns drafted him they must have thought "Yeah, this ain't going to work".  DTR is one of those bonafide Browns draft choices.  The entire league knew he wasn't going to be an NFL QB, but the Browns hoped that maybe... just maybe... he could get that offense going.  He couldn't and didn't.  He completed about 50% of his passes, threw one career TD to balance his 10 INTS.  Hey, he beat the Steelers once 13-10 when Kenny Pickett was the Steeler QB.  He got traded to the Eagles for Pickett in the Spring and then got waived in training camp that summer.  He's out of football now.  I can't believe the team printed these shirts up in the first place either.

The DTR jersey wasn't the magic bullet either.  I wore that last week when we watched the Browns get embarrassed by the Patriots.  I had it on when I went to the grocery store, and some guy walking by stopped dead in his tracks and said, "Wow... that's a real collector's item."  Thank YOU sir for noticing!  By this time I am in this too deeply and now understand the market for Shitty Ex-Browns Player Jerseys.  The Google Machine knows I might be the one buyer for a shitty Browns shirt no one else wants.  The ads flash past all the time.  I usually ignore them, but I almost wet myself with excitement when I saw my white whale.  There it was.  A DeShone Kizer jersey!  Kizer is a fabulous representative of the Cleveland Browns franchise.  Before the draft, Notre Dame's coach said, "I don't think he should enter the draft.  He's not ready.  He's not even close to ready."  Kizer went to the combine and had a very disappointing performance in the drills.  Of course the Browns drafted him in the second round, started him, and went 0-16.  Kizer was winless as a starter and led the league in interceptions.  The Browns traded him the next year where he played a quarter for Green Bay when Aaron Rodgers got hurt, and managed to throw a pick six and fumble once in about ten minutes.  He played the last game of the year too when Green Bay had wrapped up a playoff berth and didn't want to risk and injury to Rodgers.  Kizer threw for 132 yards and an INT, lost 31-0 to the Lions, then got released. He managed to sneak onto rosters as a backup in Tennessee and the Raiders, but never played again.  Hey, the guy grossed almost $4M in football and now has an NFT company.  I don't know if the company is any good, but the website has lots of jargon, so he's probably going to be better at that than football.  Good for him.

At this point I may well have the least valuable Browns jersey collection of anyone in the area.  I will admit to having lost a bid recently on a $10 Kellen Winslow jersey, but I had second doubts when I pressed "bid" on that as it's generally frowned upon to wear shirts celebrating guys that raped senior citizens and hitchhikers.  Winslow is up for parole in 2028 and has allegedly been a "model prisoner", but I'm thinking that might not be enough to carry the day if I get questioned about my choice to wear the shirt standing in line at CVS.  He also had a little too much success on the field before he wrecked his motorcycle so that's a double whammy.  I like the players that had too high of expectations, disappeared quickly, and without much fanfare.  There's a Jeff Garcia one I considered, but he had too much success elsewhere.  They got too much in trade for Trent Richardson, so he's out.  Barkevious Mingo had a long sorta OK career, so he's out.  Dewayne Bowe I'd probably buy, but not a Donte' Stallworth since he ran over and killed that guy after a night of partying in Miami.  It's a situation by situation judgement call over here.  The one thing I do know is that the Browns will inevitably bring in a whole new crop of disasterous players next year with unreasonably high expectations.  There's always a new shirt out there somewhere for me down the line.

Go Browns.