Imagine the Cleveland Browns having a big lead in the Super Bowl with just minutes to play.
Trying to form such a thought makes the brain hurt, but the unimaginable is the reality in Premier League, where Leicester City holds a five-point lead over Tottenham with just four games to play. A season ago, Leicester barely avoided relegation and opened this campaign at laughable 5,000-1 odds to hoist the Premier League trophy. But here we are. And only a sudden return to its previous middling standards will prevent Leicester from the first top-flight championship in the club’s 132-year history.
It’s an underdog story that has never been replicated in American football. Last season’s Carolina Panthers opened at 50-1 odds, fresh off a 7-8-1 season and losing No1 receiver Kelvin Benjamin to a torn ACL. They defied those expectations all the way to becoming five-and-a-half-point favorites in the Super Bowl … only to get torn apart by the Broncos (who were given preseason 9-1 odds) and lose by 14.
The biggest underdog story in NFL history is the 1999 Rams, then a proud member of the St Louis business community. They opened the season at 300-1 after going 4-12 the season before and making Trent Green, who had started for one year in Washington, their big offseason acquisition.
Then Green got hurt and the worst record in football seemed assured – only Arena League veteran/grocery market stock boy Kurt Warner turned the Rams into an unstoppable offensive force that went 13-3 and beat Jeff Fisher’s Titans in the Super Bowl. In retrospect, beating Jeff Fisher in a Super Bowl doesn’t seem like a huge upset, but it was big enough at the time to make Vegas bookies cry like Dick Vermeil.
Yet as impressive and unexpected as that Rams season was, same as with Joe Namath’s Jets in 1968, there is really only one NFL franchise that would ever truly shock the football world by winning it all: the Cleveland Browns, the eternal laughing stock. If the NFL had relegation, not only would the Browns not have avoided it like Leicester did, they’d have been dropped from the CFL by now, too.
Cleveland currently sits at a league-worst 200-1 odds for Super Bowl 51. But even that seems generous to the Browns. If you played the 2016 season 200 times, Johnny Manziel signing with a team and showing up to practice on time every day feels more likely to happen once than a Browns championship. The Browns have worked years to earn the 5,000-1 odds Leicester City was handed and it’s disrespectful that the bookmaking community isn’t honoring all the years of failure with more appropriate 10,000, or even 100,000-1 odds. If those ‘99 Rams were 300-1, then the 2016 Browns have to at least be 500-1, right? Let’s be reasonable.
And now let’s stop being reasonable and think about how these Browns could pull a Leicester City and win it all in 2016. If Cinderella can win the world’s biggest soccer league, who (outside of maybe that little, wise voice in your head and also everyone you know) says the Browns can’t take the NFL, too?
The biggest thing the Browns have going for them, and a similarity with Leicester, is a new man at the helm with a proven track record of success. Claudio Ranieri did well with Chelsea a decade ago, and has taken Leicester from the brink of relegation to the brink of a championship in his first season as manager. In Hue Jackson, the Browns seem to have finally landed on a coach that is respected and coveted by other franchises in the league – not a Plan D like recent failures Mike Pettine, Rob Chudzinski and Pat Shurmur.
Jackson coordinated an efficient Andy Dalton-quarterbacked offense in Cincinnati the last two seasons and in 2011 went 8-8 as head coach of the Oakland Raiders, a bit of wizardry few coaches alive could achieve. Before that, he coached Joe Flacco from unibrowed Delaware product to elite (postseason) quarterback with two distinct eyebrows. He’s legit.
The Browns may finally have the coach to turn things around. They definitely have the schedule to do it.
Cleveland opens the season against the Eagles, the Ravens and the Dolphins, teams who were a combined 18-30 a season ago. A 3-0 or 2-1 Browns team would then only need to keep its head above water while finishing up with a schedule that includes just three teams outside their division with winning records in 2015. Defying all odds and winning Super Bowl 51 will require first slipping into the playoffs, and even an average team could go 10-6 with Cleveland’s schedule.
Of course, Hue Jackson and an easy schedule aside, there’s the problem: the team itself. It’s not average. On paper, the Browns look bad. On the field, they’ve looked far worse and enter the draft having lost all four of their top free agents: Mitchell Schwartz, Alex Mack, Tashaun Gipson and Travis Benjamin.
But not all losses were bad. Manziel and Dwayne Bowe are no longer Browns and can definitely be placed in the Addition By Subtraction category. They also made no splashy acquisitions … same as Leicester City! If Cleveland avoids the temptation to draft their next bust with the No2 pick in the draft, they’ll open the season with either Josh McCown at quarterback or Robert Griffin III. McCown was downright above adequate last year when not injured and RG3 is … well, he’s got a higher ceiling that most Browns players, right? With Joe Thomas holding down the offensive line, poor man’s Gronk Gary Barnidge at tight end and maybe Terrelle Pryor making plays at wide receiver, the Browns could surprise on offense.
The defense, which was ranked 27th in the league last year and gave up 27.0 points per game, will be led by new coordinator Ray Horton, a role he also served in Cleveland in 2013 when the Browns D was ranked ninth in the NFL. What if the Browns took sure-thing linebacker Myles Jack with the No2 pick and set him loose to wreak havoc on the field with Joe Haden? The defense would definitely be better and, with an improved offense, might just be enough to get a wildcard spot with a weak schedule.
That achievement alone would feel like a miracle, but now we need to get the Browns four more postseason wins. The first one is easy: a win over Marvin Lewis and the Bengals in the in the wildcard round. Then all that would stand in their way of a Super Bowl appearance might be some mix of Alex Smith and Andy Reid, the always-injured Steelers, the Houston Texans, Bills or Jets, a Mark Sanchez-quarterbacked team and Tom Brady and the Patriots, who are due to be embroiled in some sort of cheating scandal again this postseason. It’s not impossible. That gets us to the Super Bowl where Hue Jackson unleashes a dozen mind-blowing trick plays featuring RG3 and Terrelle Pryor and … the Cleveland Browns are Super Bowl 51 champions!
It seems impossible. It probably is impossible. But no matter how bad things get in Cleveland, hope – and the Browns looking for a quarterback – springs eternal.
