Browns fandom and French butterflies

Yesterday Jets fans heartily cheered when Chad Pennington went down with an ankle injury and was replaced by his backup, Kellen Clemens. Today in his Yahoo! Sports column NFL writer Mike Silver (formerly of Sports Illustrated) took the time to call out Jets fans:

Jets fans, I’ve got an idea: Why don’t we ship you all – or at least those of you who cheered Chad Pennington’s departure Sunday with a sprained right ankle and the subsequent appearance of backup quarterback Kellen Clemens – to Cleveland for a few years’ duty in the Dawg Pound. You don’t deserve a quarterback with Pennington’s guts, intelligence and drive. You deserve Ryan Leaf.

Ryan Leaf never played for the Browns, but given the team’s recent history with quarterbacks avoiding the Ryan Leaf fiasco is probably the only thing that’s gone right for the organization w/r/t quarterbacks, and the only reason the Browns didn’t screw that up is because the team was in Baltimore at the time. That might be the only silver lining to Art Model shipping the franchise to Maryland. And thus you have your Cleveland Browns: victories are when the organization can’t screw up because the organization has been moved to another city.

That said, I understand what Silver is saying here. Jets fans do not know suffering. Cleveland fans do. The Meadowlands may as well be the Promise Land when compared to Cleveland’s Devil’s Island and the only way for Jets fans to get some perspective is to be subjected to the torture of being a Browns fan. Fire up your tribal tattooing systems because the club is about to get larger.

And much like Henri Charrière Browns fans are staring over a cliff into a void whose prospects look grim. I guess to take the metaphor a little further Brady Quinn is our sack of coconuts, but I suppose it’s worth it if Steve McQueen plays us in the film adaptation of our lives. Right?

Yes, the momentum of this post died about three paragraphs ago and then got really bad in the paragraph above. This is a case of a half-interesting title driving a rather inane post. I figure most cheap romance/crime novels work the same way.

And….

The End.