Living With Great Expectations

The operative word to sum up the 2008 Cleveland Browns season is ‘expectations’. It’s tough to find a single article, column, blog post, or story that doesn’t use the word expectations in the first paragraph. No matter what happens with the Browns this season, they will be compared to the weight of these lofty pre-season expectations.

The real question, then, is how will the Browns handle these expectations, and can they not just handle, but possibly even exceed them? Expectations are nice, especially when a franchise has been living under nothing but doubts and feelings of lethargy and cynicism for so many dreadful seasons. You’ll have to excuse me while I confess that I have often seen this Browns franchise as a sleeping giant in the NFL. It’s hard to remember now, thanks to season after season of being little more than an embarrassing laughingstock, but the Cleveland Browns are a franchise with a history of success and winning with few rivals. This is a franchise with 8 League Championships to its name, 4 in the AAFC and 4 in the NFL. This is a franchise with 11 conference titles and 13 division titles. This is a franchise with 21 names in Canton in the Professional Football Hall of Fame.

It’s hard to think of the Halcyon Days of the Browns in these Tumultuous Days. This, however, is supposed to be the year the Browns reclaim their legacy. With 5 primetime games this season, as well as several 4:00 spotlight games, and with 6 returning Pro Bowl players, and with several high profile new players via trade and free agency, and coming off an impressive 10-6 season in which they just missed the playoffs, this is supposed to be the year. With so much optimism and high expectations floating around training camp, how could anything go wrong?   

There are really 2 ways it can go wrong. One, you can have unexpected injuries. Nothing can kill momentum and growth in the NFL quite like untimely injuries to key players at virtually any position. And two, the players can buy into the hype and ease up on the effort. If either or both of these scenarios come to fruition, they can kill a team’s goodwill. The problem the Browns are facing is that it’s possible that both are happening right now before the season even starts.

I hate to go all “doom and gloom” on you now, before we’ve seen even one meaningful snap, but the Browns injury situation is perplexing at the very least. Still 3 weeks until the regular season begins, the Browns have already seen injuries befall Braylon Edwards, Kevin Kasper, Beau Bell, Martin Rucker, Steve Heiden, Joshua Cribbs, Brad Cieslak, Leon Williams, Brodney Pool, Lawrence Vickers, Joe Jurevicius, Kellen Winslow, Steve Heiden, Ryan Tucker, Seth McKinney, Daven Holly, Willie McGinnest, Shaun Rogers, and Derek Anderson. Some injuries are worse than others, while some are pretty minor, but none the less, injuries seem to be spreading throughout this team like a plague. This is problematic because the superstitious side of me says that in the NFL, injuries often seem contagious. Once a couple injuries start hitting a team, the next thing you know you have a full blown epidemic on your hands.

While injuries are always a concern, there’s not much you can do about them. Being good often requires a touch of luck as far as injuries are concerned. What’s not up to luck, though, and is therefore perhaps of even greater importance, is the ability to not be distracted by expectations. When you consider the Browns humiliating performance against the New York Giants in the Meadowlands on Monday Night Football for all the football world to see, you can’t help but wonder if some complacency has already rooted its ugly head in the Browns’ clubhouse. If that is the case, then maybe this slice of humble pie was just what the doctor ordered for an ailing football team.

For their part, however, the players have all been saying the right thing. If complacency or self-congratulations were a problem, you wouldn’t know it from listening to the players talk. Which begs the question of what exactly happened Monday night? You can’t tell me that there is a talent discrepancy between the two teams that is proportionate to the degree of blowout on display in that game. Perhaps it was just rust from being the 2nd preseason game of the year, on a 12 day break from their 1st preseason game. Perhaps it was a team taking it easy knowing it was about to play 3 games in 11 days. Or perhaps it was just one of those days.

Whatever the case, this remains the season of high expectations for the Cleveland Browns. How the players on this team deal with the weight of that pressure that comes from having lofty expectations will go a long way towards determining how this season ultimately turns out. At the end of the season last year, when the pressure was dialed up and the Browns had to come away with big wins, the team faltered, going just 2-2 over a stretch of games against the Cardinals, Jets, Bills, and Bengals. This year, the Browns can expect the pressure to equal that of the home stretch last year. The good news is that the Browns have experienced heartbreaking failure. They’ve already experienced humiliating domination this preseason now, too. It all adds up to experience, and we’ve seen time and time again the value of experience in sports. The Browns will be a better team for having already gone through failure last year and for having already gone through embarrassment this year. Now, if the Browns can just get their injuries under control, this could be a team ready to band together and use their experiences to overcome their expectations and to take this once proud franchise back to where they belong. I’m ready to believe.