Todd Monken wants the Browns quarterback competition to play out, the new stadium keeps looming, and the boards are already doing offseason board things.
For a side project I’m working on, I went to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and looked at some of the really old Browns TNG.com pages from the late 1990s and early 2000s.
It’s clear that I was having a lot of fun with the site way back when. There was a lot of silliness, with everything from an area mocking our rivals to a regular feature called “The Drunk Guy Game Report”, a conceit that still amuses me.
It took some time for this site to evolve from a site that was just having fun to one that took itself a little more seriously and tried to provide a mix of news, fun, and analysis.
Over the years, my anger at the way the NFL treated Browns fans, both the move and the disappointing expansion team, has faded into more of a mindset which looks at somewhat of an amused fascination at the whole NFL ecosystem, from the NFL’s overt money-grubbing, to the team’s perpetual dysfunction , to the frequently ludicrous nature of the entertainment product which passes for news about the team and the game, while simultaneously taking itself very seriously. I wondered how my then-30-something self would relate to this whole recent mess about starting quarterbacks, sandwich-making, and the reaction to it all.
Back then, I probably would have produced a scorching editorial about how fans are treated like morons by this sort of thing, but today I’m more tempted to shrug my shoulders at it and let the Browns universe play out as it inevitably will. At a far enough distance, the whole thing is just a sign of how goofy it is to take sports so seriously.
I probably should be angry about the buzzkill of inserting this storyline following the good news of the Browns’ second consecutive strong draft, but I remain somewhere short of upset. To quote one of my favorite songs and artists of all time: “I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused. ” The media behaves as it does. Players’ relatives behave as they do.
The team behaves as it does. Any opportunity I have to affect the course of events is indiscernible. I won’t criticize the easily-questioned decision to run with a story that may not pass the sniff test, nor will I entertain misogynistic comments about a talented woman who put out the story, and who has become the center of the story.
I admire what she’s done in this rough, male-dominated business, even though I may not always agree with her reporting or analysis. - one of the least rewarding and inept teams to follow over the past thirty years, suddenly look like the adults in the room, rising above the chatter and chaos to simply state that it’s far too early to talk about who’s winning what depth chart race. Which is inarguable.
Because, suddenly, the Cleveland Browns are looking like an organization that gets things done. They’re stacking good personnel decisions, their new head coach seems like the perfect antidote to the previous one, and they’re even amassing a couple of billion dollars to build a new stadium, with intentions of helping to revive the local economy. It won’t, of course, these boondoggles never do, but I believe that they believe it will.
Meanwhile, the new stadium continues its slow march from renderings to reality to a municipal finance seminar. Jimmy Haslam says, the funding remains a topic, and we all get to pretend that hotel rooms, traffic patterns, roofs, Super Bowls, and tailgating geometry are normal things to consider before the first rookie minicamp rep. , because the great sorting never really ends. Draft weekend was merely the loud part.
Now comes the quieter work of figuring out which of these names becomes a football player and which becomes a trivia answer on a future Watercooler thread.if you missed the latest tour through renderings, rumors, and reps. The draft class is still being unpacked one pick at a time, which is how it should be, because instant grades are snacks and roster construction is dinner.
So today is for letting the quarterback competition breathe without pretending it is not the oxygen in the room. It is also for remembering that the Browns can build a dome, draft a safety, hire smart people, and still somehow make the quarterback room the main character. This is our lot. We have chosen it, or it has chosen us.
The paperwork remains unclear.2026 NFL Draft’s best UDFA fits: 1 undrafted free agent to watch on each rosterTodd Monken: I would love to name QB before training camp, I’m not there yet Shilo Sanders tells Mary Kay Cabot to “go make a sandwich” after she says Deshaun Watson should be QB1thin, stretchy material that could help shield next-generation space technology from radiation . I am generally in favor of both space technology and things not being fried by invisible cosmic nonsense, so we will place this in the positive-news bucket and step away before someone asks whether it can protect us from offseason quarterback speculation.
When not wondering whether a radiation-shielding rubber hair is somehow eligible for the practice squad, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled. Wooster High School mourns death of sophomore baseball player
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