Dear Cleveland Browns,

Dear Cleveland Browns,

Every Sunday, for four months out of the year, you make me wish I could have grown up in any other NFL city in our fine country.  I don’t feel like I ever “chose” to be a fan of yours.  Instead I was born into a family of fanatical people who basically, through years of conditioning, “forced” me to become a fan of yours. 

Why don’t you just stop now you may ask?  Well now I just feel like I have too much invested in this thing.  You don’t spend your entire life building a house just to move into an apartment across the street. 

I don’t think I am alone in my resentment towards being forcibly molded into a fan of your franchise.  In fact, I would be surprised if there weren’t hundreds of thousands of people exactly like me.  People, who could have been born 80 miles to the Southeast of Cleveland and been perfectly happy, celebrating six Super Bowls for Pittsburgh.  As sick as the thought makes me, those people really lucked out compared to us.

Why is it always something with you guys?  If it’s not an outbreak of staph infections, it is how you are transitioning into a new defensive scheme.  If it’s not your transition into a new defensive scheme, it is how you are trying to install the West Coast Offense (in Cleveland, in the windiest stadium in the country, for some insane reason).  If it’s not that, it is your inability to court decent free-agents, or your players are in trouble with the law or the league, or your owner cares more about soccer then football, or your running back is either a pansy whose agent won’t let him play with a sore throat or his backup has a fractured knee for the fifth time.  How can you consistently find wide receivers who can’t catch, it seems like that would be harder to accomplish then finding guys who can?  How come you can’t hire a proven NFL head coach in 13 years?  How is that even possible?  Do you think that every obscure offensive/defensive coordinator is some sort of a diamond waiting to be discovered by you? 

The fact is, that most of those guys are coordinators because that is exactly what they should be… coordinators.

At what point, with as incensed and deprived of a fan-base as you have, did you think it would be a good idea to try installing the Holmgrem/Heckert/Shurmer five year plan?  Do you think you have five years?  Five years?  Five years to produce a winner in a town that hasn’t seen one in 16?  Five years is a long time to stay patient with something you already lost patience in years ago.  If I am running a business that has been screwing its customers for the better part of two decades, whatever reforms I make to rectify that situation had better not take five years.  Not If I want to retain any clientele. 

You have a great, young core of players on both sides of the ball, but you have them coached by a man, who is easily the worst excuse for an NFL head coach that I have seen in my 32 years.  Hiring Pat Shurmer as your head coach, after he coordinated the St. Louis Rams to a 6-10 record is one of the most curious decisions I have seen made by your franchise.  And that is high praise for a team so mired in an ocean of ongoing, nonstop, curious decisions. 

The problem is, if you replace him now, which you kind of have to, and bring in a whole new system, it has to work immediately.  Otherwise your core of good, young talent will leave for greener pastures and we are all stuck for another 3+ years waiting for you guys to acquire new talent that might work in whatever system the new regime installs.  I think, if that happens you might as well just see if Baltimore needs another team and just relinquish your strangle-hold on one of the most prime pieces of property in our city. 

My advice is this.  You’re going to have to bring in a new head coach.  Retain your offensive/defensive coordinators and bring in a head coach that is proven in the NFL and who doesn’t want to completely overhaul everything.  In parallel, sign some free agents.  We can’t keep trying to cover Dez Bryant and Victor Cruz with 7^th round picks.  Hope to god, that your young core buys in, and that the system works.  Because you are just about out of time with your fans. 

Sincerely,

Matt Coan

Who are the real Zombies in this Apocalypse?

A series of gruesome murders have taken place over recent weeks leading people to an odd conclusion.  The main headline grabber comes to us from beautiful Miami Florida where commuters were rudely interrupted during their rides home, finding a naked man eating a hobo on the side of the highway.

We have another case from Baltimore Maryland, where a college student ran out of Hot Pockets and Raman Noodles and had to resort to eating his roommate. 

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a gay porn star/model/internet celebrity, killed his boyfriend, ate some of him and then boxed up the rest and mailed it off to various Canadian Government Agencies. 

Finally in the always lovely state of New Jersey, anther “zombie” was cornered by police.  Instead of allowing them to take him into custody, he did what any normal minded person would do in that situation and sliced himself open and started throwing parts of his guts at the cops. 

Clearly these incidents are gruesome and horrifying and nightmare provoking however, the people who carried them out are, and in a few cases were, as alive as you and I at the time.  Therefore, they aren’t zombies. 

Are they all psychotic?  Sure, more than likely.

Did some, if not all of them, have more drugs in their system then at a Woody Harrelson Family reunion?  Yes they probably did. 

Were these people so mentally ill and deranged to a point where they were unable to control themselves in anyway whatsoever?  Absolutely, I bet they all were.

Were these people zombies?  Absolutely not.  

Want to know why?  Because there is no such thing as zombies.  They are made up.  They are fictitious, Hollywood cash cows and nothing more.  I know that people know this, and I know that they know this, and that I am just raining on their fun little fantasy land parades that they live in.  However, I want to know why I am so personally intrigued. 

I find it to be extraordinarily interesting how a spree of gruesome crimes can happen.  Said crimes are then reported on by the media, and the next thing we know, pop culture has labeled it the “Zombie Apocalypse”.  How does that happen? 

Could it be the growing popularity of zombie related television shows?  Are we all just wired somehow to quote unquote “label” everything that happens?  Maybe it is just so impossible for our brains to properly grasp such a string of horrifying events that we are forced to categorize them as something so unbelievable that we eventually land on calling it “The Zombie Apocalypse”.

Honestly, if I had to take a guess, I would say we are just plain old fashioned bored as a society.  People, for better or worse, love to hate these sorts of stories.  We have been trained to do so over the years, thanks to Hollywood, Fox News, Video Games and other moguls of modern day fiction. 

As revolting as it may be to hear, these types of things happen every single day, throughout all of the corners of this rock that we inhabit as it hypnotically spins us around the sun.  But when they happen in our American backyard, we are so intrigued that our collective, self-aggrandizing consciousness kicks into full gear.  Somehow subconsciously wanting to keep these sorts of things in the news cycles because of how boring our lives are otherwise.  If we label these things, and call them something like “The Zombie Apocalypse”, more naïve people will jump on the idea and soon enough the idea will become marketable for lack of a better term.  And before long, we will be able to guarantee ourselves something interesting to watch for on the nightly news; something to break up the monotony. 

And to me, therein lies a huge problem with us as a species.  We are, like it or not, chomping at the bit to hear about these things, just for our next chance to act shocked at how horrible they are.  Many of our lives are so boring or bad, that in a way, it feels good to hear about people who are A LOT worse off than we are.  And somewhere in the fray of the news cycles, the big questions are never asked. 

Such as; “How in the world does a human get to a point where they resort to these sorts of actions?”  Surely there had to be warning signs prior to someone dismembering their boyfriend and mailing the pieces to the government, no? 

What are we doing wrong?  How can we ensure that these people receive whatever care, counseling, incarceration required to prevent these kinds of things from happening? 

Someone needs to figure this out, because our societal lust for these sorts of things to continue, to me, raises the most red flags.  

We, as a country, could use a real kick in our asses when it comes to our collective moral.  When I can ask people who are much older than me, and who have been through things like Vietnam and World Wars, if they have ever seen things worse for America then they are right now?  And they say “No”; I think it leads to labels like this. 

People want to be able to categorize all the horrible things that happen, along with the impossibility of making a decent living in this country, along with unemployment and unrest in the streets, as something that represents a massive breakdown in our culture, an all encompassing catastrophic event of sorts.  Finally a few horrible murders happen in rapid succession and boredom mixes with frustration which mixes with fear and we call it, “The Zombie Apocalypse”.  In other words, “How can this shit get any worse?”

Giants 21 - Patriot’s 17; From an outsider’s point of view.

Something occurred to me last night. Something I never knew about myself. At some point between Tom Brady being sacked for the final time by the Giants to seal their Super Bowl victory and noticing the sheer agony on my beloved girlfriends face, I realized that when it comes to heart-wrenching professional sports losses, I am a completely callous bastard. I really need to work on my empathy towards my friends who were saddened by the Pats loss last night.

It took my girlfriend to yell at me while I marveled at Mario Manningham’s unbelievable catch in the final crucial moments of the game for me to realize my mindset going into this thing had been screwed from the get go. It took the look of complete hopelessness on her face when I looked at her, for me to finally realize; “Holy Shit, you’re not used to this sort of thing, are you?”

As I lied there, on my couch, overcome by the frigid realization of how horrible it must be for this person next to me to endure these sporting emotions for the first, maybe second time in their lives, I kept my mouth shut when she barked at me; “How would you feel if this was the Brown’s in this situation. You would be freaking out”

I kept my mouth shut for several reasons, mainly because I know there is no reasoning with someone in the grips of sports-related shock. They say Polar Bears are the most dangerous mammals on the planet; well I am pretty sure that disappointed sports fans could give them a run for their money.

I also kept my mouth shut for the fact that I had nothing nice to say in reply to her. In my head, all I seemed able to land on was “Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea how thrilled I would be if the Browns even made it to a Super Bowl, in my lifetime? I wouldn’t care if they lost by 38 points.” To say this back to her would have been hopelessly counter-productive.

The main reason I kept my mouth shut was because I know exactly what she was going through. I know how futile any words or actions are to soothe the disappointment she was feeling. Lucky for her she was able to make it to adulthood before enduring such wounds; I got to learn about that kind of pain when I was eight.

To be honest with you Jessie, if it were the Browns in that situation, I would have been sitting next to you, stoic and unsurprised by their failure, speechless, yet calm, because I was freaking out in 1987 when I learned about the game of football as John Elway marched the Bronco’s down the field in the final moments to a touchdown in the AFC Championship, crushing the Brown’s Super Bowl dreams.

I was irate a year later, in 1988, when Brown’s running back Ernest Byner could have simply fallen down into the end zone through a hole, large enough to drive a dump truck through and instead fumbled on the one yard line. And as his fumble was recovered by those same hated Bronco’s, another AFC Championship was lost and another Super Bowl was missed.

For me, the worst came two years later in 1989 in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, as the Cavaliers, out of a timeout, called a defense that would inevitably force Craig Ehlo to switch onto Michael Jordan. You can imagine who won that matchup. By the time Ehlo had jumped and landed again, Jordan was still rising through the air in his signature fade away jump shot, with less than a second left on the clock, he sent a line drive shot that hit the back of the rim, rattled around for what seemed like an eternity, and then unmercifully fell through the basket, winning the game for the Bulls and sealing the fate of, what is still to this day, my favorite Cavaliers team of all time.

It was this game, when I was 10 years old that I really, consciously realized how horrible the world of a professional sports fan could be. Little did I know how these losses, I would carry with me forever, stains on my soul.

I wish I could say that this was the end of this torturous journey for me, but since, I have had to endure a blown save in game 7 of the World Series by Jose Mesa, allowing the Florida Marlins to win the game in the bottom of the 9th, with 2 outs, crushing the championship dreams of the Indians in 1997. I again had to watch them lose to the Braves in another World Series and lose to your Red Sox in the ALCS after winning the first two games of the series.

I have endured being a fan of a basketball team that until recently, made the playoff’s every year for six seasons and never managed to win a championship, even though they had the best player in the word on their side.

I have had to watch that best player in the NBA spurn my home town, live on ESPN, to announce he was joining the Miami Heat which also happened to take place on my 30th birthday.

Fast forward two years when I am expected to empathize with someone about a sports team, which I’ll be honest here, I sort of half care about to begin with.

At first I felt like the victim, of a person taking this sports loss out on me as I ogled at Mario Manningham’s miraculous fourth quarter catch. I felt like I was being attacked, used as a punching back. Then I thought about it. Look at the body of work it has taken for me to become so hardened to this sort of disappointment, a decade’s long siege of soul crippling misery for me to transform into a person who doesn’t even so much as bat an eye to losses by my teams that I root for.

I am so used to it, that I expect it now. Even if the Brown’s had been in the Patriot’s shoes, and say they were up by 28 points, with two minutes left, I would still be sitting back waiting for the other shoe to fall. Surely, John Elway would come out of retirement for that final five minutes or the gates of hell would open along the 50 yard line consuming every Brown’s player, and leaving the Giants as the victors by forfeit. This is just the way it is for me and how it always has been.

I firmly believe that there is a certain amount of a person’s soul that is dedicated to sports disappointment. And once it is filled, it cannot accommodate anymore; like being caught in a rain storm, eventually you can only get so wet before any additional water just runs right off. That part of my being has been supersaturated with devastating disappointment for a long time now, and there is nowhere left to tack on anymore.

This is why I immediately went back to using the brand new paper shredder I purchased at Bed Bath and Beyond yesterday as the final seconds ticked off the clock in the Super Bowl; my girlfriend marching around the apartment, throwing things and completely beside herself. There was no consoling her, just as there was no consoling me in 1989 as I hyperventilated on the stairs of my childhood home, my parents imploring me to just breath in my nose and out my mouth as I watched the Cavaliers leave the court, and Michael Jordan celebrate his achievement.

In a way, if you are going to choose to continue rooting for sports teams, it is better to be like her. To react like that shows that she still holds out hope for her teams, something I don’t do anymore. The fact of the matter is, your disappointment stems from the fact that most of the time, your teams win, which is why this comes as such as surprise to you. Rooting for a collection of teams who have never won anything in my lifetime, and as of today do not seem real close to changing that inconvenient fact, eventually transforms you into the callous bastard of a sports fan, I am today.