Okay, so look: I’m happy. Of course I’m happy. The Cleveland Browns did something on Sunday that, frankly, I’ve been waiting for them to do all my life. They out-Steelered the Steelers. They out-Tomlined Mike Tomlin. For 50-plus years, I have watched the Pittsburgh Steelers crush the spirits of opponents (most often the Browns) by simply being tougher, meaner, making the key play in the key moment, making their own breaks at the right time, getting the big stop at the end.
For 50-plus years, the Steelers have been the diametric opposite of the Browns—stable, constant, competent, ferocious. The Browns have had 16 head coaches since I became aware of football. The Steelers have had three. The Browns have had 23 different quarterbacks lead the team in passing since I became aware of football. The Steelers have had half that many, and two of those quarterbacks are Hall of Famers (or will be, in the case of Ben Roethlisberger).
The Steelers have had seven losing seasons in 50 years and won at least five games every year. The Browns have THIRTY-THREE losing seasons in 50 years, and they won fewer than five in THIRTEEN of them, not counting the strike season of 1982. And let’s not forget they missed three years after the OG Browns moved to Baltimore.
Yes, all my life I looked to Pittsburgh and wondered: Why and how? That is: Why do they have everything figured out? How do they win all the close games? Why are they so tough and well-organized? How do they always get so lucky?
Then I’d wonder: But are they lucky? Can you call it luck when they do it year after year, decade after decade? Isn’t calling the Pittsburgh Steelers lucky a bit like Tim McCarver calling Bob Gibson lucky because whenever he pitched, the other team didn’t score any runs?
This year’s Steelers are pretty much the ultimate example of their black (and gold) magic. They came into Sunday’s game having been outgained in EVERY SINGLE GAME. Every one. Heck, the first time they played Cleveland, the Browns outgained them by 150 yards. And you know what? The Steelers still won. They came into Sunday’s game 6-3 anyway.
So, yes, of course I’m happy: The Browns won this one the Pittsburgh way. They lost the turnover battle. They were losing the yardage battle until the final drive. They gave up the Steelers’ longest run play in nine years. They looked utterly helpless throughout the second half.
And they won the game anyway.
So, yes, of course, I’m happy, and I’ll share that happiness, but …
I can’t get that $^^@ timeout out of my head.
Are you like this too? Do you watch your team play, watch your team win, and then when it’s over, instead of being fully happy, you latch onto one thing—even an admittedly meaningless thing—so galling, so absurd, so infuriating that it makes your head explode?
Fourth quarter, a little over a minute left, tie score. The Browns got the ball at their own 35. There didn’t seem much hope of the Browns driving the ball down the field behind their rookie quarterback, Dorian Thompson-Robinson. There’s something likable about DTR for sure; there was this moment in the first half when he was on the sideline sipping on some sort of warm drink out of a paper cup—in my imagination, it was hot cocoa—and it was like: “Awww.”
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No, he’s surely not ready for this, not ready to be the starting quarterback of an NFL team with a great defense and Super Bowl dreams, but sometimes there’s nobody else, and DTR is so clearly giving it all he has. In the second half, leading up to the final drive, he was 7-for-19 for 28 yards with a sack and an interception. But there he was again, with the game in the balance.
And: BAM! He stood in the pocket and fired a 15-yard pass to Elijah Moore. BAM! He flipped a 5-yard pass to Kareem Hunt. BAM! He connected with the amazing Amari Cooper for 8 yards and a first down. BAM! He tossed a pass out to David Njoku, who had dropped, I believe, 137 passes. Njoku caught this one for 11 yards, moving the Browns to the Steelers 26, easy field goal range, and the Browns called their second timeout with 25 seconds left.
It was all happening. The Browns were going to beat the Steelers and DTR was going to be the hero, and that master of the dark arts, Mike Tomlin, was finally going to be outdueled. All the Browns had to do was run the ball to the middle, which they did, Kareem Hunt for two yards, setting up a 42-yard field goal for the win. Now all they had to do was let the clock run down …
… only the clock stopped at 20 seconds.
Why did the clock stop? The cameras showed an injured Steelers player, so, obviously, that was why the clock stopped, OK, the Steelers used their last timeout, no problem, the Browns could just run the ball again and let the clock wind down and use their last timeout with three or four seconds left …
“Oh, the Browns are the ones who called timeout,” one of my favorite announcers, Ian Eagle, said.
At first, it didn’t compute. It was like: Wait, what did he say? The Browns called timeout? With 20 seconds left? With no timeouts left? With the team already in field goal range? No, that can’t be right. Ian had simply misspoken.
Except … Ian doesn’t often misspeak. He was right. It was indeed the Browns who had called timeout. It’s one of the dumbest timeouts I’ve seen in my life, and football fans know—we’ve seen a lot of dumb timeouts.
It didn’t end up mattering. As a lifelong Browns fan who has seen games blown in an impossible number of ways, I could give you 5,000 different scenarios where it COULD have ended up mattering. But it didn’t. The Browns ran a play and then scrambled to the line in a disturbingly disorganized fashion and spiked the ball with five seconds left. Dustin Hopkins made the game-winning 34-yard field goal. There was still time left on the clock (ugh) but the Browns stopped the Steelers on their desperation last play.
Yes, Cleveland won the game. They out-Steelered the Steelers. They left Mike Tomlin having to deal with the second guessers, who wondered why they didn’t get the ball more to running back Jaylen Warren, who had 12 touches for 129 yards … but no touches when the Steelers got the ball with less than two minutes left.
“When you’re unsuccessful, you can look back and make a lot of those types of judgments,” Tomlin told the second-guessers. “We just don’t live like that. We don’t live in our fears, we don’t second-guess, man. We live, and so I stand by whatever decisions or play selections or ball distributions we had today.”
It feels good to have HIM answer those questions rather than the Browns coach.
So why can’t I get that timeout out of my head? Why do I find myself asking a million questions? How did it happen? Did DTR call it in a panic as this was his first professional game-winning drive? Did Our Guy Kevin Stefanski call it for reasons that I cannot fathom? Did someone on the sidelines forget that the Browns had only one timeout left?
Maybe it’s overreactions like that that suggest I don’t DESERVE the Browns to win games like these.
The Browns are 7-3 now, their best start since that wild Baker Mayfield-infused 2020 season … before that you have to go all the way back to 1994, when Bill Belichick coached the team. And this defense, whoa, for the sixth time this season, they gave up fewer than 250 total yards and fewer than 15 first downs. Myles Garrett had two more sacks*; he’s up to 13 for the season.
*The first one should have been a safety, but the referees blew the call. They ruled that Steelers quarterback Kenny Pickett was at the 1 when Garrett sent him flying backward. It seemed obvious to me, even before they showed the replay, that this wasn’t so, that Garrett had turned his back to the hit and the ball was in the end zone, meaning it should have been a safety. Replays confirmed that. I was screaming at the television for the Browns to challenge the call. They did not. Another thing I have spent too much time thinking about.
And with seven games left, Garrett does have at least a shot at Michael Strahan’s official sack record of 22.5*, though Strahan set the record in 16 games, meaning we could have a Roger Maris asterisk situation if Garrett does it in 17.
*The unofficial record—unofficial because it happened before the stat was recognized in 1980—actually belongs to a player you might not know: Al “Bubba” Baker, who, as a Detroit rookie in 1978, recorded 23 sacks. Bubba Baker was a force of nature; in one game against Tampa Bay, he had five sacks. And when a running back chop-blocked him late in the game, he issued a warning:
“If any of ’em ever gets me, and I feel it’s not justifiable to the play, the next time I tackle him, I’m going to tear his head off.”
And if we’re talking Roger Maris asterisks, the TRUE record probably belongs to the man who invented the sack, Deacon Jones, who in 1964 and again in 1968 had 22 sacks in only 14 games. Then again, Deacon himself would tell you the true sack record belonged to Gino Marchetti; one year in the 1950s, the Baltimore coaching staff insisted that they counted 43 Marchetti sacks in a 12-game season.
Our guy Kevin Stefanski was fired up in his victory speech to the team.
“Whatever it … takes,” he shouted, offering a weird pause between “it” and “takes. “That’s what this game’s about. OK, but what I see, talk about connected teams, that’s what I saw today. Was it perfect? No. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But man, when you fight like crazy, fellas, we’ve got a chance. Next we got … something … something’s in the way next week. I don’t know who it is. But something’s in the way she moves. Attracts me like no other lover. Something in the way she woos me. I don’t want to leave her now. You know I believe her now.”
Whoops. Sorry. Blacked out again from boredom, ended up in a Beatles song. These are the times when KevStef’s cliches and oddly unexciting speeches are comforting; competency and stability and steadiness have always been his greatest strengths. Just don’t call timeouts like that one, and things look really good.
Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.
