A bold new philosophy on winning from the Browns

Joe Thomas is probably my favorite Cleveland Browns player. For 11 gut-wrenching seasons, that guy went out there every game for some of the worst teams in football history and played left tackle with the same energy and fire that Bruce Springsteen gives at every concert. Joe never missed a game. He never missed a snap. He never missed a block.

OK, well, I’m sure he missed some blocks, but not many. I cannot think of anything more admirable and decent than just going out there every day, despite the monotony, despite the hopelessness, and doing your job excellently. That was my father at the sweater factory. We’ve learned since that Thomas struggled with the task of giving his all for such incompetent and doomed Browns teams. The losses piled up on him. He grew depressed by it all. But he sought counseling, and he leaned on his family, and he fought through, and that day when he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame remains such a happy one in my memory.

I was thinking about Joe Thomas on Sunday while watching the Browns lose their 22nd consecutive regular-season game in Pittsburgh. Joe never won there.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one thinking about Joe Thomas.

“Joe Thomas was pivotal in me becoming the rusher that I am, the player that I am, and helping me just be an all-around good person,” Myles Garrett said after the game.

Myles has never won a regular-season game in Pittsburgh either.*

*The Browns did beat the Steelers in Pittsburgh during the 2020 playoffs, but that was the COVID year, so there was nobody in the stands, no Terrible Towels twirling.

And you can see it wearing on him. There are only a handful of people on earth who understand, truly understand, what Myles Garrett has to put himself through in order to be a titanic defensive force. Every game, every single one, he has to fight through double teams, triple teams, quadruple teams. Every play, he gets chipped and chopped and pulled and held and bluffed. Coaches spend entire weeks creating designer offenses specifically contrived to shut him down. If Garrett’s lucky, he plays one game a year without debilitating pain.

He pushes through the pain, he breaks through the triple teams, he chases down quarterbacks, he helps the younger players, and he speaks for the team because that’s the sort of player and person that he is. Unfortunately, he does this for the Cleveland Browns. And the Browns are losers.

“Before you start winning, you gotta stop losing,” Browns coach Kevin Stefanski said after Sunday’s game, and you can go ahead and put THAT on a T-shirt because those eight words could not more perfectly sum up what this franchise is and what Stefanski himself is left with. For six seasons now, I’ve been poking fun at Stefanski’s purposely boring and entirely unrevealing postgame press conferences, usually joking that I fell asleep in the middle of them and banged my head.

But none of that is as funny as him saying, “Before you stop winning, you gotta stop losing.” It’s like the Chat GPT in his brain malfunctioned, and he found himself just sputtering nonsense thoughts. To win, you must not lose. But at the same time, you cannot win if you lose. When you lose, you do not win, but when you win, you do not lose. Some say that when you lose, you win, but they are wrong; you only win when you win, not when you lose, and in order to win, you must not lose, and it’s only when you don’t lose that you win. If we want to win, we can’t lose. If we do lose, we will not win. The best way to win is to avoid losing, and if you don’t avoid losing, it is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to win. I think in the end, you’d almost have to say that losing is the opposite of winning, and winning is the opposite of losing, and you can’t win until you stop losing, but you also can’t lose until you stop winning, which gives us hope.

The poor guy gave away the game. KevStef doesn’t have any answers. I don’t think ANYONE has answers for an organization as lost as this one, but it’s obvious that Stefanski does not. He didn’t have any of his usual bugaboos* to point to. The Browns didn’t turn the ball over. They didn’t miss any field goals or give away any big plays on special teams (well, they gave away one, but it was called back because of a penalty). The Steelers committed more penalties. The Steelers failed to finish drives.

And still the Browns got pounded from start to finish.

*Fun word alert!

So what do you say when all the ghosts and goblins you usually count on do not appear, and you STILL get destroyed? Right. You say, “Before you start winning, you gotta stop losing.” By the way, I wanted to put up the video of KevStef’s presser, but when you go to the Cleveland Browns site and try to watch it, you get this:

Yes. Yes, there was a problem.

There’s plenty more to say about the Browns, their rookie quarterback Dillon Gabriel*, their team-record 11 straight games of not scoring 20 points, and so on.

But I want to end this with Myles Garrett and the challenge of going on when things seem oppressively bleak. Garrett let loose a bit after Sunday’s loss — “To lose the same way every time, it’s frustrating as hell,” he said — and you couldn’t blame the guy. He had demanded a trade after last season’s fiasco, but the Browns somehow convinced him that they were all about winning and they wouldn’t let him waste his brilliance. He believed them, or at least wanted to believe them, and signed a four-year extension. I imagine that those now look like four very, very long years.

So what do you do?

“Got to continue to be the same person every day,” Garrett said. “Coming in, working my ass off, showing guys what it’s like, what’s expected of you to be a professional and, you know, a man of character. Come in and just be who you are. Don’t let the environment or situation define who you are.”

That all sounds right. That’s what Joe Thomas did. Someday soon, Myles Garrett will join Thomas in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That will be a helluva day. Sadly, I’m not sure there will be too many good days before then, though.

The Mariners beat the Blue Jays 3-1 in Game 1 of the ALCS on Sunday — I’ve rarely seen a team go down as easily as the Blue Jays did — and the Mariners are now about as close to the World Series as they’ve ever been. They did have a 1-0 lead over the Yankees in the 2000 ALCS and a 2-1 lead over Cleveland in the 1995 ALCS, but I don’t know, maybe this feels different? I guess Mariners fans will have to tell us what their hope quotient is right at this moment.

One of the weirdest things about baseball is how energized a team can look one minute and how lifeless it can look the next. The Blue Jays looked ALIVE in the Yankees series. And then their start on Sunday was perfect. George Springer homered on the first pitch the Blue Jays saw. Then Nathan Lukes followed up with a gritty, hard-earned 12-pitch walk. Vladdy Jr. blasted a 107-mph line drive to center, right at Julio Rodriguez, and then Addison Barger drew a hard-earned walk of his own. The Blue Jays didn’t score, but Daulton Varsho ripped another hard line drive to center that just held up for Julio. This was a team on fire!

In the second inning, Anthony Santander cracked a hard single to right that was botched by Victor Robles, allowing him to move into scoring position.

And … that was it. I mean, THAT WAS IT. The Blue Jays did not get a hit the rest of the game. But the suffocation was much more comprehensive than that. They made the last 23 outs on 70 pitches. I mean, they weren’t exactly facing Greg Maddux. But they had SIX eight-pitch-or-fewer innings, which our pal and hero Sarah Langs assures us is the most for any postseason game since at least 2000. These innings were going by faster than Office episodes.

Today, the Blue Jays will throw their newfound superhero Trey Yesavage, while Seattle will counter with the thoroughly underappreciated Logan Gilbert. I think Gilbert is underappreciated for two reasons — one, there’s this:

Lowest WHIP for 2024-25 seasons:

And two, he’s one of those rare players who has both two first names AND two last names. I’m sure Brilliant Readers can come up with other examples, but it feels like a rare thing to me.

The NLCS starts today, too, and once again, the Brewers are not telling anybody who their starting pitcher will be. It reminds me of when I went to the Japan Series way back in 2009 … Japanese teams (at least in those days) NEVER told you who their starter was going to be, and they couldn’t understand why American teams always announce it. I have to admit, that gave me a whole new perspective — why DO MLB teams announce their starters? I’ll have to ask John Thorn about this. My suspicion is that it used to be a sales technique — come out ot the park to see Lefty Grove or Warren Spahn or Mark Fidrych pitch! But I actually don’t know.

My feeling about sports — really, my feeling about life in general — is live and let live. We’re all just trying to make our way in this crazy world.

But I have to say it: I am now officially in the “mute John Smoltz” portion of my baseball-watching life.

I certainly don’t mean this as a personal attack on Smoltz; I have spoken with him at various times, and he’s always been friendly enough, and he was an absolutely marvelous pitcher, one of my favorites to watch. He knows the ins and outs of baseball — particularly pitching — like few others.

But listening to him as an announcer just makes me sad. It’s the opposite of what I want to feel watching sports.

Sunday’s Browns-Steelers game was announced by Ian Eagle and J.J. Watt. Ian Eagle is a Broadcasting Hall of Famer in every sense of the word — I think he’s like the Stan Musial of announcing — and J.J. Watt is just personable and energetic. It was hilarious to listen to him break down the playing style of T.J. Watt without ever mentioning that, you know, that’s his brother. But the point is, they were just fun. Not every joke landed. Not every observation hit home. Watt did that NFL thing of overpraising mediocrity because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to say anything good about the Browns.

But when the game was done, even though it was a dreadful game for any Browns fan, I felt like I’d spent three hours with two guys I’d like to hang out with.

With Smoltz, I’m depressed by the third inning. I just am. He brings this downer “oh, this used to be so much better” energy that makes me feel, well, blah. He tells few stories. He brings few laughs. He comes up with one thought (“This guy should be throwing more curveballs!”) and hammers it home so repeatedly that he should end each recall by saying, “fifteen minutes could save you 15% on car insurance.”

Even when he tries to act like he’s enjoying himself — I assume he’s been given some notes that he could bring a bit more enthusiasm to the booth — it feels so forced that it makes me even sadder than when he’s yammering on about how good baseball used to be.

Yes, true, Smoltz will, now and again, make some insightful comment about pitching or predict a pitch sequence before it happens or something like that. Much more often, though, he will say something — as Keith Law points out — like “Give the Blue Jays credit; they’re going to come out swinging the bats tomorrow, for sure.”

I can only assume that Fox has all sorts of data that shows people love John Smoltz. I’ve not met a baseball fan who feels that way, but I’ve not met all the baseball fans.

I know people talk all the time about how they mute this announcer or that announcer, but my feeling is that people SAY that but don’t really DO that any more than they laugh out loud when texting LOL (and they certainly don’t ROFL). Sunday night, though, I actually muted John Smoltz. I’ll probably unmute the game today because it’s no fun watching a baseball game in silence. But for one night, I just couldn’t take the gloom any longer. I like baseball.

*Editor’s Note: It sounds like not everyone received the latest Poscast in their feed. It is available now with special guest Brandon McCarthy. The conversation with Jane Leavy will publish this afternoon.