The Cleveland Browns are tempting fate and history by desecrating the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Terrible Towel in their schedule release video. NFL teams now have an informal obligation to attempt to create an original video to make schedule news more interesting. The Browns, of course, failed dismally in their attempt, receiving near-universal jeers from their own fans.
I, frankly, don’t even know what’s going on in the video they released, perhaps a reference to Stranger Things. At one point in the video, the Browns’ elf mascot uses the Steelers’ Terrible Towel to wipe up spilled food. At least, he begins to before giving up, then using some magic to make it all disappear. Cool, I guess?
While the curse of the Terrible Towel is not actually real, it seems foolish on the Browns’ part to tempt fate anyway for a video that virtually everybody thought kind of sucked anyway. They will visit the Steelers in Week 6, who will at that time be coming off their bye week.
Cleveland, by the way, has zero—ZERO—primetime games scheduled this season, because nobody wants to see them. The Browns is the Browns, persistently managing to do weird things in typically bad ways. There is a reason Myles Garrett refused to take anything less than a comically large contract to rescind his trade request, because that’s the only way anybody can stomach playing for them. But do any Browns fans care about upsetting the Steelers by desecrating the Terrible Towel? Of course not, because players continue to do it, year after year.
And while the “curse” doesn’t actually exist, teams do typically manage to struggle in some form or fashion after desecrating the Terrible Towel. Or at the very least, it happens often enough to allow the myth an air of legitimacy. And of course teams like the Browns poke at the Steelers by intentionally flouting the supposed curse.
It is one of those fun superstitions tied to sports that even the players indulge in. Steelers players even acknowledge that they are aware of when another team desecrates the Terrible Towel. The Browns, of course, don’t really need another curse any more than the ghost of Art Modell. But they got Jimmy Haslam as a bonus, who shackled them with Deshaun Watson.
Pretty much everybody thinks the Browns will be a bad team this year, so the Steelers shouldn’t need the benefit of a Terrible Towel curse to beat them. Of course, Cleveland does manage to slip a win by, which is actually a worrying trend. The teams have split their head-to-head games for three years running.
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