Putting aside any crossover with both fan bases that will be watching the game anyway—and I’m 100% certain there is some—Sunday’s game between the Raiders and the Browns is a bowl game for the absolute worst people on (sports) earth (plenty of competition for regular earth).
On one side will be the ones who pirouetted out of the woodwork last week like final-number dancers at the Nutcracker prepared to defend Shedeur Sanders for the sport of it. This defense can take place on numerous fronts and multiple battlefields, but let’s just say that we arrived at a place where a group of people were bewildered by—and made sure others were bewildered by—the fact that a backup quarterback didn’t receive reps with the Browns’ starting offense. This, in a regulated, modern NFL where repetitions for any player are more valuable than peak Hawk Tuah coin.
On the other side are the ones who are tuning in specifically to see a 23-year-old kid fail. Nevermind that Sanders is no more brash on the field than Jaxson Dart, he has stirred up a unique animus among a certain segment of our population that—I theorize—is more emotionally charged by the media-createdreaction to everything Sanders does instead of who Sanders actually is. While there are plenty of blameworthy candidates here, it’s up to all of us to look beyond the public depiction of someone and formulate the same kind of compassionate opinion as we would for any young person early into his professional life with a big opportunity.
Of course, no matter how you slice it, the WPP (worst possible people) Bowl is the height of meaningful football the Browns will play this year, and one of the biggest reasons for the advent of this bowl game won’t even be on hand to enjoy it. In case you missed it, Paul DePodesta, the Browns’ director of strategy, recently left Cleveland to return to baseball with the Colorado Rockies. DePodesta, of Moneyball fame while part of the seminal Billy Beane staff in Oakland that (along with the help of a loaded pitching staff) managed to prioritize on-base percentage at a time when other teams were focused on less quantifiable measurements to predict the success of baseball players and teams, left Major League Baseball and began working for the Browns in January 2016 and signed a five-year contract extension in 2021.
And, I have to admit, so long as the Browns had someone on staff who claimed to have the strategy under control, there was at least some down-the-road sense of well-being. Titles can be comforting. Kind of like when your corporation had something like a Chief Fun Officer back in the 2010s, even though that person ended up being a high-six-figure employee who rented an ICEE truck to the office you don’t work out of once a year.
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Sanders is but a very small part of this, though sometimes microcosms can lead you toward the big-picture answer we’re seeking. If Sanders can play—and I’m willing to bet he can—then perhaps drafting him two rounds after another quarterback you liked better despite having myriad needs all over the roster makes sense. If Sanders looks much like he did against the Ravens last week, then I think we have a fair entry point into the basis of Cleveland’s so-called strategy over the past decade or so.
Because the other side of the coin, the other side of the WPP Bowl, is that we were always destined for this place. That there was less a strategy that led us to this moment and more a collection of galaxy-brained smart-guy-football-twitter theories strung together. The Browns tried tanking after all—remember that one? They tried hoarding a mass quantity of draft equity. They did that thing where they traded for Kenny Pickett and Joe Flacco, then traded both of them after a handful (or no) starts. They tried trading all that equity for an already established Pro Bowl player. These are all blueprints that were recently popularized by other teams and vetted publicly as the kind of forward-thinking milieu the team wanted to cultivate as it attempted to leave a less savory past behind.
Hell, even drafting Sanders and Dillon Gabriel a few rounds apart is another crack at the Shanahan double quarterback draft theory (like Robert Griffin III and Kirk Cousins in the same year, or Trey Lance and Brock Purdy one year apart)—itself a kind of mutated extension of the Packers’ theory that necessitated constantly overdrafting at the position.
Of course, all the teams that perfected these strategies managed to bring them to life in practice instead of just skipping from one to the next.
This is what I’ll be thinking about when I see the poor guy go out there on Sunday. Not whether I hope he succeeds or fails. Not whether he was overdrafted or underdrafted. Not who his dad is and whether I like that person (I do). But if, based on the team he was brought to, whether he ever really had a chance. The Browns have put so much work—an admirable, back-breaking amount of work—into refining their processes and making belief seem less like dumping our life savings onto 00 on the roulette wheel.
And yet, as one decade of strategy ends, we find ourselves here in a game that is so much less about winning and losing than it is the very kinds of meaningless tedium that a strategy was supposed to take us away from.
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