THE DAILY BLOVIATION
Yesterday afternoon a member told me, in my own weekly site-issues thread, that it was “time to feed the hamsters” because pages were taking longer to load for a few minutes. I’d like to think that was the Shedeur Sanders news bringing every one of you to the site at once.
Unfortunately, It was probably the hamsters. The hamsters have been addressed. You can trick the little buggers into eating some ground coffee if they’re starving.
There’s an old line in this town that the most popular player on the Browns is the backup quarterback. Shedeur Sanders has spent a year and a half breaking that rule because he has somehow managed to be the most popular and least popular player on the roster at the same time. We see this every damn chat on our YouTube shows.
On Wednesday, with Deshaun Watson in the concussion protocol, Sanders took the first-team reps for the first time since losing the camp competition. Within an hour, our Watercooler had run the entire Shedeur discourse in about four posts. The thread opened with “Here ya go Shedeurites! ... Easy game vs a terrible defense. #1 reps all week. Its on now baby! SB here we come!”
The next reply: “Are we in April?”
A few posts later: “That’s an automatic loss.”
For the record, I’m somewhere in the middle, which has never gotten anybody a radio show, which is why I have to host my own streams.
Monken was about as excited as I’ve seen a head coach get about his starter being hurt. “I can’t wait,” he said. “This is so cool.” Then: “I can’t wait to see him let it rip today and see where we’re at. I mean, that’s what you do. That’s why you build depth. That’s why he got a ton of reps in fall camp.”
And then there was the press conference. Asked about the Saints defense, Sanders laughed and said: “Yeah, I’ve seen a lot. When I smile, just know that means something. I’m maturing. I’m maturing. Like, I could have given a decent answer, but now I’m just going to smile whenever it’s just, like, some questions.”
Of course, this is Shedeur we’re talking about so the recyclers and clickbaiters were out in force. One national site helpfully rounded up the angriest replies so you didn’t have to go find them yourself. (“Get some PR training” was a popular theme.) Asked why he hired an agent last month, he said “I’m focused on this game. Anything else really don’t matter at this point.” Asked about the attention, he said “I ain’t really trying to ride the roller-coaster life. I like to keep everything even.”
Kid, did you ever pick the wrong town. Well, maybe not “pick” so much as “wound up in.” But still.
It turns out, in my experience, that the correlation between how a quarterback sounds at the podium and how he plays on Sunday is zero. Not even like small.
FOUR ROOKIES AND A NEAR MISS: CBS put four Browns on its midseason All-Rookie team: Concepcion, Boston, Fano, and Emmanuel McNeil-Warren, with Barber named the near miss at guard. It takes three years to evaluate a draft, but early signs are pretty darn positive.
PUT HIM IN: Browns great John Wooten is one of five Contributor finalists for the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2027, along with Ralph Hay, Robert Kraft, Virginia McCaskey and Doug Williams. The subcommittee picks one on Nov. 17. Wooten started 94 games for the Browns from 1959 to 1967, made two Pro Bowls, won the 1964 title, spent nearly 30 years in NFL front offices, and was the first chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. He was also one of the first two African American varsity players at Colorado. So on a week when a Colorado quarterback may start for the Browns, the most important Buffalo in Browns history deserves the call to Canton. Kraft has enough jewelry.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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Brazil just expanded Pantanal Matogrossense National Park by 185 square miles, growing it from 523 square miles and protecting more of the Pantanal, the world’s largest flooded grassland. It’s home to 463 species of birds, giant otters, giant anteaters, tapirs and the largest concentration of jaguars on Earth. The new boundaries were drawn around the corridors the animals actually use to move in and out of the park, which is the kind of thing that only happens when somebody bothers to go look.
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When not smiling at certain questions because it means something, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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