(Editor's note: So I was planning to write about the history of the Bills and Browns and their respective cities. Then I remembered I'd already done that last season.
More than a year has passed since their Week 3 meeting in 2012, and while things have happened on both sides of Lake Erie, not a lot has changed.
Both teams have new coaches and new quarterbacks, and each is 2-2 heading into tonight's game in Cleveland, meaning either the Bills or Browns will have a winning record at this time tomorrow.
As for the two cities on the shores of Lake Erie, Buffalo's wobbly self-esteem recently received another booster shot from another dramatically scored promotional video, while Cleveland's baseball team won its last 10 regular-season games, assuring Indians fans the privilege of seeing them lose their lone postseason contest in person.
That means Cleveland fans may be drunker than usual for tonight's epic clash, which will be telecast as part of the NFL Network's Game-Nobody-Outside-The-Two-Competing-Markets-Wants-To-Watch-Of-The-Week. If you don't have the NFL Network, you can catch it on one of the alternative stations listed here.
The following was originally posted on Sept. 20, 2012. Enjoy.)
When the Buffalo Bills play the Cleveland Browns, it should be something to anticipate.
The two cities are four hours – if you drive like a reasonable human -- away from each other along the rim of Lake Erie.
The cities are fossilized remains of America’s industrial age, where all that survived from their relative glory days of the early 20th century are some pretty impressive architecture and even more impressive legacies of systemic corruption.
Having been national punchlines (Cleveland most famously for the river that caught fire, Buffalo for its epic blizzard), the resulting inferiority complexes manifested themselves differently:
Buffalo is creepily nostalgic about the days before it became a shithole, trying to market itself by essentially wailing, “We used to be pretty!”
Cleveland is awfully smug about being a significantly larger shithole – for all its taxpayer-funded redevelopment, it remains the only place I know of where an entire bar district went out of business.
The franchises, born simultaneously 66 years ago in the old All America Football Conference, each went through a period of dormancy about four decades apart.
The AAFC Bills, who never found a way to get past the all-powerful original Browns, died when the upstart league merged with the NFL in 1950, to be reborn in the American Football League 10 years later.
The Browns did not go into hibernation until Art Modell shipped them to Baltimore after the 1995 season. Cleveland became the first NFL city to lose a team, then get it back with its name, colors and even record book intact.
The Bills and Browns won their respective league titles in 1964. The Bills repeated a year later, but neither has won a championship since. Buffalo has its four straight Super Bowl losses. Cleveland aspires to losing even one Super Bowl.
Both have experienced any number of heart-shattering losses in the interim, which their fans drone on about under the mistaken impression that defeat does, indeed, build character.
So you would think a certain charm would result when the Bills meet the Browns. Not so. At least not since the current version of the Browns took the field in 1999.
Instead, Buffalo-Cleveland is where CBS sends its last-string announcing team, a matchup that produces games that are close, but in no way interesting.
The Bills’ 13-6 win in 2010 ranks as perhaps the least satisfying win in franchise history, with Cleveland’s 6-3 victory (in the loosest possible sense of the word) a year earlier occupying a similar place in modern Browns lore.
Part of the reason for the lack of drama has been the consistent lousiness of both teams. But even the one time they met in a contest with playoff implications, in December 2007, they managed to produce an unwatchable game – even with an epic snowstorm providing spectacular visuals. When things end up 8-0, there are no winners.
It was not always so. The AAFC Bills passed for a rival to the all-powerful Browns, who won the championship all four seasons the league was in existence. They met in the 1948 title game, in which Cleveland eked out a 49-7 win to complete the first unbeaten, untied season in modern professional football history.
The most famous (or infamous, depending on your hometown) modern meeting came in January 1990, in a first-round AFC playoff game. A wild shootout came down to the final drive. We Want Marangi was there, sitting in the end zone as the Bills drove toward the seemingly inevitable winning touchdown. We reminisced about the experience a few years back for a newspaper that gets neither a mention or a plug here, a memory triggered by a fan’s fashion choice for a 2007 preseason game at Ralph Wilson Stadium.
A young man wearing an old-style Bills jersey bearing No. 33 and the name "Harmon" sat in front of us.
He deserves points for honoring one of the most widely reviled players in franchise history, the man whose dropped pass in the waning moments of a playoff game in Cleveland is blamed for a defeat that revisionists claim cost the team a fifth straight Super Bowl trip.
I attended that game on Jan. 6, 1990, with one of my college housemates, Bill, sitting in the end zone at Municipal Stadium, surrounded almost exclusively by little old ladies from Buffalo. While our neighbors provided pleasant conversation, they weren't going to be much help if the tens of thousands of drunken Clevelanders filling the rest of the ancient edifice decided to turn on us.
Bill and I did our best to provoke just such a reaction, particularly as Jim Kelly drove the offense toward the end zone in front of us. We stood on our seats and faced the rapidly angering masses. As I recall, there were verbal taunts and perhaps a hand gesture or two --- this was before journalistic ethics stripped me of a rooting interest -- as we loudly predicted the inevitable touchdown that would shatter yet another Browns season.
Then (Ronnie) Harmon dropped Kelly's pass while straddling the sideline on the opposite side of the end zone from where we sat. On the next play, Kelly threw his last pass of the day directly into the belly of Cleveland linebacker Clay Matthews to end Buffalo's season.
Since the stadium lacked a high-tech video board, we didn't know just how egregious Harmon's drop had been until we were walking out, surrounded by delirious Cleveland fans who had happily forgotten about our premature taunting, and heard it discussed by radio announcers.
As I told the young man wearing his jersey on Friday, "Ronnie Harmon saved my life."
If I ever write a memoir, I think I've got the title.
The following season, covering my first road game after spending the evening in the then-booming Flats, I stood at just past the back line of the end zone end zone and watched Darryl Talley run right up to me after returning an interception for the final points in a 42-0 Buffalo blowout.
About 20 minutes later, I asked Bud Carson a rather innocuous procedural question that somehow reduced the embattled Cleveland coach -- who had benched Cleveland icon Bernie Kosar in favor of the far-less legendary Mike Pagel and just coolly batted away a series of questions about his future from the hostile hometown media -- to tears (or at least visibly moist eyes).
A day later, Carson was fired – ostensibly because the Browns were on the way to missing the playoffs for the first time in six years and not for crying in public.
On Sunday, the Browns try to reverse what looks like the spiral of yet another lost season, while the Bills try to build on last week’s pummeling of Kansas City.
If recent history repeats itself, though, you might want to have a good book handy. Or you could join in on We Want Marangi’s weekly open thread, to be posted before kickoff, to help mock the misery.
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