Ohio (TheOBR.com) – Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
I have a favorite show on Hulu. It’s called “Paradise,” and it’s post-apocalyptic thriller that is well-written and compelling for people like me who dig science fiction.
Hulu must like the genre as well, because they’re making a new show about the Cleveland Browns.
It’s called “The Land,” it comes from Dan Fogelman, the “This Is Us” guy, and the first two episodes drop at midnight on Feb. 15, right after the Super Bowl.
So, you have the Browns playing football on Super Bowl Sunday, which is alright, as a concept, but staggers one’s suspension of disbelief.
Christopher Meloni plays Danny Roarke, a down-on-his-luck Browns head coach who bets his career on his own son, an Ohio State quarterback, by drafting him first overall. William H. Macy (who looks nothing like Jimmy Haslam) plays the owner. His daughters, Mandy Moore and Chloe Bennet, are fighting over who inherits the team, and Chace Crawford is the new general manager.
Here’s my problem with the show. It’s too tame. A coach drafting his kid with the first pick? Deion already did that, in a way. A family fight over the deed? Yawn. That’s tame. That’s network-notes tame. Nobody in Hollywood would have the nerve to pitch the season we’re actually watching.
Here’s your elevator pitch: “OK, the quarterback has torn both Achilles tendons, has 27 civil lawsuits and an 11-game suspension in his past, and spent the summer as the guy everybody assumed gets cut in March. Now he’s the starter, and he’s running for fourth-quarter first downs. The team is carrying four quarterbacks on purpose. The head coach is a first-timer whose big quote this week was “I don’t have to feel anything at this point.” The defense got hung with 34 points in the opener, changed its personality in about seven days and started winning. They’re 3-1 and they’re in first place.
Right. Like anyone would believe that. The film executive exits the elevator without even looking at you.
In the Watercooler yesterday, MBAthehardway dropped this one: the Browns are the only team in more than 100 years of NFL history to have fewer touchdowns, fewer made field goals, fewer rushing yards, and fewer passing yards than their opponents through four games, plus more turnovers and more penalties, and still have a winning record. That’s real science fiction, folks.
THE REAL THING: This actually happened. Jim Ray Smith, the guard who pulled out in front of Jim Brown on the sweep, passed away on Oct. 3 at 94, per George M. Thomas at the Beacon Journal. The Browns took Smith in the sixth round in 1954 out of Baylor as a future pick, and he did 23 months in the Army before he ever played a down. Paul Brown tried him at defensive end, then moved him to guard, where he promptly appeared in five straight Pro Bowls from 1958 to 1962. He was named first-team All-Pro three times, blocking for Jim Brown and Bobby Mitchell. He retired to sell real estate in Dallas, let Ray Renfro and Mike McCormack talk him back for 1962, and then the Cowboys sent Monte Clark to Cleveland to get his rights. Browns Legends, class of 2005.
He told Browns.com back in 2014 that losing your Paul Brown playbook cost you $500, “and when you weren’t making any money, $500 is a whole lot of money.” He also said this: “The good Lord said, ‘Boy, we are going to make a football player out of you until we figure out what to do with you.’”
Rest easy, sir.
STILL IN THE MICROWAVE: Jared Verse, four games into a new team, on how far along he is: “I don’t even think I took the meal out of the microwave yet.” He has five hurries, two quarterback hits and no sacks. The OBR staff has been defending his impact in shows like Gang of Three. Still, Rutenberg says everybody is looking for the “ooh” and the “wow” play and “that’s not what defense is. Defense is about violence, chaos, disruption and getting the ball.” I’ll take his word for it. When you’re the guy who came back in the Myles Garrett trade, though, people are going to count the sacks. Fair or not.
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT: Denzel Boston leads all rookie receivers in receiving yards and yards per catch, and he and KC Concepcion have combined for 30 catches, 428 yards and two touchdowns. Our rookie WR comparison stacks them up against every rookie receiver back to 2020. Over at the Beacon, Chris Easterling says Spencer Fano is no stranger to Jets edge rusher David Bailey and has Emmanuel McNeil-Warren finding his groove. This young core of players is truly re-inventing the Browns
MINORITY OWNER, MAJORITY CONFIDENCE: Denzel Ward recently bought a small stake in the Guardians. Before Thursday’s elimination game in Chicago he said, “We’re going to win it all. So you heard it here first.” The Guardians then came from behind to beat the White Sox 9-5, with Jose Ramirez homering, and the series goes to a Game 5 in Cleveland on Saturday night. They were down 0-2 in the series on Wednesday morning. Ward the owner is undefeated since he opened his mouth. Somebody keep him talking
PROGRAMMING NOTE: The OBR Daily Newswire will be taking two days off for reasons I’ll explain later. I will not be fighting anyone for the ownership of the Cleveland Browns.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
- Cleveland Browns Denzel Boston ‘Planned’ on Making an Impact Early in his NFL Career
- How The Cleveland Browns Young Wide Receiver Duo Matchup With Former Rookies After Week Four
- Cleveland Browns News and Rumors 10/8/26: A Certain Feeling of Zen
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond…
While doomers proclaim the upcoming AI end of the world, Jennifer Doudna, the CRISPR co-inventor, has a refreshingly sane take on AI in the lab. It’s great at the grunt work: cleaning up data sets, converting formats, merging one pile of data into another and writing the project summaries nobody wants to write. It’s getting good at spotting patterns a human would never catch by eye. But it can’t look at a sample and decide on the fly to double the volume, which any grad student does ten times a day, and Doudna says the robots aren’t close. Her picture of the future is every young scientist with a staff of AI assistants, she describes as “brilliant, but somewhat naive about the actual details of the project.” The people still decide which experiment is worth running. I spent part of 1998 on an AI project that went nowhere and built a Browns website to stay sane, so I’m glad somebody finally figured out what the machines are for.
When not pitching implausible football seasons to Hulu executives who will never take his call, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloer @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled
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