The Fumble

The Browns of the Bernie Kosar era weren’t just good. They were also resilient.

Very resilient. They were like those inflatable, life-size clown punching dummies kids used to have, where you’d hit it with all your might and knock it to the floor, only to have it pop right back up unscathed.

The Browns had a 21-3 halftime lead at Miami in the 1985 AFC divisional playoffs yet found a way to lose 24-21.

They came back in 1986 with more resolve – and a diverse attack with the offseason hiring of Lindy Infante as offensive coordinator. But they received a dagger to the heart again when they let Denver drive 98 yards to score the tying touchdown with 37 seconds left – at Cleveland, no less - in the conference title game. The Broncos ended up winning 23-20 in overtime.

Devastated but not dissuaded from their determination to kick in the door and finally make it to the Super Bowl, the Browns regrouped and returned once more to the AFC Championship Game in 1987. There they would meet the Broncos again, this time at Denver. Not even an in-season players’ strike could knock them off course.

Certainly, the football gods would be on the Browns’ side this time. After all, the odds were with them. Following their two crushing, gut-wrenching defeats in 1985 and ’86 - plus an equally painful 14-12 loss to Oakland in the 1980 divisional playoffs when Brian Sipe’s pass was picked off in the end zone in the closing seconds - it seemed the Browns had already run the gamut of excruciating ways to drop games.

Maybe, but the Browns were dealt one more kick to the stomach on Jan. 17, 1988 at Mile High Stadium, losing 38-33 in what will forever be known as "The Fumble" game.

Browns running back Earnest Byner appeared headed into the end zone for the tying touchdown with a minute left, only to have the ball stripped at the Denver 3 by little-known defensive back Jeremiah Castille. He recovered, essentially ending the Browns’ valiant comeback attempt – and adding another memorable chapter, albeit a negative, sobering one, to the team’s history.

"That game pops into my head like it was yesterday," Dan Fike, the team’s starting right guard during the Kosar era, said the other day. "The double-overtime game against the Jets, The Drive game and The Fumble game, are ones that you can never forget. They are fully ingrained into your memory, like your wedding day.

"And I’m sure if you asked the Broncos, The Drive and The Fumble are key games for them, too – defining moments. Only for them, it was a different kind of defining moment."

The Broncos celebrated – and probably still celebrate – those games. Those were the contests that really launched the career of Broncos quarterback John Elway and got him started toward the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Along with that, the Denver organization jumped into the Super Bowl limelight.

For the Browns, though, there was nothing to celebrate from those games – nothing to feel good about. Then or now.

"We were crushed when we lost those games to Denver, and that’s a feeling that still lingers with me to this day," Fike said. "Emotionally, it took a month for me to overcome The Fumble game. And like I said, I still think about that game. I still get asked about it by people.

"For me, The Fumble game was worse than The Drive game, maybe because I was actually out on the field when The Fumble happened. In The Drive game, we had just scored to go ahead so we were sitting on the bench talking for a while. It wasn’t until Denver got down there close to scoring that we got up to watch what was going on."

Whereas The Drive game was close throughout, The Fumble contest almost got out of hand right away. Denver had a 14-0 first-quarter lead and was up by even more – a whopping 18 points, at 21-3 – at halftime. An offense that had exploded the week before in a 38-21 victory over Indianapolis in the divisional round, and had scored 30 or more points seven times on the year, could muster only a 24-yard Matt Bahr field goal.

"We just did not click very well in the first half," Fike said.

The second half was different, though.

"We opened up the offense after halftime," Fike said. "Bernie was winging the ball all over the place, and we were running the ball on them."

Slowly but surely, the Browns caught up. They scored three TDs in the third quarter - Kosar hitting wide receiver Reggie Langhorne for 18 yards and Byner for 32 yards, followed by Byner’s four-yard run. Those scores cut the deficit to 31-24.

The Browns finally tied it at 31 four minutes into the fourth quarter when Kosar threw a four-yard TD pass to wide receiver Webster Slaughter. But with four minutes remaining, the Broncos answered with a score of their own on Elway’s 20-yard pass to running back Sammy Winder to go ahead, 38-31.

That set the stage for what the Browns hoped would be their Drive, their comeback to score a tying touchdown and force overtime, where they would eventually outlast the Broncos and win.
Taking over at their own 25 with 3:53 left, the Browns quickly picked up ground in chunks. Byner ran 16 yards up the middle on the first play. Two plays later, Kosar passed 14 yards to wide receiver Brian Brennan to the Denver 43. He went to Brennan again on the next play for 19 yards.

Byner tried the left side on a six-yard run two plays later, then, two plays after that, Broncos inside linebacker Karl Mecklenburg was penalized five yards for offsides to give the Browns a first down at the Denver 8 with 1:12 remaining. The Browns had moved 67 yards in just six plays covering 2:41.

Then came the next play and The Fumble.

"It was a trap play,’ Fike recalled. "I trapped (right end) Rulon Jones and drove him to the outside, and Earnest cut back inside."

The hole was huge. Actually, the blocking on the entire drive – on both running and passing plays – was flawless.

Byner blew through the opening as he headed toward the end zone for what looked to be an easy touchdown. The only Bronco in his way was Castille.

Castille wandered toward the middle of the field just in front of the goal line. There he dislodged the ball from Byner’s hands and fell on it.

"You hated to see that happen from a team standpoint, and you really hated to see it happen to Earnest. It just didn’t seem fair," Fike said of Byner, who ended the day as the Browns’ top rusher with 67 yards in 15 carries, and also the top receiver for either club with seven catches for 120 yards. "He was the one who got us back into the game in the second half with his running and his pass receptions.

"Earnest is a good person and a good friend, and he was a good teammate. No way have I ever held any ill feeling toward him for what happened.

"You hear all the stories about Cleveland being jinxed, and that one play is a prime example of that. I’m from the South, and when you had some bad luck, you were snakebit. So I guess we were snakebit."

In 1985, ’86 and ’87. But the Browns kept overcoming that to climb back into the title hunt. They were Rocky Balboa, getting beaten up but never beaten down to the point of giving up.
"I think we were able to withstand the bad things that happened to us because we were a tightly-knit team," Fike said. "You knew everybody’s wife and kids. We spent a lot of the time together off the field.

"There was a camaraderie among the players. When you looked and saw your teammate across from you, you knew that he was with you and would support you. Sure, we had great talent, but we also had a great sense and a great feeling for one another."

What the Browns didn’t have, however, was a chance to go to the Super Bowl.

"I don’t know which one of our teams were better - the one in ’86 or the one in ’87- but we thought we were better than Denver was both years," Fike said . "I mean, the Broncos were obviously good to have gotten that far, but we just thought we were better.

"We also thought we would have played better in those two Super Bowls than they did (losing 39-20 to the New York Giants following the 1986 season and then 42-10 to the Washington Redskins the next year)."

Speculation. That’s all the Browns have now because they were never able to make their dream come true.

Almost, but not quite.

"To get used to the high altitude in Denver, we went out to Albuquerque the week before The Fumble game to train," Fike said. "There are Browns fans everywhere you go, and they were out there, too.

"One day, a Browns fan came up to me and told me he had a dream that I recovered a key fumble at the end of the game. So after I blocked Rulon Jones out of the play, I turned around to see the ball pop out of Earnest’s hands. In the next split-second as I dove for the ball, that fan’s story about the dream came back to me.

"It’s just one of those crazy things. I was down there scrambling for the ball, still thinking about that dream. I ended up being down at the bottom of this big pile. I missed recovering the ball by about 12 inches."

Yes, history is sometimes that close to being drastically altered. Nearly two decades later, the Super Bowl-hungry Browns are still trying to make up that small, but at the same time oh-so-large, distance.

No one on the Browns thought it would turn out that way – even after the 1987 title game loss.
"I think it’s important to remain consistent in this league and not give up hope," Kosar is quoted as saying in the Browns 1988 media guide. "If you maintain your character and poise, it’s eventually going to work out."

The Browns hope Kosar is proven right at some point soon.