Browns' Baxter out for year

Cornerback tears ligament in both knees on Sunday

BEREA, Ohio (AP) -- Cleveland's Gary Baxter tore patellar tendons in both knees while trying to break up a pass in the first half of Sunday's loss to Denver, a devastating injury for the cornerback and another big loss for the Browns.

Baxter will undergo surgery on Tuesday at the Cleveland Clinic to repair both knees, coach Romeo Crennel said during his Monday news conference. Crennel, who has been coaching for more than 35 years, said he has never seen an injury like Baxter's.

Crennel estimated that Baxter would be sidelined for at least one year.

Baxter, who missed 11 games last season with a torn chest muscle and three games earlier this year with a similar injury, was backpedalling when he planted near the 5-yard line and tried to leap to knock down a pass intended for Javon Walker.Baxter's legs buckled and he dropped to the ground. He immediately grabbed his left knee and it was believed that was his only injury. Baxter was lifted onto a cart and driven to the locker room.

Crennel said the 27-year-old Baxter told the team he intends to return from the injuries.

"He wants to come back," Crennel said.

Baxter is the second Browns player to blow his patellar since July. On the first 11-on-11 play of training camp, center LeCharles Bentley, the club's top free agent signing, tore his left patellar tendon and was lost for the season.

Baxter signed a five-year, $30 million contract as a free agent with Cleveland before the 2005 season. He spent four seasons with Baltimore prior to joining the Browns.

Curses! Bentley out for the year

As word spread across Browns country that center LeCharles Bentley had seriously injured his knee on the first 11-on-11 play of training camp, fatalistic Cleveland fans all had the same thought.

Cursed again.

How else to explain another freak injury to a high-profile player?

"No doubt in my mind this team is cursed," said Jack Copley of Brunswick, who attended Friday's practice with his wife, Phyllis.

"If you're picked by the Browns, you're going to get hurt. It's sad. Every time we get a player who we think is going to turn it around here, something bad happens to him."

Sure seems like it.

Since coming back to the NFL as an expansion team in 1999, the Browns have been snake-bitten by injuries, expecially severe ones to first-round draft picks and star players. Some of the bumps, bruises and breaks have included:

Mammoth offensive tackle Orlando Brown gets struck in the eye with a penalty flag thrown by a referee during a 1999 game, an injury that ends his season and causes serious damage.

Quarterback Tim Couch, the No. 1 overall pick in 1999, survives a season-long sacking as a rookie then breaks his hand on the final play of practice in 2000 when he bangs it on the helmet of a rushing linebacker.

Linebacker Jamir Miller makes the Pro Bowl in 2000 -- still the only Browns player to do so since '99 -- but ruptures his Achilles' tendon in the first preseason game of 2001 and is forced to retire.

Offensive tackle Ross Verba signs as a free agent to strengthen a porous line, but tears his biceps muscle in a preseason game and misses the 2003 season.

Tight end Kellen Winslow, the Browns' top draft pick in 2004, breaks his leg in Week 2 at Dallas trying to recover an onsides kick in the final seconds and misses the rest of his rookie season. Five months later, he wrecks his motorcycle doing tricks in a parking lot and misses all of 2005.

Cornerback Gary Baxter, who started 46 straight games for Baltimore, starts five in a row in his first year with Cleveland but tears his pectoral muscle making a tackle in Week 5 and misses the remainder of last season.

Wide receiver Braylon Edwards, finally emerging as a playmaker after a slow start made slower by a staph infection in his elbow last season, scores two touchdowns in the first half against Jacksonville on Dec. 4 before tearing a ligament in his right knee. He undergoes surgery a month later and isn't expected to be back until Oct. 1.

On Thursday, Jim Klempay was on the Internet when a message came across in a chat room for Browns fans that Bentley, the club's biggest free-agent signing of the offseason, had gotten hurt on a routine running play with the players only wearing shoulder pads and helmets.

"I couldn't believe it," said Klempay, of Avon Lake. "I thought somebody was trying to start a fight or something. I wanted to be sick."

The Cleveland native's season-ending injury hurt Browns fans a little deeper.

Bentley, who starred at Ohio State, had come home to play for the Browns, a team he followed passionately even while making two Pro Bowls for the New Orleans Saints. Besides anchoring the line, Bentley's arrival was viewed as a turning point for the Browns, a star player who could help return the team to prominence.

It all looked so good, right up until the moment Bentley was loaded onto a cart with his left knee immobilized and driven off the practice field. He had surgery on Friday and may need one year to recover.

General manager Phil Savage, who called Bentley "the face of our free-agent class," dismissed any notion that the Browns are jinxed.

"If this organization really believes that there is some validity to that, then we are all wasting our time," he said. "I think it is important for our team, coaches, scouts and the people who work here in the front office and with this organization to say that we are still going to get the job done.

"Things happen and there is always give and take. Sometimes you have good news, sometimes you have bad news, but the reality of it is life goes on -- things happen."

And for the Browns, they are usually bad.

Emotions of Browns' move still raw 10 years later

Ten years ago this week, the unthinkable happened in Cleveland, and Ozzie Newsome still can't quite fathom it. In that sprawling football-crazed city of a half million, there was nowhere to hide from the blast of the bombshell news that Cleveland's beloved Browns were moving to Baltimore.

It was an experience that Newsome wouldn't wish on anyone. There was no escaping the story night or day. The specter of the franchise's relocation to Baltimore -- announced by team owner Art Modell on Nov. 6, 1995 -- and the anger it engendered in Cleveland loomed over everything the Browns did in the second half of that season.

The team complex was picketed by jilted and angry fans almost daily, and it became a fortress of sorts for the bewildered Browns employees, who knew little more than the fans did about what came next and how the team had wound up in this position to begin with. Delivery men refused to even drop off soda and snacks and other vending supplies at the team complex anymore, and Newsome found himself hesitant to risk a trip to the grocery store, the gas station or the post office, lest he venture into a community that was nearly blind with rage.

"Moving the Cleveland Browns was just unheard of," said Newsome -- who was the Browns director of pro personnel and is now Baltimore's vice president/general manager.

And what was it like to be the lightning rod head coach of a contending NFL team consigned to franchise purgatory at midseason, soon to lose both home and hope?

"It was terrible,'' said New England's Bill Belichick this week, in his first extensive comments on the tumultuous closing chapter of his five-year Browns coaching tenure. "To walk into that building every day and have everyone in the entire organization wondering what are we going to do?"

Belichick's role in the Browns' sad saga seems like a couple lifetimes ago, but he's still struck by the chaos and uncertainty that reigned in those early days, and just how helpless it felt to be a Cleveland Brown in November 1995.

"There's no situation I've been in, before or since, that even would remotely approach that one for negativity and affecting the overall focus of the team," Belichick said. "Not within 100 miles. It touched every single person in the building, every secretary, every ball boy. I felt badly for everyone involved."

With the Baltimore Ravens now in their 10th season, and the "new" Browns seven years into their expansion experience in Cleveland, time has dulled some of the intensity of the painful events surrounding the franchise's shocking departure for Maryland.

But not for Belichick, who you'd have to say has landed on his feet with the Patriots. The long, strange trip that was the Browns' '95 season remains vivid in his memory, and it will always hold a singular place in his coaching career when it comes to the art of weathering the storm.

The Browns were 4-4 and tied for first place when news of the team's relocation plans began seeping out. They went into a 1-7 death spiral at that point, ending the season 5-11 and finishing a game out of last place in the AFC Central. Belichick was fired over the phone by Modell on Valentine's Day 1996, a conversation that lasted maybe three minutes, and didn't surface as an NFL head coach again until 2000 in New England.

"The first few days were kind of a shock," Belichick said. "Your wheels were spinning. Everybody was kind of dizzy. But after about a week, when there was nothing coming our way in the way of support (from ownership) or even factual information about what was ahead, you felt just like a flag on a pole. You were just blowing with the wind, with no control over which direction you went."

The prevailing winds, of course, were blowing east, southeast, toward Baltimore, a city that knew first-hand about losing its storied NFL franchise virtually overnight. In retrospect, nothing about how the Browns were plucked from Cleveland in those crazy, confusing days makes any sense to Belichick, who is and will always remain something of a football traditionalist at heart.



"The situation in Cleveland, I certainly could have done a better job," Belichick said. "I made my share of mistakes. But that situation was off the charts. To take a franchise like that out of that city, which is 30 miles away from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and with what high school and college football means to people around there, that place is football. For that franchise to move at that point, it was monumentally wrong. It was just a difficult situation for everyone in that building."

"Things got out of control so fast''

Having gone 11-5 and winning a playoff game in '94, Belichick's fourth season in Cleveland, big things were expected of the Browns in '95. Peter King of Sports Illustrated -- and other pundits -- even picked them to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl that season.

The Browns started strong at 3-1, but a three-game losing streak ensued before they fought their way back to .500 at midseason and into a first-place tie with Pittsburgh with an overtime win at Cincinnati in Week 9. But on the Friday before their upcoming home game against the AFC Central rival Oilers, who were one game back at 3-5, all hell broke loose when rumors of Modell's moving plans began to surface.

As it turns out, that bit of chaos was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the uncertainty that would swirl around this venerable franchise in the ensuing months.

"By Friday night before the Houston game it was out, and by Saturday it was confirmed somehow,'' Belichick recalled. "By Saturday morning, the whole city was in a complete panic, as were the players and everybody in the organization. Everybody was calling, saying, 'What's going to happen? What do we do?'

"The only deal was whether the team was going to stay in Cleveland and play the '96 season there as a lame duck, or move to Baltimore right away. No one knew anything, and Art never really provided one ounce of support for all those people working for him, and still wearing the Browns colors.''

Belichick implored Modell to address the team and the organization, offering something in the way of a definitive timetable for the move, and who would be asked to go with the team to Baltimore. But other than a brief, cursory pep talk to the team on the Wednesday following the relocation announcement, Modell said little and clarified even less. Modell at that point left the city for his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., making quick trips to Baltimore as well, and never again that year returned to Cleveland. He barely kept in contact with the team's front office.


"In this business, we all get fired, we all change jobs, and there's a lot of uncertainty,'' said Scott Pioli, the Patriots vice president/player personnel, who was a 30-year old Browns personnel assistant in '95. "But hearing that the entire franchise was moving, trying to wrap your hands around the concept was difficult.

"Things got so out of control so fast. All hours of the day there were fans picketing outside our building. There were death threats being made to people, even beyond Art Modell. There were cop cars and constant surveillance around the building. It was just surreal. So far beyond the norm that no one knew how to deal with it.''

The public's antipathy for all things Browns-related after the news broke created a bunker-like mentality within the team complex in suburban Berea. Local sponsors withdrew their support almost unilaterally, and the atmosphere within the community grew so charged that the team couldn't even get its junk food delivered.

Recalls Michael Lombardi, who was then the Browns director of player personnel and is now the Oakland Raiders' top personnel executive: "We couldn't even get the Eagle Snack guy or the Coke guy to deliver any more. Everybody was so anti-Cleveland Browns.

"That first week, Nov. 10 was the anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (on Lake Superior), and the joke was, that's what this is like. That (Gordon Lightfoot) song, when he sings, 'Fellas, it's too rough to feed you. Fellas, it's been good to know you.' We all felt like a band of brothers, actually. That we were able to survive it at all. We all have a bond among us after going through that together. Because we all knew that some of us were going to Baltimore, and some of us weren't. We knew some of us were going to take the blame for losing.''

Adds Belichick: "It was a total withdraw by the city, and the sponsors and all that. And under the circumstances, you couldn't really blame them. They weren't going to support us at that point. We were leaving them.''

Modell: "I have no second thoughts''

Reached this week at home in Maryland, Modell recalled his discomfort at taking the podium in Baltimore that fateful Monday to announce the move, three days after the first news reports surfaced.

"It didn't sit well with me, having to get up there and do that that day,'' said Modell, who gave up his majority ownership in the Baltimore Ravens in early '04, as part of his sale of the team to Steve Bisciotti. "I didn't like it. I didn't want it. But if I didn't move that damn team, I would have been in bankruptcy in 60 days.

"I was uncomfortable, I knew I was going to be vilified. But I was doing it out of pure economic need. I have no second thoughts, and nobody around me has second thoughts. The Browns survived as a football team. Their history and colors survived and they got a new stadium out of it. I knew I would take heat and I was prepared to take it. It was unpleasant. but I knew what I was doing was the right thing, and I still believe I did the right thing.''

Modell's critics have long contended that he was only in such dire economic straits because of years of questionable decision-making when it came to both his and the team's finances. Losing money as an NFL owner in the age of revenue-sharing, the critics contend, is a difficult task.
Asked if had any regrets about the Browns' '95 season being the casualty of his franchise re-location, Modell scoffed.

"They knew what was going on,'' he said of the team's front office and coaching staff. "They had a job to do and they didn't get it done. I can't buy into that. I had to do it sooner than later. I knew the squeeze was on. I would have loved to sell the team and keep it there, but who was I going to sell it to in that situation, with that stadium? Who was going to step up and buy the team under those conditions?''

(Modell's desire to replace the 64-year-old Cleveland Stadium put him at odds with city lawmakers, who reportedly balked at providing the Browns' owner public funds to help build the team a new home.)

Modell said the ensuing decade since his controversial departure from Cleveland has flown by. "Ten years go by in a hurry when you're having fun,'' he quipped. "This is the kind of story where it depends on who gets to tell the history, and what side it's coming from. I will say this, I won a Super Bowl (in Baltimore) within (five) years. That should tell you something.''
Modell even saved one last zinger for Sports Illustrated and its infamous Nov. '95 cover featuring a caricature of him sucker-punching Browns fans.

"I'll never get over that,'' he said. "Never. That was brutal. A brutal cover. Unkind and untrue. It wasn't a case of making a buck, it was a case of survival. They're on my big list.''



The '95 Browns were a breeding ground

Check out the landscape of the NFL today and it speaks volumes to see how many members of the '95 Browns -- a doomed team if there ever was one -- continue to dot the league map (see chart below). The coaches and front office staff of that Browns team comprise virtually a Who's Who of the NFL a decade later. Even a handful of players, such as Vinny Testaverde, Keenan McCardell, Matt Stover and Orlando Brown, remain in uniform.

Belichick, of course, has compiled Hall of Fame coaching credentials by winning three of the past four Super Bowls in New England. Newsome, Cleveland's director of pro personnel, won a Super Bowl himself five years ago in Baltimore, where he remains the team's general manager and vice president. Browns director of player personnel Michael Lombardi is now the Oakland Raiders' top personnel executive, and Cleveland's front office also included future general managers or personnel executives in Phil Savage (Cleveland), Scott Pioli (New England), Mike Tannebaum (New York Jets), and George Kokinis (Baltimore).

If possible, Cleveland's coaching and scouting staff in '95 was perhaps even more star-laden, containing six current NFL coordinators -- Chuck Bresnahan (Cincinnati), Eric Mangini (New England), Jim Bates (Green Bay), Jim Schwartz (Tennessee), Mike Sheppard (New Orleans), Rick Venturi (New Orleans) -- and two future collegiate head coaches in Kirk Ferentz (Iowa) and Pat Hill (Fresno State). Browns special teams coach Scott O'Brien is now the coordinator of football operations/assistant to the head coach in Miami, under Nick Saban -- who, of course, was Belichick's defensive coordinator in Cleveland from 1991-94.

"I think we all knew we had something good together,'' Lombardi said. "The program that Bill had built in Cleveland was an outstanding program, and it was going to be a success. We all knew it. Everybody knew it coming to work every day. I think there's just one person who didn't know it.''

Always loath to publicly sing his own praises, Belichick nonetheless acknowledges the satisfaction of seeing the Browns' '95 front office and coaching staff ascend to positions of power throughout the league.

"Obviously I'm really proud of that and proud of what we accomplished there,'' he said. "We had a damn good football team in Cleveland in '94. I told Art several times, you've got a good staff here, coaching and scouting. That's not the problem. I feel like the point has been proven 10 years later.''

Newsome, the Hall of Fame Browns tight end who was one of many Cleveland officials to make the move with Modell to Baltimore, lauds Belichick for assembling such a talented array of football men.

"We were all there together during that time,'' Newsome said. "The majority of us came in there young and eager to learn. Bill exposed us and challenged our ability to learn and understand the game of football, and I think we all did.''

An ending befitting the Browns' saga

After their season already had swirled down the drain with six consecutive losses, the Browns beat Cincinnati 26-10 in their penultimate game, the last one ever played in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium. The outcome, however, is not the memory that lingers.

"I remember the final home game, it was surreal day,'' Pioli said. "The city's anger had peaked that day. And during the fourth quarter, they actually had to stop the game every time a team was driving toward the one end zone nearest the 'Dawg Pound', where the stands were so close to the field. The refs were making the two teams turn around once they got close to the Pound, because fans were heaving bleacher seats from the Pound and from the upper deck.

"I remember hearing this cracking noise, this sound, this unnatural sound for a football game. And it was people in the upper deck actually ripping up the wood and the metal from these seats and throwing them out on the field. You'd hear a cheer every time another one would go over the rail.''

Belichick said he has watched the game film from that day, and it's jarring to see the teams changing directions so often, in essence playing on a 50-yard field.

"We changed directions four times in that game,'' he said. "To stay away from the Pound. And I'll never forget seeing those seats, and they were like four seats together, and must have weighed 70 or 80 pounds, watching as they would get pitched over the upper deck. There were guys who actually brought their tools to the game and were literally taking the stadium apart. It was bizarre.''

Even Testaverde, the Browns starting quarterback for most of that season, found time to grab a few souvenirs of that lost year in Cleveland.

"The best part about it was when the Modells left town, David, Art's son, also left town prior to the whole team moving,'' Testaverde said this week. "Up in David's office, he used to keep all these cigars -- he was a cigar aficionado. I'd go up there every couple days and take a few. At the end of the year, I had me a couple cases of cigars. He wasn't around to stop me.''

For Belichick and the rest of the Browns, the ugliness of that last home game summarized their entire lame-duck experience in Cleveland. The season's final two months was a slow, steady depressing descent.

"Art had no concept of how bad it was there during those two months, because he was gone,'' Belichick said. "I didn't feel bad for myself, because I knew I'd get another job somewhere else in the league. But it was hard for my family. And it was for all those people in the organization, the people who had worked there for years and who bled Cleveland Browns for him. They didn't deserve being flat out dumped.''

1995 Cleveland Browns Then and Now

Name
Browns Title
Current Job


Bill Belichick
Head coach
Patriots head coach

Ozzie Newsome
Director Pro Personnel
Ravens V.P./General Manager

Michael Lombardi
Director Player Personnel
Raiders Personnel Exec.

Scott Pioli
Personnel assistant
Patriots V.P., Player Personnel

Phil Savage
National scout
Browns Sr. V.P./G.M.

Mike Tannebaum
Player Personnel asst.
Jets Sr. V.P./Asst. G.M.

George Kokinis
Pro Personnel assistant
Ravens Director Pro Personnel

Eric Mangini
Coaches assistant
Patriots Defensive Coordinator

Jim Schwartz
College/Pro scout
Titans Defensive Coordinator

Jim Bates
Secondary coach
Packers Defensive Coordinator

Chuck Bresnahan
Linebackers coach
Bengals Defensive Coordinator

Rick Venturi
Defensive Coordinator
Saints Defensive Coordinator

Mike Sheppard
Receivers coach
Saints Offensive Coordinator

Scott O'Brien
Special teams coach
Dolphins Cord. Football Operations

Kirk Ferentz
Offensive line coach
University of Iowa head coach

Pat Hill
Tight ends
Fresno State head coach

Pepper Johnson
Linebacker
Patriots Defensive Line coach

V. Testaverde
Quarterback
Jets quarterback

Matt Stover
Kicker
Ravens kicker

Keenan McCardell
Receiver
Chargers receiver

Orlando Brown
Offensive tackle
Ravens tackle

Tom Tupa
Punter
Redskins punter (on IR)

Edwards suffers torn ACL

Edwards suffers torn ACL
By Zac Jackson,
Staff Writer
December 5, 2005

Braylon Edwards tore the ACL in his right knee Sunday and will miss the remainder of the season.

Browns coach Romeo Crennel said Edwards will have surgery to repair the tear when the swelling goes down. A full recovery is expected.

Edwards suffered the injury while battling Rashean Mathis for a deep ball in the fourth quarter of the Browns' 20-14 loss to the Jaguars. He landed awkwardly on the knee and was attended to on the field for several minutes.

"He was making an effort to make another big play for the team," Crennel said.

Edwards had a banner day before the injury, recording 5 receptions for 86 yards and scoring his second and third career touchdowns on passes of 34 and 17 yards from Charlie Frye in the first half.

"We anticipate he will be back with us next year and continue to provide those plays he did yesterday," Crennel said.

The third overall pick in last year's NFL Draft, Edwards finishes his rookie season with 32 receptions for 512 yards and 3 touchdowns in 10 games. He missed two games in October due to an arm infection.

Latest Chapter of Browns Misfortune 5/2/05

Winslow hurt in motorcycle accident

WESTLAKE, Ohio (AP) -- Browns tight end Kellen Winslow Jr. was injured in a motorcycle accident, but the team said his injuries aren't life-threatening.

The former Miami star was riding in a community college parking lot Sunday when he hit a curb at about 35 mph and was thrown from the motorcycle, police Lt. Ray Arcuri said.

He was taken by ambulance to Fairview Hospital and was scheduled to be transferred to the Cleveland Clinic on Monday where the team's medical staff would treat him, Browns spokesman Bill Bonsiewicz said.

"He went over the handlebars and was real evasive about what the injuries were," Arcuri said.

Winslow was wearing a helmet, but it wasn't strapped on and flew off his head, Arcuri said. He and four other men were riding motorcycles in the parking lot, not far from Winslow's home.

The first-round draft pick missed nearly all of his rookie year after breaking his leg in the second game of the season. He has had two operations on the leg.

Cracked kneecap, femur among Winslow injuriesSaturday, May 7, 2005 By Steve Doerschuk Repository sports writer

BEREA — Details of tight end Kellen Winslow Jr.’s condition continue to seep out.It has been learned Winslow has a cracked right kneecap, complicating knee issues that have the Browns preparing for a 2005 season without last year’s first-round draft pick.

It also has been learned that a hairline fracture of the right femur is among injuries Winslow suffered Sunday after ramming his Suzuki sport motorcycle into a high curb.

The club is not commenting on these injuries, standing by its initial statement that Winslow initially had swelling in his right shoulder and knee, and by a subsequent statement that said the knee remained a concern, although internal wounds were improving.

Winslow suffered substantial bruises to his chest, a source said, adding that reports Winslow suffered broken ribs were untrue.

Team spokesman Bill Bonsiewicz confirmed Friday that Winslow remained at Cleveland Clinic for a sixth day.A Clinic spokesman said Friday that Winslow has exercised a legal option to block the hospital from issuing so much as a one-word condition report, such as "fair.’’ The spokesman said the hospital was directed to issue all requests for Winslow information to the Browns.

Visitors have included teammates, relatives and members of the team hierarchy, including Randy Lerner, Romeo Crennel and Phil Savage.

As to reports the Browns are bracing themselves for a season without Winslow because of knee issues, Bonsiewicz said, "We’re not responding to any speculation."

Before Sunday’s crash, Savage had said Winslow was close to a full recovery from right leg injuries. A broken fibula and ankle complications cost Winslow all but two games of the 2004 season.

Winslow isn’t the first high-profile athlete whose course was changed by a motorcycle wreck.Duke product Jason Williams, the No. 2 pick of the 2002 NBA draft, hasn’t played since crashing before the 2003-04 season.

In an interview on ESPN Radio, Williams said he feels for Winslow."When I crashed my bike ... the instant thought wasn’t that I was going to die or I wasn’t going to stay alive, it was that I threw it all away,’’ Williams said. "It wasn't until I got to the hospital when I saw the 15 to 20 doctors waiting for me in the emergency room where it actually clicked to me that I wanted to stay alive.’’

Williams said motorcycles are part of pro athletes’ culture."Even the best of the best guys ride motorcycles,’’ he said. "You see guys riding them to games, you see guys riding them around. You can tell guys that it’s dangerous, but when it really comes down to it, these guys are grown men.’’

Linebacker Brant Boyer, a Browns team leader in recent years, is a motorcycle enthusiast who has been seen pulling in and out of the Browns’ parking lot on a bike many times.

Of course, that’s different than Winslow zipping around a parking lot shortly before he crashed on Sunday.You can reach Repository sports writer Steve Doerschuk at (330) 580-8347 or e-mail:

Winslow's Injuries Turn Out To Be Truly SeriousOfficials Re-Create Accident

POSTED: 5:13 pm EDT May 6, 2005

CLEVELAND -- Browns tight end Kellen Winslow's injuries are much more serious than first thought, NewsChannel5 reported.

5 On Your Side Health Team Anchor Lee Jordan reported sources close to the Winslow story said the Sunday motorcycle accident left Winslow with a broken tibia and femur, along with a fracture to the large bone in his thigh. His ACL was damaged, possibly torn and there are lacerations on his liver and kidney.

NewsChannel5's source continues to stand by the information.

One media outlet is even suggesting Winslow's football career is over, WEWS reported.

Winslow previously had two surgeries on the right leg the he broke last fall.

Meanwhile, officials in Westlake re-created Winslow's accident by duplicating the motorcycle's skid marks in the parking lot of Cuyahoga Community College. The test, which involved using a special device, was designed to help gauge Winslow's speed when he crashed his motorcycle Sunday night.

WEWS reported police didn't have a bike similar to Winslow's, so a Channel 19 reporter, with nearly the same bike and tires as Winslow's volunteered to do the skid test. Police gave him the green light.

Westlake police repeatedly cautioned the rider to go slowly, so they could estimate Winslow's speed.

He ended up falling off the bike when attempting to stop. Officials said the reconstruction closely resembled what happened to Winslow.

"As everybody saw, you can see how easy it is to lose control on a motorcycle when you're braking," said Lt. Bill Eschenfelder of the Westlake Police Department.

Saturday, May 07, 2005
Mary Kay Cabot
Plain Dealer Reporter

One afternoon in March, Browns tight end Kellen Winslow Jr. was playing paint ball with friends in the back yard of his Westlake home when he heard a rumbling in the parking lot behind his house.

He looked and saw someone performing wheelies and other stunts on a motorcycle.

He went to the lot and introduced himself to the rider, Jason Campana.

Campana and Winslow exchanged phone numbers. Before long, Campana was hanging out at Winslow's house talking about motorcycles, according to interviews with Westlake police and sources close to Winslow.

Winslow was so pumped about what Campana could do on his Suzuki GSX-R600 that he decided to buy a bike. Campana, 19, hooked him up with his buddies at State 8 Cycles in Cuyahoga Falls.Because Winslow is 6-4, 250 pounds, Campana thought he would be better suited to the Suzuki GSR-R750 than the 600. It's more powerful than Campana's bike, but Campana and the salesman at State 8 both thought the 750 was the right choice.

Winslow, a novice, bought the shiny, red bike about April 9 and received it a few days later. Soon, Campana was teaching him how to ride, how to shift gears and operate the clutch. Campana, who has been riding motorbikes since he was about 8, advised Winslow to take a safety course at Polaris Career Center, but the tight end did not follow the advice, he said.

Before long, Winslow and Campana were riding around Winslow's Westlake neighborhood, much to the chagrin of neighbors.

On April 16, one got fed up and called the police."He was going up and down the street about 50 miles per hour," said the neighbor, who asked not to be identified. "He was popping wheelies and dogging it. I got tired of it and called the police. There's eight to 10 children right around where he lives."

Lt. Ray Arcuri of Westlake police said a sergeant was sent to the Cornerstone development where Winslow lives, "but by the time we arrived, we were unable to locate anybody doing it."

Another neighbor, Dr. Robert Nahigian, a dentist and president of the Cornerstone Homeowners' Association, tried to stop Winslow."One day he and someone else went down the street about 15 times doing wheelies," he said. "One of them did a wheelie right in front of my house. After about 15 minutes, I waved him down."

Nahigian told Winslow that he didn't think he should be doing stunts in a residential area. "I also told him that I was concerned about his own safety," Nahigian said. "He told me he wasn't going over the speed limit."

Nahigian questioned why Winslow would perform such dangerous acts when he was still rehabbing from a broken right fibula and ligament damage in his ankle."He would walk his dog and he wasn't even walking well before the accident," said Nahigian.

When he wasn't practicing, Winslow would often pop in a tape of the Starboyz, a stunt riding team whose three main riders are from Akron. The Starboyz travel all over, performing stunts.

A day or two before Winslow's motorcycle accident, he burned out the clutches on his bike attempting a burnout, a trick that involves spinning the back wheels, said Scott Caraboolad, president and founder of the Starboyz. Caraboolad said one of his Starboyz associates works at State 8 and sold Winslow the new clutches. Then, Caraboolad said, the State 8 guys fixed his bike for him."

The guys at State 8 were trying to get Kellen to come take private lessons with us," said Caraboolad. "We wish we would've gotten the chance to teach him how to do things the right way."

On May 1, Winslow, Campana and a few friends rode their bikes to Canton to watch the Starboyz perform live at Hardings Park Cycle.

After the show, Winslow and friends went inside to shop for motorcycle paraphernalia. Working security was Eric Stanbro, an off-duty Canton-area policeman who always works the show - even though he has a general disdain for the Starboyz, who wear "Cops Lie" T-shirts and other anti-police messages."

Some guy said, 'Grab a paper and pen, Kellen Winslow's in here,' " said Stanbro. "I went over and looked and it was him. He spent about an hour in there shopping and looking at things. He signed about half a dozen autographs and took some pictures with fans."

When Winslow and friends left, they turned onto Ohio 62 and some popped wheelies. Stanbro said Winslow, who was last, was one of them."He popped up his front wheel and just gunned it," said Stanbro. "He was going about 40-50 mph and held it about 100 feet. He was just flying. A bunch of people were watching him and I think he was showing off."

Stanbro said he's positive it was Winslow because he was wearing a bright red Budweiser jacket, the same one that appeared later that night on the security video at Corporate College in Westlake."

All of the other guys were wearing leather and looked like much more experienced riders," said Stanbro.

But one of the other riders, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it's doubtful that the inexperienced Winslow could perform such a difficult wheelie.

"He was in back of us, but I don't think Kellen is able to do that yet," he said. "He was taking it slow and being responsible on the bike. He enjoyed the ride down there and we were watching out for him."

When the riders got home, they split up for a while, but agreed to meet again later that evening at Corporate College because one of the riders' friends wanted a picture with Winslow. Winslow and Campana brought their bikes. They took the picture, and then Campana and Winslow started riding around the lot.

According to interviews, they were practicing stunts and tricks while the other two watched. Then came the accident. Campana was off in one corner of the parking lot and Winslow was in the other. The two others were half-watching, half-talking to each other.

Suddenly, Campana wheeled around only to see Winslow fly over his handlebars and land in the shrubbery. The three men rushed to Winslow's side and found him unconscious. According to sources, the friends didn't know if he was dead or alive. One of them grabbed his hand and began saying, "Kellen, Kellen, Kellen."

Winslow regained consciousness, but was in extreme pain and they didn't move him. They called 911. Winslow was transported by ambulance to Fairview Hospital and then taken the next day to the Cleveland Clinic, where he remains with potentially serious injuries to his right knee and shoulder, along with internal injuries.

The Browns said Friday they had no further update on Winslow's condition. There is concern within the organization that Winslow has multiple injuries to his right knee and leg. There is also concern Winslow injured his kneecap in addition to suffering ligament damage and a possible hairline fracture of the right femur.

The eyewitnesses gave their accounts to police but the versions conflicted. One thought Winslow was attempting a reverse wheelie or "endo" and the other thought he was trying something else. Campana told police he had no idea what Winslow was doing and wishes he could ask him. He told police it could've been a freak accident.

Caraboolad, the Starboyz president, said the accident could have been prevented.

"I was so busy performing that day that I didn't have a chance to talk to Kellen," he said. "If I had, I could've given him some advice and maybe talked him into attending one of our wheelie schools to learn the right way."

Caraboolad said one of the first things he would've told Winslow is to not practice stunts in a parking lot. "It's totally the wrong place," he said. "Even professional stunt riders have a hard time in parking lots. You need a race track a half-mile long to accelerate.

"The Starboyz, who used to "raise hell on the streets of Akron and Canton" and have been arrested for performing on roadways, now have an operating agreement with Thompson Raceway Park outside Painesville. It's where they teach their increasingly popular wheelie classes."

The sport is so dangerous that we decided to start a wheelie school so that guys wouldn't kill themselves," he said. "I've seen 30 or 40 people wreck right in front of me."

He said the Starboyz are scheduled to teach Michael Jordan and his race team how to do stunts this summer."We wish we could've done the same for Kellen before it was too late," he said.

"He's very lucky to be alive."

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.

The Drive still ‘Dawgs' Browns

Hanford Dixon talked on his cell phone as he drove around the Cleveland area on business the other day.

As the conversation continued, it seemed at some point soon that the former Browns Pro Bowl cornerback, a member of the team’s prestigious Browns Legends Club, would clip a mail box, plow into the rear end of someone stopped at a traffic light or simply drive off the road and into a ditch.

For the subject being discussed was that old bugaboo, the 1986 AFC Championship Game, or The Drive, as it’s more commonly known today.

"I don’t appreciate you bringing it up," Dixon joked. "And the fact it’s on TV all the time around this time of year doesn’t make it any easier, either."

Yes, The Drive will get more a lot of face time these next several weeks.

"I don’t watch it. I can’t watch it," Dixon said of the Browns’ 23-20 loss in overtime.

It’s just too painful.

"It was just a blow," he said. "It took a while to get over. You keep replaying the game in your mind, wondering, ‘What if?’ When I think about it even now, I get so upset that I just want to go kick something."

Red Right 88, the play described in Part 1 of this series, struck out of the blue, like a lightning bolt on an otherwise clear day. But The Drive was just the opposite. There was nothing sudden about it in any way, shape or form. It was a slow, miserable experience – like a Chinese water torture. Each drop – each play of that drive – hurts a little more when it’s viewed now, 18 years later.

The old saying that time heals all wounds doesn’t apply here. It only seems to fester, and when The Drive is shown again and again and again, like a nightmare that just won’t quit, it’s like pouring salt into the wounds.

The whole container of salt. Maybe even the entire salt mine.

"I know it’s been a long time since it was played, but that game still hurts. It really does," Dixon said.

To realize just how much it hurts Dixon and the rest of the Browns who played in that game, you have to turn the clock back to calendar year 1987 – to be exact, Jan. 11, the day the game was played before a full house of 79,915 at old Cleveland Stadium.

Dixon wasn’t a businessman then, as he is now. He was the Top Dawg and he, along with fellow Pro Bowl Frank Minnifield, embodied the spirit of the Browns – and of Cleveland - at that time.

The team was made up of characters who had character – players who had ability on the field and off it. They were players with whom Browns fans easily identified. They loved playing here.
Some of them, such as Boardman native Bernie Kosar, Clevelander Bob Golic and Canton’s Ray Ellis, were even from here, so it made their stake in all this just that much greater. It was more personal. They were playing for their boyhood friend who still lived in the old neighborhood, their uncle who weaned them on stories of Otto Graham, Bill Willis and Lou Groza when they were growing up, and the elderly man down the street whose grass they used to mow when they were kids.

They didn’t need a road map to get around town. They knew these roads like the back of their hand.

And the players who didn’t grow up here made you think they did by the way they adopted the community as their own.

As such, the Browns players had a wonderful relationship with the fans. They played for the fans, and they played up to them as well.

When the team began winning, following up an 8-8 season in 1985 by going 12-4, capturing eight of their last nine regular-season games and gaining home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs, it only manifested the situation.

The high point heading into that game against the Broncos was what had happened the previous week. The Browns, down by 10 to the New York Jets with two minutes to go in the fourth quarter in the divisional playoffs at Cleveland, put on one of the greatest comebacks in team history to win, 23-20, in double-overtime.

Ask the modern Browns fan for his most memorable game, and he’ll pick that one. Hands down.

It wasn’t just a football game. It was a statement by a team and a city that was yearning to make one. The Browns, like Cleveland in general at that point, had been knocked down, but they were fighting back. Everybody loves an underdog, and they really love one in Cleveland.

The time between the triumph over the Jets and the game against Denver was a week-long party. People sang songs – "Bernie, Bernie" played to the tune of "Louie, Louie" – toasted each other and the Browns, and generally made merry as they awaited the visit by the Broncos.

The Browns were going to win and, at long last, make it to the Super Bowl. It was a sense that everyone had.

"Is there anyone in Northeast Ohio who doesn’t believe the Browns will win?" Ed Meyer, then the Browns beat writer from the Akron Beacon Journal, wrote in explaining his reason for predicting a Cleveland victory.

But the feeling wasn’t confined just to this region. It was also reverberating nationally.

"This is the Browns’ time," Miami Dolphins head coach Don Shula, a former Browns player, Painesville native and John Carroll University product, said while working as an analyst on NBC’s pre-game show. "The stars are all aligned in the right way. Everything seems to be in the Browns’ favor."

Maybe so, but the game was anything but easy. The Broncos matched the Browns point for point. It wasn’t until Brian Brennan turned Denver safety Dennis Smith into a pretzel as he turned him one way and then another in catching a 48-yard touchdown pass from Kosar with 5:43 left in the fourth quarter, that either team had any real breathing room. That put the Browns up, 20-13.

The fans’ wishes were coming true. The Browns were going to the Super Bowl, and Brennan was going to be the hero. The highlight that would be shown over and over and over again from that game – even years later – would be of Brennan, holding the ball behind him and looking back at a helpless Smith, who had been faked flat onto the ground, as he skirted into the end zone. In the background could be seen Browns fans jumping up and down with unbridled joy.

This was 1964 all over again.

Even the players, who obviously have to guard against being over-confident and, as they say, counting their chickens before they’re hatched, thought at that point that the Browns were going to win. That feeling became much greater – from both the players and the fans – when the Broncos botched the kickoff return and they had to fall on the ball at their own 2 just to keep possession.

"There’s no doubt we thought we had them," Dixon said. "Who would have ever thought they’d drive down the field 98 yards on our defense? We had Pro Bowl cornerbacks (Dixon and Minnifield). We had good linebackers. And the guys up front with the pass rush gave everything they had."

But even with all that going for them, and even though they were in their own stadium with the crowd going wild and rooting them on, the Browns still couldn’t stop the Broncos. Denver went 98 yards in15 plays in 5:44 for the tying touchdown, the scoring coming on third-and-one from the Cleveland 5 when Elway rifled the ball to wide receiver Mark Jackson on a quick slant with 37 seconds left.

"We were really never concerned at any point on that drive, because the thought in the back of our minds all along was that they had to score a touchdown," Dixon said. "They couldn’t settle for a field goal. They had to score a touchdown, and we felt that sooner or later, we’d stop them."
That never happened, though, of course. But it came close to happening.

The key play occurred after nose tackle Dave Puzzuoli sacked Elway for an eight-yard loss, setting up a third-and-18 situation from the Cleveland 48 with 1:47 left. It looked like the Broncos were done.

As Elway was standing in shotgun formation waiting for the snap, running back Steve Sewell went in motion. A miscommunication problem caused center Billy Bryan to snap the ball to Elway at about the same time Sewell was crossing behind Elway. The ball grazed Sewell in the leg and hit the ground, but instead of it beginning to bounce crazily, as one would expect with the well-worn grass surface at the old stadium, the ball came right up to Elway. It was an artificial surface-like hop.

"There were so many things like that, just crazy stuff that happened – stuff that normally doesn’t happen," Dixon said.

Also, on the scoring pass, the ball seemed to go directly between the raised arms of Browns tackle Carl Hairston as he rushed Elway. The quarterback’s pass seemed to be a field-goal attempt that split the uprights of Hairston’s arms.

There was extensive criticism of Browns coach Marty Schottenheimer, the team’s former defensive coordinator, for allegedly going into a prevent scheme on the final drive. The Browns had held Elway and the Broncos to just 13 points for well over 3½ quarters playing their base 3-4 alignment.

But Dixon won’t even comment on such criticism.

"Don’t put the blame for what happened on anyone but us: the players," Dixon said. "If we had executed the way we were supposed to, we would have stopped them. But we didn’t. We didn’t make it happen. So blame the players."

The Browns won the toss to start the overtime and got the ball first, but went three-and-out.

The Broncos took over at their own 25 following Jeff Gossett’s ensuing punt and moved 60 yards in four plays to set up for the game-winning 33-yard field goal of Rich Karlis, a native of Salem in Columbiana County, who had grown up rooting for the Browns.

Even that was not without controversy, however. The ball soared off Karlis’ foot, so much so, in fact, it went high above the height of the uprights. A photo of the kick in Sports Illustrated, looking at it from Karlis’ back as he drove the ball at the closed end of the stadium, shows that the ball was dangerously close to being wide left. To this day, many – mostly from Cleveland – believe the kick was no good.

"I’m one of those people. I don’t think it was good," Dixon said. "I mean, we’re at home, so I think we should get that call."

But they didn’t. So instead of the Browns going to the Super Bowl, it was the Broncos.

"The thing that really hurt was for Denver to play like they did against us and then for them to just lay an egg in the Super Bowl (losing 39-20 to the New York Giants)," Dixon said. "We were a more physical team than Denver, and I think we would have matched up better against the Giants, especially defensively, than they did. There’s no doubt in my mind that if we had beaten Denver, we would have gone on to beat the Giants and been Super Bowl champions."

Then Dixon laughed. It was that kind of "Oh, man" laugh, the one that’s used to shield disappointment.

"It just wasn’t meant to be," he said. "No matter what we did, Denver was destined to win that ballgame. The good Lord upstairs just did not want us to make it that year, I guess."

Then he added, "You know, though, that was our own opportunity to get where this team has never been before – to the Super Bowl. These current Browns are going to have to get to a Super Bowl soon so that people will stop asking me about that game."

For what it’s worth – not much, in the eyes of Browns fans – here’s the painful play-by-play recap of The Drive:
Denver ball (5:32 left in fourth quarter). Cleveland 20, Denver 13.
1-10-Denver 2 – Sammy Winder 5 pass from John Elway (tackled by Hanford Dixon).
2-5-Denver 7 – Winder 5 run (Reggie Camp, Mike Johnson).
Denver takes its first timeout.
3-2-Denver 10 – Winder 2 run for first down (Camp).
1-10-Denver 12 – Winder 3 run (Anthony Griggs).
2-7-Denver 15 – Elway 11 run for first down (Chip Banks).
1-10-Denver 26 – Steve Sewell 22 pass from Elway for first down (Chris Rockins).
1-10-Denver 48 – Steve Watson 12 pass from Elway for first down. (Ray Ellis, Frank Minnifield).
Two-minute warning.
1-10-Cleveland 40 (1:59) – Elway passes incomplete to Vance Johnson (Ellis in coverage).
2-10-Cleveland 40 (1:52) – Elway sacked for 8-yard loss (Dave Puzzoli).
Denver takes its second timeout.
3-18-Cleveland 48 (1:47) – Mark Jackson 20 pass from Elway for first down (Felix Wright).
1-10-Cleveland 28 (1:19) – Elway passes incomplete to Watson (Sam Clancy in coverage).
2-10-Cleveland 28 (1:10) - Sewell 14 pass from Elway for first down (Clancy).
1-10-Cleveland 14 (:57) – Elway passes incomplete to Watson (Clancy in coverage).
2-10-Cleveland 14 (:42) – Elway 9 run (Clay Matthews).
3-1-Cleveland 5 (:39) – Jackson 5 pass from Elway for touchdown.
Rich Karlis kicks extra point. Cleveland 20, Denver 20 (:37).
Drive: 15 plays, 98 yards, 4:55 consumed.

Red Right 88

The cold, hard reality. That might sum what the Browns and their fans faced on a day when the temperature at old Cleveland Stadium – in the heat of the afternoon – was exactly zero, with a wind-chill of minus-37 degrees.

Their Cinderella season was over. The Kardiac Kids once again reached into their bag of miracles and came up empty-handed. No last-second comeback – no miracle finish – this time.

No, the numbers bore into the souls of everyone in Cleveland like a giant drill bit piercing the hardest metal: Oakland Raiders 14, Browns 12, making Jan. 4, 1981 a day that will forever make their blood run cold.

All because of Red Right 88, a pass from Brian Sipe to tight end Ozzie Newsome that was intercepted by Mike Davis, ending the drive, ending the game and ending the Browns’ season.

Abruptly. Immediately. It was as if, just when the song was reaching a crescendo, someone ripped the DVD right out of the player.

Where there once had been so much, there was suddenly nothing. Nothing.

"When I think back to that game, and specifically to that play, the first thing that comes to mind is the silence – the unbelievable utter silence – after it happened," Sam Rutigliano, the coach and orchestra leader of the Kids, said from his winter home in Charleston, S.C. the other day.

"There were over 77,000 (77,665) fans that day shivering in the cold, roaring and roaring and roaring as we drove the down on that drive. Then the ball that Brian threw gets intercepted, and it’s absolutely quiet."

Like the fans and his players, Rutigliano watched in stunned silence as well. But he was just as stunned – and just as quiet – when he sat in his office the next day and watched the tape of the game.

"The play was supposed to go to Dave Logan, and there he was in the end zone all alone. He had beaten his man by three or four yards," Rutigliano said.

But Sipe didn’t see him. What he saw – or what he thought he saw – was Newsome alone in the middle of the end zone, so he threw it there.

Sipe "should have thrown it to the blonde in the third row," as Rutigliano said at the time and a thousand times since when the play is discussed. But should the Browns have been passing at all? Shouldn’t they, on second down from the Oakland 13, have been positioning the ball in the middle of the field to let the venerable Don Cockroft kick the game-winner?

"It was the right call," Rutigliano’s wife of nearly 50 years, Barbara, jokingly yelled as she passed by the telephone.

Rutigliano has since admitted that the Browns should have kicked the field goal, but that was no certainty, either. Usually, Cockroft was money in the bank, but on this day, the brutally cold weather made it seem as if he were kicking a brick, not a football. Also, Cockroft had been hampered for much of the season by a cartilage problem in his left knee and sciatic nerve pain in his left leg. Plus, he had missed two field goals in the game already.

So instead of Cockroft or Sipe or Logan being the hero, it was Mike Davis, a little-known and little-used player in the Oakland secondary. It was Davis’ 15 minutes of fame, or judging by the shelf-life of this game, maybe more like a quarter-century.

"We traded Greg Pruitt to the Raiders after the 1981 season, and I remember him telling me once, several years ago, that Mike Davis had the worst hands of anyone he had ever seen," Rutigliano said. "Greg practiced against him every day, and the guy couldn’t hold on to anything. He caught everything with his thumbs.

"Greg told me that when he saw that, he knew that God had intervened so Davis could catch the ball."

Rutigliano said that with the passing years, much about the game has been forgotten. Included is the fact that even if the Browns had beaten Oakland, they weren’t necessarily headed to the Super Bowl. That was just an AFC divisional playoff game. They would still have to go to San Diego and beat the Chargers in the conference title contest.
But it wasn’t meant to be.

And the fact that it wasn’t still haunts Browns fans. It is as if the game were played yesterday. People still discuss it that frequently.

"I was in Auckland, New Zealand once and a guy brought it up to me," Rutigliano said. "Another time, I was having dinner in a little village outside of London and a Browns fan brought it up.

"It’s kind of fun to talk about it. Like they always say, the next-worst thing to bad publicity is no publicity, so the fact that you’ve tracked me down to talk about it, is a good thing. It means people still care about it, that they still remember.

"This doesn’t surprise me. I’m never surprised about Browns fans. It defines why Cleveland is the flagship of the fleet. It’s the only city that ever lost its team, fought to get one back and then built a world-class stadium for it."

A Kardiac Kids reunion is slated March 12 in Youngstown. Rutigliano at first had to beg out of it since he will be in Tampa helping conduct training camp for NFL Europe players.

"But the people running the reunion have arranged to fly me back to Youngstown that night, and then back to Tampa the next morning, just so I could go," he said. "That’s incredible."
So is the story of the man who really took the play seriously.

"Some guy from the media – and I can’t remember his name – told me in the early 1990s, when I was still coaching at Liberty University, that because of Red Right 88 and the way in which I handled it, it affected him so profoundly that it really changed the direction of his life spiritually," Rutigliano said.

As a spiritual man himself, the former coach can understand it.

"I talk all around Ohio on behalf of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and I talk a lot to churches, and I used that play a lot when I do," Rutigliano said. "There’s such a light side to it, and such a heavy side to it as well."

The heavy side?

"In the late 1990s, they had a reunion dinner for the Kardiac Kids," he said. "Brian attended it and at one point during the evening he looked at me and said, ‘The thing I still hold on to from that season and that game is that you trusted me.’ And that was our personality all year long, we trusted each other. We went out the same way that we went in."

The light side?

"You know, the weather determines how many people attend our funeral," Rutigliano said. "So we’ll all survive Red Right 88."

Three Different Seasons

Yet they all have one thing in common: They serve as the defining moments in modern history for the Browns.

Red Right 88 following the 1980 season set the stage, The Drive in ’86 furthered it and The Fumble in ’87 added an exclamation point to it all.
To what?

Disappointment. Frustration. Disgust. Heartache. Headache. Even anger.

And, most importantly, a stronger-than-ever yearning for the Browns to finally break through the invisible barrier and get that elusive Super Bowl berth. The Browns have been close to earning it, but they’ve never quite gotten there.

Mike Davis spoiled the effort once, John Elway twice.

Together, they left Cleveland wanting and waiting in the 1980s – the supposed decade of greed.

And ever since the Browns have been trying to make amends for those games – those near-misses.

In the mid- to late 1990s, Browns fans fought to get their team, their colors and their history back. It worked, but with it also comes the memories – the after-effects – of those three contests. It’s part of the history and lore as well.

That will continue to be the case until the Browns make it all the way to that last game – and maybe even win it.

The names of the coaches won’t matter. Neither will those of the players. If you’re a member of the Browns – even if you were in diapers during the 1980s – what happened then is a part of who you are, what you’re up against.

With their fervency, Browns fans painfully re-visit all this 12 months out of the year, but especially in January, which marks another anniversary of those games. Red Right 88 is 24 years old this month, The Drive turns 18 and The Fumble observes No. 17.

As such, we’re going to re-visit those games here, in the order in which they were played, and see if perspectives have changed after all these years.

January 11th, 2005

New Browns senior vice president and general manager Phil Savage wasn’t quite right when he said, "A lot of memories of Browns fans are in black and white."

After all, there was color TV in the 1960s.

But the thought behind his comment is accurate and understandable. It has indeed been a long time since the Browns were really the Browns as so many people remember them, when time stood still in Cleveland on Sunday afternoons.

How long? It’s been 1989 since there was a feel-good Browns season – one that was both successful and enjoyable. That was the year when, in Bud Carson’s first year as coach, the
Browns roared to the AFC Central title with a 24-20 comeback win in Houston in the regular-season finale. They then beat the Buffalo Bills 34-30 in the divisional playoffs when Clay Matthews intercepted Jim Kelly’s pass at the Cleveland goal line as time expired, but lost to Denver in the conference title game for the third time in four years, 37-21.

That ended a pretty good decade for the Browns. In the 10 years from 1989, they made it to the playoff seven times, got to three AFC title games and nearly made it to two more in 1980 and ’85.

But that was two decades ago. Fans watched those games in color, but after all these years, the colors are beginning to fade.

No one in the "new" Browns organization knows that better than Savage. He arrived in 1991, when memories of the 1980s were still vivid. And in addition, there were still enough members of the original Browns franchise who had been around long enough to tell him about everything that had happened from 1946 on.

But this is not the 1946, the 1980s or even 1991 anymore. This is 2005, and a lot has happened to the Browns – and their fans – from then until now. In fact, fans may not realize just how long it’s been or how much has transpired until they look back at each year separately, beginning with 1990:

This was titled "The Season from … (you know where), and with good reason, for after making the playoffs for five straight years, the Browns dropped like a rock as the players who carried them to success in the 1980s began to run out of steam – all at once. They won their opener over Pittsburgh despite the fact several key members of the defense had held out in contract disputes until the week of the game. But it was all downhill from there. The Browns were shut out three times by lopsided scores, giving up a combined 111 points in the process, and they were crushed by the Oilers, 58-14. They lost eight in a row and 10 of their last 11 to finish 3-13. Carson was fired halfway through and replaced on an interim basis by offensive coordinator Jim Shofner. Bernie Kosar, constantly under siege while working behind a line that never recovered from the retirements of tackles Cody Risien and Rickey Bolden, suffered through the worst season of his career and was replaced at quarterback for a time by Mike Pagel.

1991 – Browns owner Art Modell passed over former Browns assistant and player Bill Cowher to hire defensive coordinator Bill Belichick of the New York Giants to be head coach. Belichick clashed almost immediately with the media and some of the players clashed immediately, but the fans initially loved the coach because he quickly made the team much more competitive.

Following an opening loss to the Dallas Cowboys and a defensive assistant named Butch Davis, the Browns won two in a row, including a last-second win over Cincinnati at Cleveland. Belichick ran to the Dawg Pound right after the game and thanked those fans for all the noise they made, further endearing himself to them. The Browns were 6-7 and hanging in the playoff hunt by a thread until three straight losses to end the season doomed them.

1992 – The Browns once again faded down the stretch and lost their last three games en route to a 7-9 record. Their leading receiver from a year earlier, Webster Slaughter, was one of the first NFL players to test this new thing called free agency. His absence and that of the No. 2 wideout, Reggie Langhorne, whom Belichick cut, plus the fact Kosar broke his ankle in week 2, really hamstrung the offense. And the bloom started to come off the Belichick rose when, for whatever reason, he lifted Kosar’s replacement, former Ohio Stater Mike Tomczak, in favor of young, untested Todd Philcox when the Browns were beating the Vikings in Minnesota. One of Philcox’ passes was intercepted and returned for a touchdown as Minnesota stunned the Browns with a comeback win.

1993 – If you’re looking for the season when things started going horribly for Modell’s franchise, putting it into a hole that it never really recovered from and ultimately led to what happened in
1995, this is it. With the Browns at 5-3 and in first place in the division at the halfway point, Belichick unceremoniously cut Kosar because of "diminishing skills" at a time when Vinny Testaverde was hurt and unable to play. So he turned to Philcox. Belichick lost the team and fans – especially the fans - and never got them back. The Browns went 2-6 in the second half for another 7-9 finish, and Belichick and Modell, who went along with the decision on Kosar, were becoming co-public enemy No. 1. To make matters even worse, Kosar turns up in Dallas and helps Davis and the Cowboys win the Super Bowl.

1994 – The Browns made the playoffs for the first time since 1989, gaining a wild-card berth by finishing 11-5. One of the best defensive performances in club history, plus an offensive line that kept Testaverde pretty much unscathed, were the keys. The Browns even won a playoff game, as Belichick beat his old boss, coach Bill Parcells of the New England Patriots, in a first-round game, before they fell at Pittsburgh. But the season just wasn’t as enjoyable as it should have been. The fans couldn’t identify with the strong New York flavor of the club, and Belichick’s terse, dry personality sucked all the life out of things. It was, then, one of the strangest seasons in Browns history.

1995 – Picked by Sports Illustrated before the season to finally earn that elusive Super Bowl berth in this, their 50th year of existence, the Browns started as if they were indeed the real deal. They were 3-1, including an 18-point win over a Kansas City team that would finish 13-3, before things fell apart. The defense wasn’t same as the year before. The veterans Belichick had brought in to carry the team in 1994, had nothing left. And the defense wasn’t the same after coordinator Nick Saban left to become the head coach at Michigan State. Still, the Browns were hanging tough at 4-4 following an overtime win in Cincinnati. Then the biggest news in the history of Cleveland sports and one of the biggest in NFL annals – that of the team’s move to Baltimore following the season - was uncovered. The fans’ initial reaction of total dismay turned to unmitigated anger. Sponsors pulled their ads from Cleveland Stadium, Belichick and his family were harassed by over-zealous fans and the Browns lost seven of their last eight to finish 5-11. That one win? A 26-14 decision over Cincinnati in front of almost 56,000 teary-eyed fans in the final football game ever played at the Stadium. But in the end, the team wasn’t headed to the Super Bowl. Instead, it was headed to the East Coast.

1996 – For the first time since 1943, when the Rams suspended operations for a year because of World War II, there was no pro football team in Cleveland. But the fans refused to take it lying down. They burned up fax machines in team offices around the league until the powers to be met and promised Cleveland an expansion team – the Browns, with the colors and history intact - in 1999. That seemed like light years away, though, and for many fans, it was. Their hearts had been broken, their passion stepped on, as they endured the first of what would be three straight football- and Brown-less years.

1997 – This was an extremely difficult year – an in-between year. The emotion of The Move had settled some, and 1999 was still too far off for fans to get overly excited about. The only thing that whetted the fans’ appetite was the beginning of construction of the new stadium.

1998 – The team of Al Lerner and Carmen Policy was selected as the ownership group for the new Browns in September. That was the good news. The bad news? That the lateness of the decision set up an almost impossible timeline to get the expansion team up and running and ready to play a game in 11 months. The club had no players, no coaches and not even any footballs.

1999 – Chris Palmer wasn’t the team’s first choice to be head coach, but he got the job anyway. The Browns gathered players via an expansion draft, free agency and the college draft, getting two picks in rounds two through seven. But even with that, talent was at a premium. It showed, as the Tim Couch-led Browns started 0-7, losing 43-0 to Pittsburgh in their long-anticipated opener, and finished 2-14. The fans wanted wins, sure, but they wanted their team back more, so the horrible record was tolerable. And they liked the fact these new Browns beat the Steelers in Three Rivers Stadium, something the old Browns always struggled to do.

2000 – A series of devastating injuries, including one that shelved Couch for the final nine games, caused the Browns to limp home at 3-13 after an encouraging 2-1 start. They suffered the two most lopsided back-to-back losses in team history, 44-7 to the hated Ravens and 48-0 to Jacksonville, which is the last club the original Browns ever played in 1995. Having just a 5-27 record in his two years, Palmer was fired several weeks after the season and replaced by Davis.

2001 – Feeding off the enthusiasm Davis brought from the college game, the Browns bolted to a 6-4 start before they faded to a 7-9 finish. Marring that encouraging turnaround – and the fact the Browns set a team record with 33 interceptions – was an ugly "Bottlegate" incident in which angry Browns fans hurled hundreds of plastic bottles onto the field to protest a call late in a loss to Jacksonville. It gave the organization, the fans and the city a black eye.

2002 – After a 2-4 start, the Browns, behind the running of William Green, won seven of their last 10 games to finish 9-7 and earn a wild-card berth, making the playoffs for the first time since 1994. In two short years, Davis had completely resurrected the team and the Browns became the feel-good, Cinderella story in the league. But unfortunately, Lerner, whose drive and resources put the Browns back onto the field, wasn’t around to see it, as he passed away from cancer in late October. The Browns went to Pittsburgh, the same franchise they faced 10 years before in the last playoff game, for a wild-card contest. They seemed to have the game won, leading 24-7 in the third quarter and 33-21 with three minutes left, before somehow losing 36-33 despite the fact Kelly Holcomb threw for 429 yards, then the third-highest total in NFL history. It left the team and town numb. It was Red Right 88, The Drive and The Fumble all over again.

2003 – Davis purged a horde of key, well-respected veterans from the roster because of what he said were salary cap reasons, leaving the team a shell of what it had been in that playoff run. Holcomb, on the strength of his performance against the Steelers, unseated Couch after a red-hot quarterback competition in training camp and the preseason. But he and Couch both suffered through injury-riddled seasons, limiting their effectiveness. Ditto for the team overall. The offensive line was especially hard hit by injuries in the disappointing 5-11 finish. Green was suspended halfway through the season for off-the-field problems.

2004 – Buoyed by a two-year contract extension and with a new quarterback in Jeff Garcia, Davis enters the year with optimism. That increases with a 20-3 win over the Ravens in the season opener. But another ton of injuries, many again to the line, and back-to-back heartbreaking losses to Philadelphia and Baltimore, doom a decent start. With the 3-8 Browns having lost five straight, including a wacky 58-48 decision in Cincinnati, a fatigued Davis resigns. The Browns lose their first four under interim coach Terry Robiskie but beat Houston 22-14 in the finale to go 5-11.

Now in steps Savage to try to get the Browns back on course.

"The last thing I would say in terms of why I’m here and what I’m going to do and what we’re going to try and do over the coming weeks, months and years ahead is to reach out to the incredible fan base of the Cleveland Browns," he said upon being hired last Friday. "I’m asking the fans to believe in us and trust us to do the job.

"I can promise this: we will do our ultimate best to put a quality team on that field in that stadium so the fans can be extremely prideful about their team again. In my opinion, there’s a lost generation of Browns fans out there. They haven’t enjoyed the feel-good atmosphere of having a quality, winning product and that’s our objective. We need to get our fans to a point where they are experiencing the happiness that comes from consistently winning NFL football games."

It’s a happiness they’ve not really experienced since 1989.

Owner Art Modell

Before 1966 season threatens to fine reigning league MVP, all-time great, and future Hall of Famer Jim Brown if he is late to training camp because the movie he is in, "The Dirty Dozen", is running over schedule. Brown retaliates by retiring at the age of 30 following his 2nd MVP season and a year removed from the city’s last professional championship in any sport.

Prior to 1995 season Modell takes out another bad bank loan ($5 Million) in order to sign 4 time Pro-Bowler and malcontent Andre Rison. Rison catches only 47 passes for 701 yards and 3 TD’s. Rison is released after the ‘95 season. He signs with the Packers late in the 1996 season and wins a Super Bowl ring that year.

After the 1988 season Modell fires coach Marty Schottenheimer. Schottenheimer had a 44-27 regular season record since taking over mid-way through the 1984 season. Schottenheimer leads the Browns to the play-offs in each of his four full seasons as coach.

In 1991 Modell hires New York Giants’ Defensive Coordinator Bill Belichick. Belichick leads the Browns to one play-off appearance and has an overall record of 36-44 before being fired following the ‘95 season and before Modell’s move to Baltimore. Belichick has the making of a dynasty in New England today and has won three Super Bowls in his first five years there.

After the 1988 season Modell trades RB Ernest Byner to the Washington Redskins for Mike Oliphant. Byner goes on to help the Redskins win the Super Bowl in ‘91. He also goes to the Pro Bowl in 1990 an 1991. Oliphant ran for 97 yards and scored 1 TD in two years with Cleveland.

In 1993 Modell releases fan favorite Bernie Kosar citing Kosar’s "diminishing skills". Another P.R. disaster that is seen as another of Modell’s cost cutting ways. Kosar signs with Dallas for the remainder of the season. He wins a Super Bowl ring serving as Troy Aikman’s back-up.

Following the 1995 Modell moves the team to Baltimore. Despite the fact Cleveland averaged over 80,000 fans in an old, decrepit stadium in which he owned the lease and league wide profit sharing. Modell had driven the Browns to near bankruptcy with poor business decisions.

In the ultimate slap in the face Modell gets his Super Bowl ring in 2000. Adding insult to injury Baltimore shuts out Cleveland 12-0 in Cleveland and then runs up the score in Baltimore and beats a beat up, injury riddled Browns’ squad 44-7. Baltimore coach Brian Billick was offered the Browns’ coaching job in 1999 but decided to take the Baltimore job instead. Baltimore defeats the Giants 34-7 in the Super Bowl.

Heartbreaking Play-off Losses since 1980

January 4th, 1981, Divisional Play-off game vs. Oakland. "Red, Right 88" 1980 NFL MVP Brian Sipe is intercepted in the end-zone in the final seconds of a 14-12 game. Cleveland was driving for a last second FG attempt by Don Cockroft who had missed two previous Extra Points and FG attempts. Mike Davis intercepted the pass intended for Ozzie Newsome. The game is played in sub-zero wind chill temperatures. At the time of the game it was the coldest game in NFL history. Oakland would go on to become the first wild card qualifier to win the Super Bowl.

January 4th, 1986, AFC Divisional Game vs. Miami in the Orange Bowl. Browns blow 21-3 third quarter lead. Miami comes back to win 24-21, scoring the game winning TD with 1:57.

January 11, 1987, AFC Championship Game vs. Denver in Cleveland Memorial Stadium. "The Drive" John Elway drives Denver 98 yards in less than three minutes to tie the game and send it into over-time. Denver wins 23-20 in OT.

January 17, 1988 AFC Championship Game vs. Denver in Mile High Stadium. "The Fumble" Ernest Byner fumbles the ball at the Denver 2 yard line with just under a minute left in the game and Cleveland trailing 38-31. Cleveland had erased an early 24 point Denver lead. Denver would take a safety and win 38-33. Despite 207 all-purpose yards, and 2 TD’s Byner will always be portrayed as the goat. He is never forgiven and later traded for little known Mike Oliphant.

January 5th, 2003 AFC Wild Card Game vs. Pittsburgh in Heinz Stadium. Pittsburgh erases a 17 point 4th quarter deficit to win 36-33. Dennis Northcutt drops a wide open 3rd down pass that would have sealed the victory for the Browns late in the game. Kelly Holcomb’s 429 yard, 3 TD performance is wasted.

Tragic Cleveland Browns Deaths

1962 Browns trade Hall of Fame WR Bobby Mitchell to the Washington Redskins for the rights to overall #1 pick, Heisman Trophy winner RB Ernie Davis from Syracuse. Davis never plays a down for the Browns and dies from leukemia. Led to eventual firing of coach/founder Paul Brown by then owner Art Modell. Ernie Davis' number 45 is retired by the Cleveland Browns.

June 27, 1986 Browns’ Safety and UCLA alum Don Rogers dies from cocaine poisoning.
Former Cleveland Brown and UCLA alum Eric Turner dies from cancer at the age of 31 in May of 2000.

Team Owner Al Lerner dies in October 2002. His death came four years to the day that he was awarded the new Browns’ franchise. He died from a brain tumor at the age of 69. A patch with the letters "AL" are worn on the sleeves of the Browns jersey today.

1999 Draft Tim Couch 1st overall. Colossal bust who missed the 3/4 of 2000 season because of his elbow. Broke leg in 2002. Out of football.



2000 Draft Courtney Brown 1st overall. Colossal bust whose career has been ravaged by injuries ranging from knee, foot to bicep rupture. Injured foot in 2nd game of 2004 season likely done for year. Only has finished one season (rookie year) not on IR. Released after 2004 season, made $26 million and had only 17 sacks in his Browns’ career.


2001 Draft Gerrard Warren with 3rd overall pick. Underachiever who has been limited in 2004 because of pectoral muscle strain. Traded after 2004 season for a 4th Round Draft pick.

2002 Draft William Green with 16th overall pick. Started slow his rookie year. In 2003 was slowed due to shoulder injury. Missed the final 9 games of season due to injuries and drug suspension. Released and currently looking for an NFL roster spot.

2003 Draft Jeff Faine with 21st overall pick. Missed final 9 games of the season due to knee injury. Missed final four games of 2004 season because of injury. Traded following 2005 Season to the New Orleans Saints.

2004 Trade ‘04 #2 pick to move up one spot to draft Kellen Winslow 6th overall. Breaks his leg on final play of the 2nd game of rookie season. Out for the year. Trade back into 2nd Round in order to draft Sean Jones with 59th overall pick. Jones tears his ACL in training camp and is out for the year.

2005 Draft Michigan WR Braylon Edwards with the 3rd pick. Edwards season is trunacted because of a staph infection in this elbow and an ACL injury on Dec 4th.

Baltimore Draft Fortunes Since 1996

1996 Draft 9-time Pro Bowler, and future Hall of Famer Jonathon Ogden 4th overall. Use the #26 pick acquired in a trade with 49ers when they were the Cleveland Browns’ organization to draft 7-time Pro Bowler,’00 Super Bowl MVP, two time Defensive Player of the Year and future Hall of Famer Ray Lewis. 1997 Draft 2-time Pro Bowler, ‘97 Defensive Rookie of the Year Peter Boulware with the 4th overall pick.

1999 Draft Chris McAlister with #10 overall pick. 2003 All Pro and 2-time Pro Bowler.

2000 Draft Jamal Lewis with #5 overall. 2003 AP Offensive Player of the Year. Rushed for 2,066 yards including 500 yards against the Browns. 1st time Pro Bowler in 2003.

2001 Draft Todd Heap with #31 overall pick. Two time Pro-Bowler and 2nd team All Pro in 2003.

2002 Draft Ed Reed with #24 overall pick. 2nd Team All Pro in 2003, made first Pro Bowl. 2004 NFL Defensive Player of the Year. Two time Pro-Bowler.

2003 Draft Terrell Suggs with #10 overall pick. Named Defensive Rookie of the Year with 12 sacks. 2004 Pro-Bowler.