Cleveland Browns News 11/22: Watson Surgery, Blaming Canada, and Generalized Holiday Amazement
Deshaun Watson of the Cleveland Browns has successful surgery, the Pittsburgh Steelers disintegrate, and OBR Publisher Barry McBride attempts and fails to write a customary maudlin holiday editorial. The OBR Daily Newswire has arrived!
It’s probably a yearly ritual for a columnist to use the Thanksgiving holiday to publish an article on what he’s grateful for. It’s a useful trope that saves folks like myself from having to come up with creative ideas all the time because we can use it once a year. The challenge on the Newswire beat is the other 360 days of sitting down to an empty blank white space in the editor. Fortunately, after three or four years of doing this, my preconceived conceptions of “quality” have vanished, and I simply afflict you all with whatever Browns-related thoughts come my mind at six or seven a.m.
But this year, instead of starting with what I’m grateful for, I’ll give you
Yes, I have found a willing replacement over the next four days as I kick back and enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday and re-learn how to sleep in after full days of drinking beer and watching football on TV. A certain Jack Duffin will be taking over the Newswire and filling it out in his unique way. Please give him the respect he deserves for giving me a break from daily bloviation and allowing me to focus on my family over the Thanksgiving holiday.
In a way, it’s appropriate for a British citizen to step up and help me over this particular holiday. While his ancestors stayed put, our forefathers either left, got kicked out of or were forcibly removed from respectable countries and had to rely on native Americans to bail them out when the weather got cold or something. I’m not sure. I was never very studious during my third-grade history classes when we reviewed why Thanksgiving exists. Here’s the Wikipedia page on it, which I abandoned after learning that Canada celebrates it for some reason in October. That seems wrong.
To me, what is relevant about Canada is that the Pittsburgh Steelers fired offensive coordinator Matt Canada after the Browns’ defense made the Steelers’ offense look even more inept than usual last Sunday afternoon. I take this as a good thing because the replacement Steelers offensive coordinator will need at least two years to work with Kenny Pickett and fix his problems, wasting the prime of their defensive stars.
At this point, I’d like to summarize by writing about what I’m thankful for, but that would turn out to be mushy sentiments about family, a Browns team that doesn’t suck, beer, my OBR teammates, bourbon, and a fantastic group of people who read my dreck and yet remain amazingly supportive. It would be all emotion-filled and maudlin, and I’ll leave it to you to visualize the five paragraphs that I would take to write it all down carefully. These are all sentiments I’ve written in this space before, and if you’ve been reading this little morning bloviation regularly, you already know what I’m thankful for.
Jake and Andrew are back as they first start off with the Browns’ news including the update on Deshaun Watson’s successful shoulder surgery and some banter on the Colts letting Shaq Leonard walk. Then they shift to fielding listener-submitted questions for them to answer on any range of Browns topics from scheme, tendency, or performance to more broad team-based analysis through seven weeks of the NFL season. Today you get topics on how the offense expands with DTR, the redundancy in the quick game scheme and how they break the trends, the best/worst case for the Steelers’ next OC hire, and some banter on the perception of Kevin Stefanski among age demographics and why some can’t accept the type of excellence he is achieving.
