“Would you rather the Browns go winless this season OR once per week, for 16 out of 17 weeks, you have a very public, dramatic and shameful wipeout. Picture something like when Charlie Brown tries to kick the football or when a generic cartoon character steps on a banana peel. You get to pick the one week when you don’t wipeout (your “bye” week). It has to be in a public place, so if you decide to be a total hermit and never leave your room for 16 weeks to avoid this, you’ll still have to take the falls when you start reintegrating into society. You don’t get to pick when you fall.”
Can I get clarification on the falls? By "take falls" do you mean I choose the time and place and enact a public shame fall? Or is it more that I ensure a win at some point in the Browns season with this Faustian fall bargain and the devil's due is that once a week, when I'm in public and ill-prepared, I wipe out? And am I ensured that I won't seriously hurt myself?
“It’s a Faustian fall bargain where you’re ill-prepared. It’s not a staged fall. You won’t have like, a Million Dollar Baby fall, but you might go down and bang your knee up pretty bad, causing you to feel it for a while. Or maybe you only hurt your pride. Depends on the fall!”
I’d take the falls. Sixteen isn’t bad, and I’m pretty well-balanced. Whenever in the past, I’ve started to fall, I’ve been able to catch myself. Now I assume my bargain means I can’t actually do that - upper body must hit pavement or whatever surface is below me - but I think it does indicate that I’ll probably be able to mitigate annoyingly serious damage using my instincts. The shame I don’t mind as much. Who am I trying to impress out there in the world? And everyone enjoys a good fall story. I’d accrue a bunch of them.
The Browns going winless is an upsetting concept for a few reasons. One is just the city’s shame of propping up a franchise that can’t scrape together a single win in a sport where people profess that anything can happen on “any given Sunday.” They’ll have to rewrite that saying to: “Anything can happen on any given Sunday, except The Browns winning.” Another problem we’ve already seen come to pass and the winless season isn’t yet secured. Haslam fired GM Sashi Brown even though the problem with the team isn’t the talent they put out on the field. They’re losing fluke games in high-variance ways. Total wins isn’t the best metric when trying to evaluate future success, but someone like Haslam can’t actually listen to reason on that front. I know because I argue with a similar personality in my father all the time. What we want is to succeed in the future, and we’re in a constant state of rebuilding because we never give any group of people enough time to actually rebuild. Yet people see 0-16 and go, “Fire everything!” Unless this firing and the inevitable subsequent ones lead to BETTER hires, we’ll see The Browns regress. Sounds weird if you’re 0-16, but I’ve seen much worse Browns teams than this one. I’d rather replay this season then suffer through teams Ray Farmer fielded or endure Eric Mangini’s coaching ineptitude again.
Most importantly though is just the simple fact that The Browns losses create more heartache for the people in my city than most realize. This is a crazily loyal fanbase choking on the polluted byproducts of a factory of misery. If I could do something selfless to diminish even a tiny fraction of that, I would.