Cleveland Browns News and Rumors 10/1/26: Optimism in the Face of Yinzers
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CLEVELAND, Ohio (TheOBR.com) Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
It’s game day. On a Thursday. Against Pittsburgh. Act accordingly.
If you’re coming down, a few of us will be at Noble Beast Brewery on Lakeside starting around noon. One of our members has a spare VIP tailgate ticket and wants to give it away free, which is the most Browns-fan thing I’ve read since we had a user donate four club seats last week.
I’ve gotten a number of emails and messages from folks who would like to attend the event but simply can’t due to the precise logistics of their arrival time in Cleveland. There will be 8-10 of us at various points unless we get some unexpected drop-ins. If you like seeing webdorks in the wild, it’s a good anthropological exercise, a la studying a wild baboon, although I rarely attempt to establish dominance over my peers and am limited in my ability to repurpose sticks as tools.
One of the correspondents couldn’t make it to the event but urged me to, um, well, perform a necessary bodily function (particularly after beer consumption) directly onto any Steeler fans who might be unfortunate enough to be in my vicinity. I politely declined. While Steeler fans are properly loathed, I’m a non-confrontational person. Plus, I don’t want to risk a night in jail for the mere benefit of making a Steelers fan somewhat less odiferous.
And so you sound smart at the bar, here are the predicted inactives, written explicitly: “So when you are drinking with your buddies before the game, you know who is likely not playing and Why.”
HERE’S THE LIFT IN AN UNUSUAL PLACE: Big Think ran an excerpt this week from Michelle Gielan’s new book on what she calls “resilient optimism”, and her thesis caught me off guard a little, but it makes sense. Optimism takes practice, she says. Daily practice, with routines, is the way you’d train for anything else you want to be good at.
Her example is a COO named Mark who got a one-sentence email after midnight: “Show progress in the next 45 days or we’re pulling funding.” Gielan didn’t give him a pep talk. She gave him homework. No work email after 8 p.m. A 15-minute huddle every morning with one small win from yesterday and one priority for today. And every night, write down three small, good things that happened.
I read that and thought, well, there it is. That’s the Browns fan operating manual, and somebody finally got Harvard to publish it.
It’s something I should follow, frankly, because my mind wanders to awful places sometimes during football season, and expecially after we lose to the Steelers or Ratbirds. But that won’t happen. Not tonight.
Nobody gets through 27 seasons of this on raw positivity. You need routines. You need the Thursday ritual, the jersey that has lost more often than it has won, the people at the tailgate, and the guy in the Watercooler who has been predicting doom since the end days of the Clinton administration and is right just often enough to keep doing it. You need somebody to write a newswire every morning so you have something to read while the coffee kicks in. Showing up is the practice. I’ve been doing my reps.
So in honor of Mark, here are my small, good things from Wednesday:
Tyson Campbell and Grant Delpit have no injury designation and will play. Deshaun Watson leads the NFL in fourth-quarter passer rating. The Steelers traded a starting cornerback a day before kickoff. And somebody on our forum is giving away a free VIP tailgate ticket, no strings attached.
That’s four. Gielan said three. We’re Browns fans. We overstock in case one goes bad.
One did.
WYP, WYP: Elgton Jenkins, who is the No. 1 pass-blocking center in the league according to Pro Football Focus, is officially out with a concussion. Luke Wypler starts, with rookie Parker Brailsford behind him. Todd Monken offers the usual pre-game positivity: “He played at the end of the year last year, has done a great job of working himself back after the injury he had last year and missing really the offseason. And if Elgton can’t go, then I’ll look forward to seeing Wyp play.”
Per Cabot’s takeaways, that’s two rookies (Spencer Fano at left tackle, Austin Barber at right guard) plus a backup center against T.J. Watt and Cam Heyward, who have 15 Pro Bowls between them. Chris Easterling put it neatly at the Beacon Journal: the faces on the Browns line have changed since the last time these teams met, and the problem on the other side of the ball has not changed at all. Teven Jenkins is out for the fourth straight game, and Tylan Wallace, who left Sunday on crutches, is out too (Petrak). Monken says he’s looking forward to seeing Wyp play. I’ll be watching through my fingers.
THE BACK END IS WHOLE AGAIN: Campbell (knee) and Delpit (shoulder) are good to go, which means the Browns get their entire starting secondary back for the first time in a bit. Good timing. Aaron Rodgers went 19-of-34 for 292 yards and three touchdowns against the Bengals, throwing to nine different receivers, with completions of 47, 38, 30 and 23 yards. Mekhi Blackmon held up fine in Campbell’s spot Sunday, and Denzel Ward shadowed Tetairoa McMillan into two catches. Put Ward on whoever Rodgers likes best and make the old man go find his second read and Mike Rutenberg’s front six or seven create havoc.
JOEY PORTER JR., COWBOY: Wednesday night, a few hours after ruling him out with a back injury, the Steelers traded Porter to Dallas for a 2027 sixth and a 2028 second, per a whole slew of “insiders”, all posting within minutes of each other. The fight was over guaranteed money, and talks died because the Steelers don’t negotiate during the regular season, which ESPN calls “a longstanding organizational principle.” He started 41 games for them. Pittsburgh now rotates Asante Samuel Jr., Jamel Dean and rookie third-rounder Daylen Everette outside, Jalen Ramsey is questionable with a broken wrist (“I’m going to give everything to try to (play)... It’s a real injury, a broken wrist”), and slot corner Brandin Echols is questionable with a concussion.
The Steelers like to think of themselves as the grown-ups of the AFC North. The grown-ups just moved a starting corner on the eve of a division game over a principle. I respect a principle. I respect it a lot more when it’s somebody else’s secondary.
This is also the third Cowboys-Steelers trade in two years, after George Pickens and Broderick Jones, so those two clubs apparently share a group text. Jerry Jones, earlier in the week: “We’re right on top of it. We’re very aware of the moving parts out here.” Jerry has never once in his life been unaware of a moving part.
LEG DAY: The clip has made the rounds. Against Cincinnati, Steelers left guard Mason McCormick came in on a double-team, grabbed Dexter Lawrence’s right leg and lifted it off the ground, and the interior of that line kept doing it all game without a flag, per Ashley Bastock. Lawrence still got two sacks. Maliek Collins has seen it all over his Instagram. “I think it definitely should be a hold,” he said. “I think it puts people at risk for injury doing that.” Then: “I think that’s what the refs are there for, to protect. But I have a plan for it.” One of our VIPs asked Pete the same question in Ask the Insiders, and called it “incredibly dangerous.” Grab a guy’s leg in a bar on West 6th and you meet the bouncer. In Pittsburgh you get a game plan. Mason Graham leads all NFL defensive tackles with four sacks. If somebody hoists his leg tonight, I want a camera on Collins.
CHOSEN ONES: Watson’s fourth-quarter passer rating is 148.4, a hair ahead of Patrick Mahomes, on 20-of-25 for 253 yards, three touchdowns and no picks, per Cabot. “That’s when the special players make special plays,” he said, “and I want to be one of those chosen ones. That’s just always been in my history man.” Gielan would call that a reliable daily win. I’d call it the last 15 minutes of the game. The other 45 still need work, and our Browns Rewind has the uncomfortable math: take away Watson’s scrambles and the designed run game ranked 30th in success rate on Sunday. Watson is 0-3 lifetime against Pittsburgh. Try being chosen in the first quarter, too. Just to see how it feels.
FOUR QUARTERBACKS AND A SALE SIGN: In ESPN’s Week 4 buzz, Jeremy Fowler lists the Eagles, Browns and Steelers as teams carrying four quarterbacks that “probably would welcome a deal at the right price.” That’s the whole note. No names, no calls, no offers. By lunchtime it had become a radio segment about Shedeur and Dillon Gabriel. Over in Ask the Insiders, a subscriber wants to know what we do with the logjam: “Kick the can a couple weeks and see if another starter goes down? Or DFA baseball style.” Fowler himself notes six established starters went down in the first three weeks. Kick the can. Quarterback is the one position where the price only goes up as the season goes on, and Andrew Berry knows that better than the radio does.
Write down your three good things tonight. I’d like one of them to be the score.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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FROM THE FORUMS
THE LIFT
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond…
I wrote about optimism above, using the article I pulled out for “The Lift”. I’m optimistic thatI can publish this faster if I don’t repeat myself here.
WRAPPING UP
When not writing down three good things and crossing out one of them, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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