Putting some bite back into the Browns-Steelers rivalry

Every time I hear a snarky Pittsburgh fan say that the Browns aren’t the Steelers’ rival my blood starts to boil. Not because I disagree, but because since I was born, I was raised to hate the Steelers and to believe that there was no better rivalry in the NFL than the one shared by the two blue collar cities sitting just 130 miles apart.

To be a rivalry both sides need to be competitive, but they don’t necessarily need to be equal. There are plenty of great rivalries that have the big brother-little brother dynamic, but that only works if little brother will sometimes rear back and clock big brother in the jaw. Sadly, my recollection of Browns-Steelers rivalry only stretches from the years of Tim Couch to the days of our backup quarterback leading the league in jersey sales. In that time, I can count the amount of Browns’ victories over the Steelers on one hand. My fondest memory of the rivalry: Tim Couch high-stepping into the end zone on Sunday Night Football. That’s not a rivalry—Maverick and Iceman was a rivalry.

Despite the lukewarm nature over the last decade and a half, there have been some moments. William Green and Joey Porter going at each other’s throats pre-game at midfield, resulting in ejections for both players in 2004. James Harrison body slamming a drunken Browns’ fan who ran onto the field in 2005. The Cleveland defense sacking Roethlisberger eight times on Thursday Night Football in 2010, bringing an end to the defending Super Bowl champs’ playoff hopes. That game was also the coldest contest on record between the two teams.

What sticks out for me, is going to extreme lengths to watch the Sunday Night contest in Week 2 of 2008. It was one of my first weekends in college and the campus was in the midst of a weekend long power outage as a large portion of Southwest Ohio was without power thanks to Hurricane Ike. After spending some time with thousands of my classmates chanting outside our school president’s house “No Power, No School!” I decided I needed to get my priorities straight. I needed to find a way to watch my Brownies take on Pittsburgh on Sunday Night.

So with no power anywhere in the surrounding county, I made the decision to travel the unfamiliar roads on the opposite side of the state which I had grown up on, and road trip to the University of Dayton where a good friend of mine assured me they’d have the game. Two of my newest friends, natives of Denver and bored of the faux protest going on uptown, joined me as my ’95 Pathfinder set out into the complete darkness of rural Ohio. We hadn’t the slightest idea of where we were going or what to expect. What kept us going were the scribbled down Mapquest directions on the back of a COM 135 syllabus, the love for my Brownies, and the fascination of my Denver buddies at their new Cleveland sports crazed friend.

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Rivalries are at their best when each side is part of the cream of the crop, battling it out not just for bragging rights against each other, but for supremacy over all others they compete against. The Browns and Steelers have met in the playoffs just once since 1999 and after watching a replay of the game on NFL Network a few weeks ago I’m still trying to figure out how the Browns, up 33-21 with under four minutes to play, found a way to lose that game. Still, those are the kinds of games needed to build a great rivalry. Two sides with hate in their hearts competing for high stakes. Cleveland and Pittsburgh have only met two times outside of the 2003 Wild Card game when both squads possessed a winning record1.

A USA TODAY post revealed Mike Pettine is trying to reinstall that belief in the rivalry amongst his players. In a meeting earlier this week, the first-year Browns’ coach showed his players a slide with only one big, bolded word on it which read “RIVALRY”. In one of his press junkets earlier this month, Pettine intimated that the team has essentially been planning for this Week 1 contest since the spring.

It’s refreshing to see your team buy into the same values you hold as a fan—after all, these team is essentially a amalgamation of strangers dressed in laundry provided to them by happenstance. But Brian Hoyer is a Cleveland kid, so one would hope the meaning of this Week 1 match-up goes beyond simply starting the season off on the right foot. He’s saying the things you’d want to hear, telling Scott Petrak of the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, “We hate them, and they hate us.”

It’ll take much more than a PowerPoint slide or one of fifty-three on the roster being a home town kid to revive things, but it’s a start.

The days of Turkey Jones slamming Bradshaw on his head may be in the past, but walk outside FirstEnergy Stadium before or after any home game and one will surely finds t-shirts reading “F*** Pittsburgh”, “Only Bitches Wave Yellow Towels”, and the image of Calvin urinating on the Steelers’ logo. The hatred is clearly still there from the Cleveland side, but until the Browns start winning consistently they’ll hardly rattle a Pittsburgh fan’s cage.

Mike Polk does a great job summing up a typical Browns’ fans thoughts towards Pittsburgh in his Steelers rant which can be seen below. As much I enjoy the video, I enjoy the comments section even more. An overwhelming majority of comments are angry Pittsburgh fans taking shots at Cleveland. Naturally, this makes me want to stand up tall, puff out my chest and fight back, but knowing they still care enough to hate is a victory in its own right.

On Sunday, the teams will meet with fresh and clean 0-0 records2. The most equally meaningful contest since the Browns’ “Season of Dreams” back in 2007. While a win Sunday for the Browns won’t put them on par with Pittsburgh in terms of recent history, the one thing it will do is put them ahead in Monday morning’s standings.