CLEVELAND, OHIO (TheOBR.com) – Good afternoon, Cleveland Browns fans! It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful and temperate Sunday in Cleveland. I plan on taking my dog and a huge hunk of pork butt outside today and spending the day smoking unhealthy meat. The dog, in case you’re wondering, is merely an observer to this process.
Thanks to the Cleveland Browns for giving me a day when I’m not tied to my computer, furiously updating everything that happens in practice.
THE DAILY BLOVIATION
UPON US IN HASTE: It’s a common refrain among older folks, and you’ll hear it from me as well: Time seems to pass faster as you age. Perhaps it’s because we’re jaundiced and cynical due to our advanced years and don’t look forward to events with the anxious youthful enthusiasm that once made the time seem to pass more slowly. Whatever the reason, the start of the Cleveland Browns season will be upon us very quickly.
The Browns are less than a month away from having to reduce their roster to 53, a torturous set of decisions that coaches and front office personnel must dread. The team has several weak spots, but still has managed to acquire some young, hopeful players who aren’t all going to make it.
This especially seems true at the wide receiver position, where youngsters like Gage Larvadian, Luke Floriea, and Kaden Davis have already stood out. With questions around the position, the team could use all of the bright young talents, but will not have roster space. We all have to remember camp standouts at the receiver position who impressed, but never contributed at an NFL level after that.
Therefore, some of these players, who are quickly becoming fan favorites, will be left behind.
It must be difficult for them as they’ve prepared their entire lives for this type of opportunity, but the brutal job of the coaching staff is to put together the most balanced 53 they can. Some of these talented souls will be “attempted” to be squeezed into the practice squad, the waiver process itself also brings anxiety.
There have been a few times in my past when I aspired to a goal and couldn’t take the final step. My career at one of the last of the big (at the time) “up or out” consulting companies, Accenture, ended with my falling just short of full partnership. I understood the decision and agreed with it – at the time being a full partner required strong sales ability, which just wasn’t part of my nature. I wasn’t extroverted or had the “anything for the sale” mentality required. I was ready to move on. Still, I felt horrible for the person tasked with telling me, knowing how difficult it must have been for them.
While we’ll make our callous predictions about who makes the 53 and grade ourselves on how well we did, we can’t forget the difficulty of the decision-making required in what is a pretty brutal business in the NFL.
FREE SPEECH COMPROMISES: When I first started the move-to-Baltimore protest site that later morphed into the OBR, I was aghast at how my voice would be cut off on internet forums and other heavily moderated outlets when I tried to talk about the moral hazards of team stealing. Heavy-handed moderators would take posts that couldn’t even be considered controversial and nuke them because the point of view was one they (generally Ravens fans) didn’t appreciate.
As a result, I set up my own damn boards, and they quickly became a popular place to debate move-related issues and, later, the expansion Browns.
One thing I had to learn along the way was that my free speech advocacy had to have limits. I originally started, like many technologists, by saying there would be minimal moderation and that no speech would be censored.
That didn’t last long, as people took advantage of my light hand to post the most obnoxious photos or disinformation they could. There was some cyber-stalking involved, etc. I quickly learned that it was my responsibility to create the best environment possible for the largest number of fans, which involved trimming certain types of speech. I still lean towards “freedom” rather than “restriction”, which means that some threads can turn into flamewars or be hijacked by one-note posters who try to steer the discussion towards their agenda.
Moderating forums is still a job where there’s never unanimous agreement that we’re doing it well. We’re too restrictive for some folks, not restrictive enough for others. As someone who tries to keep everyone happy, it’s been difficult for me to find the right groove, but I am helped in this quest by the OBR’s forum mods, who do their best to make sure that our mutual craziness doesn’t overstep in ways that make the experience miserable.
All this came to mind as another conversation-enabler with a “free speech” approach stumbled into trouble as the Substack service, which allows anyone to set up a Substack, got called out after it promoted a Nazi group that had set up on the site.
While I get the noble intent of the founders to allow complete and total free speech, this huge corporation doesn’t understand what I learned on my little forums in 1996. There are, and should be, limits to what people can do in a public digital space. It was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I take some comfort in the fact that supposedly brilliant businesses made the same mistakes I made as a novice board admin in the mid-1990s.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
FROM THE OBR
ARTICLES
Cleveland Browns Special Team Spending Past Future – Jack
Myles Garrett and Micah Parsons Yes the Cleveland Browns Should Pursue that Pairing – Pete
OBR Daily News Ticker 8/2 – Barry
Cleveland Browns News and Rumors 8/2: A Leap to the Implausible – Barry
FORUM POSTS
The oline progress thus far? (VIP)
Is RB Moss from the Bengals an option? (VIP)
draft picks to get Parsons (VIP)
Bottom 5 – WR, RB, QB Rooms (VIP)
LIVE TRAINING CAMP COVERAGE: August 2, 2025 (VIP)
The Official Browns 2025 Quarterback Thread
OT: Jimmy Page Settles Lawsuit
LiveWire Thread for 82 – Twitter, Video, Articles
Fred’s Two-Minute Check-In: Browns Camp Day 9
Mary Kay Cabot’s Bill Nunn Award Acceptance Speech
THE LIFT
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond…
Ghana has a rare treasure, a crater made when a meteor hit Earth: why it needs to be protected – (space.com)
Some days, there are tons of Lift-appropriate articles, and some days there aren’t. Saturday was one of the latter, as I couldn’t find my sweet spot, which generally involves posts about particularly noble dogs. But this one reminds us that, as special as our planet is, it’s still part of a vast and sometimes perilous universe, and is occasionally struck by space debris. As a species, our technology is slowly reaching the point where we can defend our planet from such things, which, on a cosmic scale of what critters can do, is quite remarkable.
WRAPPING UP
When not counting his many life mistakes, 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.
CONTACT Barry to sponsor the OBR. We have plans for nearly any budget!
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