CLEVELAND, Ohio (TheOBR.com) Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
THE DAILY BLOVIATION
So, that was the longest thirty minutes of my life.
I have often commented here on the integral role that coffee plays in the creation of this column, written as it is in the early morning hours. But I’ve never really understood how crucial it was until this morning.
My mundane morning routine, you see, has now been permanently undermined. I still get up and go through my wake-up routine, and then sit down to resist cheating at Wordle, which I solve as my first positive act every day. Fred Greetham, 80s (from the forums), and I have an ongoing daily competition in our Slack channel to see who solves it fastest (generally Fred). Unwilling to accept that Fred is simply better at it than I am, I am now working on a conspiracy theory involving him and the New York Times to explain away my Wordle failures.
In any event, today I started a new medication that requires me to abstain from anything other than a meager four ounces of water for the first half hour after taking it. This is interminable.
So, I spent a half hour dozily looking at my Browns news feeds and looking at the timer on my watch for the half hour to end, not realizing that non-coffee time is paced differently than coffee-enabled time. As the timer slowed to a crawl, I suddenly realized that Einstein’s theories of spacetime were wrong because he didn’t allow for the time spent waiting for the opportunity to drink coffee and wake the hell up.
This is a big deal to physicists, I’m sure, but I’m not one of them, so I don’t care. After all, I have bloviations to bloviate, and no time to rewrite our modern understanding of the fourth dimension.
INJURIES ARE ALREADY MAKING NEWS: Maliek Collins opens camp on the PUP list, still working back from the quad injury that ended his season in Week 13 last year — a real loss to the Browns defense, since he had 25 tackles and 6.5 sacks before it happened. Collins had bounced around the league for a few years, but really found himself in Cleveland.
PUP doesn’t mean out for the year; it means “not yet”, which, as I’ve noted, means a timeframe totally dependent on the player’s ability to heal and how much coffee he ingests.
Go the other direction, and there’s Quinshon Judkins, seven months removed from surgery on a fractured fibula and dislocated ankle, and he’s full-go for camp. This is no surprise to anyone who watched the training video I linked the other day.
No snap count, no red non-contact jersey, nothing. That’s the good version of an injury story — the one where a guy who started every game as a rookie until his leg gave out gets to walk back onto the field like nothing happened. The Browns are penciling him back in as the starting back, and after watching him run through people as a rookie, I’m fine with that plan.
THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY, SORT OF: Smaller item, of note to few other than a webdork looking for something to talk about on a Friday morning: former Texas lineman Cole Hutson attended rookie minicamp with the Browns — and with the Cowboys — and didn’t get signed by either. Now he’s got a Texas judge granting him a temporary restraining order so he can go back and play college football again, on the theory that since nobody ever signed him or paid him, he never actually stopped being a college athlete under the NCAA’s new age-based eligibility rules.
There’s a hearing set for August 3rd. Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian sounds thrilled about the possibility: “If we’re fortunate enough to have him back, it’d be great.” We had the guy in the building for a rookie minicamp and let him walk. Somewhere, there’s a version of this story where we regret that in three years, and a version where nobody remembers his name. No way to know which yet.
ESPN IS THE MIRROR: In a story about the ESPN layoffs, The Athletic decided to opine a bit about how ESPN’s coverage has changed to focus more on loud self-promoting personalities like Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith, and less on journalists doing journalist-type things.
It just struck me that this is a reflection of our society at large, where social media has turned part of a generation of sports fans into Twitter trolls, “influencers” and “content creators” who seemingly spend all their time on social media poking at raw emotions. Everyone has a digital megaphone now, and they’re using it. It’s just that ESPN has recruited the loudest ones to work for them.
Oh, ESPN, please stop being a reflection of our look-at-me society. Let’s return to the sardonic humor of guys like Dan Patrick, Craig Kilborn, and Kenny Mayne, who knew how to deliver the news with a knowing smirk that recognized the absurdity of talking about sports as crucial, life-altering news. Now it’s all about trying to get reaction and engagement. I preferred Sportscenter when it was halfway to a comedy show. I haven’t watched it in years.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!Newswire Bloviation Archive
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THE LIFT
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond..
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A Texas A&M researcher tracking wild avocados through the rainforests of Nicaragua, Honduras, and southern Mexico found 47 native varieties genetically distinct from the Hass avocado that makes up basically the entire commercial supply.
That matters more than it sounds like: 90% of avocados sold anywhere trace back to one cloned variety, which means one disease or one bad climate swing could hit the whole supply at once — ask a banana farmer how that story usually ends. These wild discoveries haven’t caught the root rot that plagues commercial avocados and are already built for hotter, wetter conditions.
Sometimes the backup plan was growing in a rainforest the whole time.
WRAPPING UP
When not unreasonably invested in the legal status of a lineman the Browns didn’t even sign, 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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