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After the Browns went into Dallas and ran roughshod over the Cowboys earlier this season, Jim Rome declared them the new America’s Team.
Apparently, NFL and NBC executives are inclined to agree. We found out at lunchtime on Wednesday that the Browns-Giants game on December 20 has been flexed to Sunday Night Football, the league’s top weekly showcase, displacing the 49ers-Cowboys game originally earmarked for that slot.
In fairness, beyond the Browns being really good this year, other dominos had to fall for this to happen. The 49ers’ postseason hopes took a hit with a lackluster performance on Monday night. The Cowboys… well, did you watch their game at Baltimore on Tuesday? Contrast that with a surging Cleveland team and a Giants squad, from the biggest media market in the country, being tied for first in its division, and what do you know: It turns out the most reliable national TV draw in sports isn’t infallible after all.
The Browns have washed away a lot of ugly marks this year. They are guaranteed their first over-.500 season since 2007. They are six games over .500 for the first time since 1994. With their wins over the aforementioned Cowboys and Eagles, the post-1999 iteration of the franchise has finally beaten every other team in the league. But getting flexed into Sunday Night Football is rare air. Some historical context…
In 2006, the NFL made Sunday Night Football on NBC its marquee game of the week. Al Michaels, the longtime voice of ABC Monday Night Football, John Madden, and ABC’s top production people on MNF changed networks. The concept of “flex scheduling”—the league’s ability to drop an undesirable game from primetime and replace it with a better matchup late in the season—was born. Besides getting out of bad games, the flex was also created to give teams not expected to be good a chance to play their way into primetime. The Browns, of course, have spent these 15 years playing their way into tee times on the golf course during the opening weekend of the playoffs each January.
Cleveland has appeared on Sunday Night Football just twice: Both early-season matchups that one could suggest were strategically placed by the league in cases of “we think this team will be good this year, but we’re going to get them out of the way early just in case the wheels fall off.” Those suspicions in both instances were well-founded. The 2008 Browns, coming off a fun 10-6 year, lost a Week 2 matchup at home against the Steelers and finished the year 4-12. Last year’s Browns, of course, ran a draw play on fourth-and-9 en route to losing in Week 3 vs. the Rams, which pretty much summed up a disastrous 6-10 campaign.
With just two appearances, the Browns are tied for the fewest SNF games in the post-2006 era with the Buffalo Bills (who, coincidentally, will get their third appearance this weekend when they host the Steelers). It’s somewhat wild that to finally get their third SNF game, Cleveland is replacing the Cowboys, who have the most all-time appearances with 49 and until Wednesday’s announcement, had never been flexed out of SNF.
Digging even beyond the era of SNF as the league’s top game, a look at the Browns’ history in games called by Al Michaels really illustrates the deep waters we’ve reached. As mentioned above, before changing networks, Michaels called Monday Night Football on ABC, the previous NFL game of the week before NBC’s version of SNF. The Browns had one Monday night game from 1999 to 2005, a loss at home to the Rams in 2003. Excluding a preseason win in the 1999 Hall of Fame Game, you have to go back to Sept. 13, 1993, for the last Browns win called by Michaels, the play-by-play man for the league’s top game for that entire stretch. And yes, that run of futility even includes a Thursday night appearance at Baltimore that aired on NBC (not a top game of the week, but a loss called by Michaels nonetheless).
We could go further into the Browns’ woes in games called by networks’ top teams (0-5 with CBS’s Jim Nantz and Tony Romo over the past three seasons and no wins with Nantz in the broadcast booth since a Thursday nighter at Cincinnati in 2014), but you get the idea.
The point here is that yes, the 2020 Browns are eminently watchable and it’s not just Northeast Ohio taking notice. So, in a week and a half, settle in and get ready to be serenaded by Carrie Underwood. The Browns are headed to the Big Apple, and they’re going to be on the NFL’s biggest TV stage: Sunday Night Football. And this time, they absolutely deserve it.
