Here We Go Flacco! Here We Go! Wait! What?
On September 21, 2008, 23-year-old Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joseph Flacco made his second NFL start and first against the Cleveland Browns. He played like a rookie, completing 13 of 19 passes for 129 yards with two interceptions and a sack taken. It didn’t matter though, as the Ravens defense smothered a fading Derek Anderson en route to a 28-10 Baltimore triumph. Six weeks later he made his first trip to Cleveland Browns Stadium and had a much better time: 17 of 29 completions for 248 yards and two touchdowns. Thus began the illustrious career of Joe Flacco against the Browns. How incredible it is to now consider he is the club’s best bet to win on Sunday.Since returning in 1999, the Browns have racked up losses, injuries, embarrassment, and most of all villains. The largest villain of all is quite literally the tallest – a certain Pittsburgh quarterback who played his collegiate ball in southwest Ohio. But his star has faded, and he is now presumably at home trying to not think about the 2020 AFC Wild Card game. Perhaps the second biggest villain in the past quarter century is the Browns’ new QB1 – Joe Flacco. Consider Flacco’s career numbers against the Browns:
Some key figures:
- An 18-3 record against Cleveland
- 433 completions in 706 attempts (61.33 comp. %)
- 4,945 yards in the air
- 31 touchdowns against 13 interceptions
- 89.3 QB Rate
That is a really solid run of play, even if it came against his current employer.To put it in comic book terms, Joe Flacco is trying to basically fulfill Loki’s character arc in The Avengers film franchise. Don’t let Tom Hiddleston’s charming smile fool you, he was the absolute big bad in the original “Avengers” film in 2012. That was Flacco in Baltimore. Flinging aliens around New York City like they were touchdowns on the lakefront. He had to go through a lot of sequels to redeem himself and become more endearing along the way. In Flacco’s case, those are the Broncos and Jets years when he was far away, and you started to see him a little differently, or something. Now he has become an ally of the Asgardians (Clevelanders I guess?) that he once tormented and mocked. But then at the beginning of “Infinity War” Loki gets killed by Thanos… so maybe that’s a metaphor for Aaron Donald? Ok fine the metaphor got away from me, but the point remains – this is weird.Let’s instead look for some good mojo. Flacco will wear number fifteen for the first time in his pro career. The most recent Browns player to wear number 15 was Adrian Colbert. Apparently, in 2021 he played in 47 snaps over two games mostly as a special teamer. I learned his name while writing this article. So… let’s keep looking. Quarterback Mike Phipps is a much better comparison. Phipps played seven years in Cleveland racking up a 24-25-2 record. The former Boilermaker took Cleveland to the playoffs in 1971 and 1972. He fell apart at that point as the Browns lost both of those games while he completed only 41.4% of his passes and threw five total picks. Still! Playoffs! Phipps never led the league in anything good or made a Pro Bowl, but he did just enough to get the Browns to the postseason twice. That’s all Flacco needs to do.In his career so far, Joe Flacco has engineered 19 fourth-quarter comebacks. Seven of them came against the Browns, a remarkable 37%. “Well of course,” I hear you say. “The Browns are a division opponent so he would have played them twice a year for over a decade.” That’s fine until you learn that between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, he had five fourth-quarter comebacks combined. He made his bones feasting on the souls of miserable Cleveland Browns teams…and Browns fans everywhere will be cheering for him on Sunday. This is by far the strangest timeline.Still, there would be some poetry to Joe Flacco winning a few games down the stretch and delivering Cleveland to the postseason. It would be an amazing story if this one-time nemesis turned around and secured his place in Brown's history. Of course, at 38 years old we don’t yet know how much Flacco has in the tank or how he’ll hold up to a few hits and knocks. The team has already lost a pair of quarterbacks this year so clearly they need to be ready in case anything happens to Flacco. Does anyone have Colt McCoy’s number handy? Because that would be one hell of a story.