Ed Puskas: Let the Browns talk a little

How do you know things have changed for the Cleveland Browns?

They’re the NFL’s hot topic with the draft in the rear-view mirror and training camp still two months away.

How hot? People can’t stop talking about how the Browns — and their fans — would be better off staying in their lane.

You know — the loser’s lane.

That’s where the Browns have spent most of the last two decades. They were the NFL’s version of a sure thing most weeks since their 1999 resurrection, re-booting and re-inventing themselves — often with worse results — every couple of years.

The Browns finally struck bottom during back-to-back 1-15 and 0-16 seasons under then-head coach Hue Jackson in 2016 and 17. But they were a national punchline even before that. The incompetent Jackson just verified what everyone already knew, though he had the help of equally incompetent front-office people and an owner who couldn’t and wouldn’t get out of his own way.

Each new coach and general manager spoke of culture change, but that was Cleveland’s version of the Holy Grail. Rumored, coveted and desired in the worst way, but never to be found.

Until John Dorsey came along.

The general manager’s approach and decisions have clicked thus far. Out with the old and bad and in with the new and talented. It’s amazing what a couple of good drafts and several positive trades have done for the worst franchise in the NFL.

No one is laughing at the Browns now. On paper, this team is among the NFL’s most talented, especially on offense.

Instead, the Browns and their fans have become talk-show fodder precisely because of the culture change in Berea.

The Browns and their fans are no longer the lovable sad sacks of pro football. The team and its fans now expect to win after a second-half surge whet the appetite for winning in Cleveland.

Now that the sleeping giant has stirred from a long slumber, the Browns are annoying people, especially those outside Northeast Ohio.

“Play some games first and maybe make the playoffs,” everyone told Beckham when he told GQ he wanted the Browns to become the new New England Patriots.

Overlooked was the fact Beckham did not say the Browns were the Patriots.

He said he wanted them to win like them.

For two decades, the Browns seemed to lose games before they were ever played. It was almost as if they knew their place in the NFL and resigned themselves to it every year before running a play that mattered.

That was the culture that cried out for change. The Browns haven’t won a game yet in 2019, but they expect to win when that opportunity comes.

There is an air of attitude and confidence emanating from Berea.

That’s new for the Browns and it is clearly new to those who still view this team as if this is 1999 or 2009.

It’s a welcome change the Browns and their fans should embrace and a change for which no apologies are necessary.

Write Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas at epuslas@vindy.com and follow him on Twtter, @EdPuskas_Vindy.