A long suffering Ohio football fan has paid homage to the many “quarterback casualties” endured by the Cleveland Browns by erecting a “quarterback graveyard” featuring faux gravestones of the nearly two dozen quarterbacks that have come and gone since 1999 at FirstEnergy Stadium.
Diehard fan Tony Timoteo erected his rueful display in the yard of his Cleveland home to highlight the many, many QBs that have flamed out in Cleveland.
“There’s not many that have lasted a long time,” Timoteo told Cleveland 19 News.
The homeowner said that it was his wife who originated the idea of a quarterback graveyard and he jumped into the plan with gusto.
Starting with quarterback Jeff Couch who played in 1999, the makeshift graveyard features nearly two dozen past Browns QBs.
As the Browns continue to flail on the filed, it is a certainty that this graveyard will continue to expand.
“We have had offers from both neighbors to subcontract their yards out if we run out of space,” Timoteo laugh. “God , I hope not in the near future!”
Fans fear it may be a forlorn hope. The Browns haven’t won an NFL championship since 1964 and haven’t really had a standout quarterback since Bernie Kosar who left the team in 1993 (though Derek Anderson made Pro Bowl in 2007). Another standout was Otto Graham, one of best QBs in NFL history. But Graham’s NFL career ended in 1955 before he went on to coach several NCAA and NFL teams. Maybe Graham is the ghost that haunts Browns fans.
A Halloween “quarterback graveyard,” though, is the least of insults fans have visited upon the struggling team. Last year a fan traveled all the way to Pikesville, Maryland to urinate on the grave of former Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell.
Modell has been a boogeyman for Browns fans at least since 1996 when he made fans furious with his plans to move the team to Baltimore, Maryland, all despite his repeated promises that he would never move the team and his criticism of other teams that had moved in the past.
The fan, who posted his video to Youtube, acknowledged that a lot of time has passed since Modell’s apostasy. But he didn’t care. “Anybody says, ‘It’s been about fifteen years. Art’s dead. Let it go.’ You know what? F— you. You let it go,” he says on the video.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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