As we prepare for the Super Bowl, we’re all Cleveland Browns now.

By Gerald Neily

The following sign was held up by one of the many obnoxious Pittsburgh Steelers fans during their victorious AFC championship game against our Ravens: “As far as we’re concerned, The Ravens are still the Browns and they still stink.”

This is of course in reference to the fact that many years ago, the Steelers’ arch rival Cleveland Browns packed up and moved to Baltimore and were replaced in Cleveland by a new set of Browns. This has become par in the NFL. The week before the Steelers beat the Ravens, the Ravens beat the Titans who had escaped from Houston, and in the upcoming Super Bowl, the Steelers play the Arizona Cardinals who had escaped from St. Louis, each to be replaced by another team.

The snooty Steelers fan was suggesting that they are one of the dwindling number of “purebred” NFL teams without a chequered lineage, and thus occupy the center of the wheel of shifting franchises.

The NFL playoffs now resemble a “last man standing” demolition derby much more than a pure game of football skills. The Ravens did the Steelers a great favor by preventing them from having to play the Tennessee Titans, who are quarterbacked by Kerry Collins, the kind of wily old veteran who would have had a much better chance of whipping the Steelers than Ravens’ rookie Joe Flacco. Collins was a castoff from the New York Giants, who have also fallen in the fray. The Indianapolis Colts, who pathetically still wear their Baltimore uniforms, fell in a similar manner.

But now the Steelers face another old wily veteran quarterback in Kurt Warner, castoff from the St. Louis Rams, who as a team were stolen from Los Angeles, a city that has refused to play in the NFL’s extortionate ponzi scheme. The Arizona Cardinals were supposed to have been the team stolen by Baltimore, rather than the Browns. The Cardinals were a mediocre 9-7 during the regular season, but they’re still standing thanks more to their survival skills than football skills.

In sum, football is now a contest of the purebred Steelers, to the manner born, versus the rest of us scruffy half-breeds trying to survive the NFL demolition derby. We’re all Cleveland Browns now. But in Pittsburgh, they can sing the song of one-hit wonder Stealers Wheel, “Browns to the left of me, Browns to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”