PITTSBURGH - If the going gets tough in, say, the third quarter Sunday night, with the Steelers' defense trying to bow up for a goal-line stand, Cam Heyward isn't going to dig his right hand into the Heinz Field dirt, sweat dripping down his face, and start thinking about his team's historic dominance against the guys from Cleveland.
Sure, the Steelers are 35-7-1 against the Browns since they returned to the NFL in 1999, 20-1 against them at Heinz Field - with the lone loss coming in 2003 - and 24-2-1 against them with Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback. They have six Super Bowl trophies to Cleveland's zero. And even the last time the Browns made the playoffs, 18 years ago, that run was ended in the first round. By the Steelers. In Pittsburgh.
"I don't really rely on that," said Heyward, the team's defensive captain. "I think I rely on our work we put in. It might not start out pretty - a lot of games don't - but for us, we've just got to rely on what we've done."
It's rarely pretty for the Browns against the Steelers, who have reliably beaten them year in and year out, especially when it matters most. But if the Steelers aren't thinking about that going into Sunday night's meeting - just the third postseason matchup of Pittsburgh versus Cleveland - the Browns aren't either.
"We have a lot of guys here, myself included, that can't really speak to some of those [historic] stats," said first-year Browns coach Kevin Stefanski, who will miss the game after testing positive for COVID-19. "I know it's boring, but we're going to focus on going 1-0 this week."
About that last time
Following the original team's relocation to Baltimore, the only time this iteration of the Browns franchise reached the playoffs, they ran into their longtime nemesis to the east. The Browns sneaked in as the sixth seed with a 9-7 record, ready to face the AFC North champions who finished 10-5-1.
They didn't know it'd be their last time in the postseason for nearly two decades, but they started out like it. The Browns led, 17-7, at the half, eventually 24-7 and took a 24-14 lead into the third quarter, only for the Steelers to come storming back from down 13 in the final 13 minutes to win, 36-33.
That slammed the door on the Browns and began a playoff drought that now ends with a similar situation, a first-round game against the Steelers in Pittsburgh, the second wild card taking on the No. 3 seed that won the division.
Those are the parallels to present day, but there are other connections. One member of that Browns team was the father of Steelers linebacker Devin Bush, who won't play this week because of a season-ending knee injury in Week 6 (against the Browns). Devin Bush Sr., was a veteran safety who retired after the 2002 season, but he wasn't active in what would be the last game of his career.
But Alvin McKinley dressed for those Browns and got one of their three sacks in what would be his only postseason appearance. McKinley was hardly a big name in the NFL, or even in Cleveland, but he's the uncle of Steelers rookie Kevin Dotson, who might start at left guard in his first playoff game.
And the most notable tie is that Keith Butler, now in his sixth season as the Steelers' defensive coordinator, was then the Browns' linebackers coach. Defensive coordinator Foge Fazio was fired after that loss, and Butler left for Pittsburgh the next season, where he has remained ever since.
"It didn't happen for us that day," Butler recalled this week. "It was a big deal. The franchise had just [re]started four years before."
Even 21 playoff games later, all with the Steelers, that one still sticks with Butler. It still bothers him that the game resulted in the removal of Fazio, who never held another NFL coaching job.
An Alabama native who played his college ball at Memphis and then spent his whole pro career in Seattle, Butler witnessed for the first time Pittsburgh playing Lucy to Cleveland's Charlie Brown.
"We go into the game thinking we have a chance to beat them, even though we didn't beat them during the season. It was going to be close," Butler remembered. "We were on top of them, and we couldn't maintain being on top of them. They ended up winning the game. What impressed me about that, the Rooneys came in - Dan Rooney, Mr. Rooney, came in and congratulated the Browns on what a good game it was, how we played. I thought it was a class act by those guys."
Cleveland head coach Butch Davis didn't lose his job after that game, but the next six - yes, six - Browns head coaches did after losing to the Steelers. Which brings us to
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That playoff loss led to four consecutive losing seasons for the Browns, so going into 2007, they weren't expected to find their footing. Then, something odd happened. Derek Anderson randomly became a Pro Bowl quarterback, an unheralded defense turned the corner, and the Browns went 10-6.
They got swept by the Steelers (also 10-6), naturally, and thus lost the tiebreaker for the division and a playoff spot, of course. But that was OK, because the Browns were back. Breaking down the AFC North ahead of the 2008 season, ESPN's Seth Wickersham was one of several writers to pick the Browns to win the division, writing, "The offense is loaded, and the defense is solid enough to put the Browns in the playoffs."
Not a bad take, and maybe the hype was deserved, considering the Browns brought back a 3,000-yard passer in Anderson, a 1,000-yard rusher in Jamal Lewis and two 1,000-yard receivers in wideout Braylon Edwards and tight end Kellen Winslow.
"I remember a lot of experts picked us to finish - best-case scenario - third in our division," former Steelers cornerback Bryant McFadden said Thursday, which isn't entirely true, but stay with us. "Cincinnati was a pretty relevant team, but because of the success the Browns had in '07, people thought that would continue in '08. But for us, it was like big brother versus little brother."
Sure enough, the brothers took opposite paths. The Browns got off to an 0-2 start, both at home, the second a 10-6 loss to the Steelers in miserable weather. They never recovered, and the wheels fell off completely with a six-game losing streak to finish 4-12, never scoring more than 10 points over that stretch and getting shut out the final two weeks.
As fate would have it, the Steelers drove the final stake in the heart of that era under Romeo Crennel, with a 31-0 pounding at Heinz Field in Week 17 - yes, Crennel was fired the next day, and, yes, that win was essentially meaningless for the Steelers, who already had clinched the division. Not only did the Browns plummet back to reality, but it was the Steeles who made that season one to remember, capturing their sixth Super Bowl.
"I always felt confident playing against the Cleveland Browns, no matter when we played them," McFadden said. "We always felt like we'd be one step ahead and better prepared, and it always boiled down to execution and confidence."
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The 2019 Browns were supposed to be Cleveland's best club since that 2007 squad, which had the last winning record on Lake Erie until this year. As it turned out, last season's team crumbled in all-too-familiar fashion, a 6-10 record that screamed of "classic Browns" and got head coach Freddie Kitchens fired.
But lo and behold, it took the bizarre year of 2020 to get the Browns back to winning. At 11-5, they've finally been more bark than bite and can write a story that kicks off a new chapter of this rivalry Sunday night. Or, they could once again fail to beat the Steelers in a big game.
"I think they're still the same Browns I play every year," Steelers receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster said Wednesday, winking at the camera. "I think they're nameless, gray faces. Yes, they have a couple good players on their team, but at the end of the day - I don't know, the Browns is the Browns. AFC North football, they're a good team, but I'm just happy we're playing them again this Sunday."
That could be a nod to wanting payback after the Steelers lost in Cleveland in the regular-season finale or it could be something else, the bluster of a big brother who knows how the scale of this series has been titled over time.
Either way, chatter won't matter come Sunday. Whether the Steelers and Browns said the right things or the wrong things, one will move a step closer to Tampa and the other will watch the rest of the postseason from home. As Steelers coach Mike Tomlin put it Tuesday: "The bills are going to come due" at 8:15 p.m.
"At the end of the week, all of the talking is going to stop and it's just going to be the play," Tomlin said, "and that's how it should be."
Despite what Smith-Schuster seemed to imply, there's a feeling among the football world that these Browns are different. Much of their momentum was dashed early in the week when they learned that the even-keeled Stefanski, righter of the ship, would be out.
But at some point, don't the Browns need to do something special when you least expect it? They've threatened to before, but it never happens on the Steelers' watch.
"Nothing lasts forever," said venerable broadcaster Al Michaels, who will call the play-by-play on NBC. "Even though it's been a one-sided rivalry, I think it's the dawn of, maybe, a new era here. Pittsburgh is annually good, and Cleveland should be pretty good for a number of years.
"I think Cleveland-Pittsburgh is one of the better rivalries going forward."