Though it’s not quite on the same level as Brett Favre’s return to Green Bay, Jets receiver Braylon Edwards will face the Browns on November 14, in Cleveland. Edwards, who has had several seasons of mediocrity and dropped passes sandwiched around a fairly stellar showing for the Browns in 2007, has done his part to throw a little jet fuel on the embers of his time in Northeast Ohio.
“There’s nothing going on in Cleveland,” Edwards recently told Greg Bishop of the New York Times. “There’s no real estate. There’s no social life, no social networking. All the people who have something going on leave Cleveland. So Cleveland has nothing, and I came in there with a New York-type of essence. So what? That was the attitude I came in with. Like, this is who I am. They didn’t like the flash.”
(As a side note, just what is a “New York-type of essence”? Is he referring to those brief moments on Seventh Avenue when you think you’ve caught a whiff of crap and/or vomit and then just as your brain has acknowledged the existence of the odor it’s gone, as if it were never there? Someone should pitch that one to Calvin Klein.)
Edwards’ mother also chimed in on her son’s struggles in Ohio. “He came from a team that was always looking for a savior to a team that knows how to win,” she said, apparently under the impression that he’d been traded not to the Jets, but to the Giants.
“No one would understand what he’s been through unless you’ve been drowning,” she added.
Really? Drowning? Earning millions of dollars to play a kid’s game is drowning?
If Edwards was drowning in Cleveland, it’s only because he jumped into quicksand and asked for an anchor. Edwards’ primary problem in Cleveland were his hands (or, more specifically, his inability to use them properly) and his mouth (or, more accurately, his inability to shut it).
So we’ll check back with Braylon in a year, when he’ll likely be a member of yet another new team, and he’ll be blaming his failures in New York on those brief moments on Seventh Avenue when you think you’ve caught a whiff of crap and/or vomit and then just as your brain has acknowledged the existence of the odor it’s gone.