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- Former Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson appeared to throw some shade at his old team after the Bengals secured a spot in the Super Bowl
- Jackson retweeted a message referencing Cleveland’s shameless tanking after its instate rival earned the right to compete for the Lombardi Trophy
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On Sunday, the Cincinnati Bengals punched their ticket to Super Bowl LVI, which was a truly momentous occasion for a fanbase that hasn’t seen their team compete in The Big Game since a squad led by Boomer Esiason was defeated by the 49ers in Super Bowl XXII 1989.
Prior to this season, there was really no better way to sum up what it’s been like to root for a pro football team based in the state of Ohio since the fall of the Soviet Union than “pain.” The Bengals may have had their fair of struggles over the past few decades, but that run of mediocrity was downright pleasant when compared to the plight of a Cleveland Browns team that has yet to appear in a Super Bowl.
In 2017, the Browns officially hit their nadir when they finished the season 0-16 a year after posting a 1-15 record under Hue Jackson, who was somehow allowed to return for a third season before he was mercifully shown the door after a 2-5 start (his 3–36–1 showing during his time in Cleveland is unsurprisingly the most atrocious 40-game coaching stretch in NFL history).
Jackson understandably caught a ton of heat for the atrocious product the Browns trotted out while he was at the helm, but he was far from the only person to blame. The coach had the onerous task of working with the pieces he was given by the front office of a franchise in a state of a perpetual rebuild that relied on an impressively shameless (and laughably inept) tanking strategy.
The fact that the Bengals will be playing in the Super Bowl just two years after earning the right to draft Joe Burrow following a 2-14 campaign has to be an especially sore spot for Browns fans—and after they beat the Chiefs on Sunday, Jackson appeared to vent a bit of his own frustration with that development when he retweeted a message referencing that reality.
Thoughts and prayers.