Brian Hoyer deserved a happier ending to his Browns tenure

Cleveland Browns quarterbacks don’t get happy endings. But former quarterback Brian Hoyer was one player who deserved one.

Life as the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns means you are not going to have a happy ending.

Cheers rained down on Tim Couch as he lay injured on the FirstEnergy Stadium field. Jeff Garcia never had a chance because of the incompetence of head coach Butch Davis. Derek Anderson and Kelly Holcomb were mirages that faded away almost as quickly as they appeared. Brandon Weeden and Johnny Manziel should never have even been drafted.

Go down the list of every quarterback who has worn the Orange and Brown since the franchise returned in 1999 and you will find tales of woe and despair.

But no quarterback may have gotten a rawer deal than Brian Hoyer, who was with the Browns in 2013 and 2014.

Hoyer was the local quarterback – he played high school football at Cleveland’s St. Ignatius High School – who looked like he was going to make good with the hometown team after taking over the starter’s role from an injured Weeden in 2013. Hoyer won his first three starts before being lost for the season with an ACL injury.

He came back in 2014 and had the Browns in first place in the AFC North after a Thursday night win in November against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Then it all fell apart.

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Hoyer struggled the following week in a loss to the Houston Texans, before rallying the Browns to a win on the road against the Atlanta Falcons.

That was also the game when wide receiver Josh Gordon returned from a suspension and the offense started to fall apart as the team tried to force the ball to Gordon who, unbeknownst to everyone, was playing every game under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Hoyer was also looking over his shoulder at Manziel and feeling the pressure from a front office that was more interested in marketing Manziel than actually winning football games.

It all eventually became too much for Hoyer and he was benched after a Week 13 loss to the Indianapolis Colts. He made one more appearance in the season’s penultimate game against the Carolina Panthers, but then was released in the offseason.

On Sunday Hoyer will be spotted standing on the sidelines at the Super Bowl as the backup quarterback for the New England Patriots. He reflected on him time in Cleveland this week during media interviews, according to Mary Kay Cabot at cleveland.com:

"“It was a circus, no doubt. Johnny was the Heisman Trophy winner and they really hype that. People like (former team president) Alex Scheiner, they were fueling that because our press conferences were on NFL Network everyday. That’s what they wanted. Not only that but we started winning. There were a lot of reasons that circus happened.”"

Hoyer has every right to be bitter about his time with the Browns, but in the same interview he admitted that he wish things would have ended differently. Hoyer has to carry his share of the water for how things went south over the final weeks of the 2014 season, and this is not an attempt to make him out to be anything better than a backup quarterback, but he did deserve better.

Next: Examining the Browns quarterback options

But as The Wire’s Snoop Pearson once so eloquently put it, “deserve got nothing to do with it.”

A sentiment that is never more true than when it comes to Hoyer’s time with the Browns.