Throwback Thursday: Cleveland Browns beat Steelers 13-6 on TNF in 2009

Throwback Thursday brings us to a game back in 2009 when the Cleveland Browns scored a 13-6 win over the hated Pittsburgh Steelers

Back in 2009, the Steelers came to Northeast Ohio to play the Cleveland Browns in a frigid Thursday Night Football game.  Now, when you are playing in Cleveland and it is six freaking degrees with a cold 25 mph monsoon (wind chill -15 Fahrenheit) blowing in off Lake Erie, the game plan is to run, right?

The Steelers were coming off a Super Bowl win the previous season, and had one of the best rushing attacks in the NFL with Rashard Mendenhall on his way to a 1,100-yard season, sharing the halfback position with Fast Willie Parker.

So, of course, the Steelers would run the ball. They always ran the ball.  Even the peanut vendors run the ball in Pittsburgh.

The Browns were limping in with a 1-11 record under their coach Eric “Man-Genius” Mangini. Everybody knew that the season was over and that Mangini would be fired.

With veteran Jamaal Lewis out with a season and career-ending concussion, they had no one to compare with Pittsburgh’s running backs. Jerome Harrison and Chris Jennings were the only available running backs.  Harrison came into the game with 292 yards, and Jennings had only 167.

So with a freezing wind, and a huge advantage in running the football, what did the Steelers do?

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Well, they passed. And Ben Roethlisberger got sacked. And he got up and passed again and got sacked again. And again. And again. It was totally insane.

That game, the Browns got to Roethlisberger eight times. Here were the Steelers with highly respected offensive coordinator Bruce Arians, and they were getting killed because it seemed that they did not know how to play cold-weather football. It’s not as though Pittsburgh is a tropical paradise, so it is very hard to understand why they thought passing was the right approach.

Roethlisberger finished 18-of-32 for 201 yards, but the 8 sacks cost them 60 yards. So overall they attempted to put the rock in the air 40 times, with 161 yards total

Cleveland wasn’t that much better. With up-and-coming franchise quarterback (we hoped) Brady Quinn at the controls, the team was only 6-of-19 for only 90 yards, but only one sack for negative 6 yards.

That was terrible, but the Browns also used special teams superstar Josh Cribbs at quarterback in the “Wildcat” formation, and he rushed for 87 yards on 8 attempts, or 10.9 yards per carry. Cribbs also brought the crowd to its feet with a 55-yard punt return that set up the first field goal.

So if any of you youngsters thought Josh Cribbs was just a return man, in reality, he was much, much more than that. Also check out his work on punt coverage, where he was a deadly tackler from the gunner position.

Chris Jennings had a career performance with 20 carries for 73 yards and a touchdown in the second quarter. Overall, the Browns rushed the ball 37 times for 171 yards, compared to the Steelers rushing only 22 times (three by Roethlisberger). Parker and Mendenhall combined for only 19 carries on what should have been their night to carry the load.

Bruce Aryans has great respect around the league, so his game cannot be as illogical as it seemed. Maybe there was something wrong with his running backs or O-Line that led him to call Roethlisbser’s number so many times, with the results being eight sacks and a loss to a 1-11 team. So this is not to charge Aryans with actually being wacky, but dude, that is what it looked like from this end.

Mangini’s Browns actually went on a little winning streak at the end, finishing 5-11 and saving Mangini’s job for another year, much to the astonishment of the fan base.

In case you are wondering, at the moment the weather forecasts for this Thursday’s Browns-Steelers game calls for near-freezing conditions, but nothing like we experienced in 2009.