Joe Thomas did the impossible: He loved the Cleveland Browns

Joe Thomas was the rare offensive lineman who had numbers. Normally offensive linemen toil in anonymity. Not Thomas. We can take a finger and point at some digits and pretty easily come to the conclusion this was one of the best offensive linemen to ever live: 10,363 consecutive snaps played across 166 consecutive starts.

For almost 11 years Thomas didn’t take a play off, which is a statement that shouldn’t need any qualification, but in this case it’s necessary. Thomas did that while playing for the Cleveland Browns, a team that is butt. How butt? The Browns never made the playoffs once despite having a 10-time Pro Bowl, six-time first-team All-Pro left tackle.

Thomas allowed 38 sacks across his entire career and yet 20 starting quarterbacks couldn’t hold down the job.

For 30 percent of his career, Thomas played while the Browns had already been eliminated from the playoffs. He stuck with the Browns so long he can actually remember when the team was decent — his rookie season, Cleveland went 10-6 but missed the playoffs. That’s the same number of wins in one season the Browns have compiled since October 2014. Thomas’ career began with what was the most successful Browns’ season in nearly 15 years and ended with the worst by any team ever. In his final season, Cleveland finished with zero wins and 16 losses, nine of which Thomas watched entirely from the bench after tearing his left triceps in Week 7.

With numbers like that, you should be allowed to retire however you want. Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson both retired by rightly telling the Lions, in their own words, to suck eggs. Like Thomas, they too are in the Best Ever discussion after giving their franchise much more than it ever gave them. Thomas, on the other hand, ended his career by calling it “the best 11 years anyone could have asked for,” and dubbing himself a Clevelander for life.

That’s something he has always said. In a fantastic 2016 ESPN profile by Elizabeth Merrill, he described finding satisfaction in the struggle.

”It’s a blue-collar city, and for a blue-collar guy like myself, it’s easy to fall in love with the people and kind of the chip on the shoulder that a lot of people have because they feel like they’ve been slighted for so long. It’s so important for me to be here for the turnaround. I don’t want to just get a Super Bowl ring [by] being traded to a dream team. It would feel unsatisfying. Unfulfilling.”

Thomas felt like a Cleveland Brown. I won’t pretend to know what that means. All I can do stab blindly at some numbers and say look: The Browns are a toxic franchise that can’t keep a quarterback, or a coach, or a GM, or even an owner for that matter. Franchises like that have broken a lot of strong constitutions in good men. The Browns were constantly shipping away his friends, for God’s sake. Every time management changed, the roster was overhauled, creating a ship of Theseus situation in which Thomas was the only thing keeping the Browns from becoming completely devoid of meaning.

Thomas seemed like a mythological figure going back to college when at Wisconsin, he was treated like a star with the same enthusiasm other campuses normally reserve for quarterbacks and running backs. That may say something about Wisconsin, but it also highlights how long Thomas has been beholden to friendly, overly-grateful Midwest communities. He could have let his consecutive snaps streak end a number of times in Cleveland when few would have noticed and none would have cared. From that same ESPN story:

In 2014, the Browns were beating the Pittsburgh Steelers, manhandling them, actually, when then-coach Mike Pettine told backup Vinston Painter to go in and replace Thomas; the coach didn’t want his best player getting hurt in mop-up duty. Pettine was in his first year, and didn’t know any better. Thomas did a double take when he saw Painter.

”Get the f--- out of here,” he told Painter.

...

”Why didn’t you come out?” Pettine asked Thomas when the offense came off the field.

”I haven’t missed a snap, and I’m not coming out when we’re finally winning a game,” Thomas told him. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

Thomas had a sense of duty that was perhaps unique in football history. He was committed to playing, and in particular he was committed to playing for the Browns. And he was committed to them because they were particularly bad. He turned the demonstrable fact that the Browns are butt into a source of motivation. More than that: A source of enjoyment, as he eventually became a statesman and mentor to each new face that would arrive among the Browns’ annual crop of doomed young players.

Somehow, Thomas became an even more inevitable part of the Browns than losing itself. He was the team, to the point that it seems wrong to look at the Browns and still say it’s the Browns. Eventually you have admit that this ship that is listing 60 degrees to port and has been patched with Gak and gum wrappers isn’t the same as the one that left dock. And if this metaphor has become too tortured for you, then just read this phrase over and over until it finally sinks in: “Longest-tenured Browns player Josh Gordon.”

Thomas helped keep the ship afloat. He made it palatable to be a Browns fans during an era when, by the numbers, there was every reason to bail. He was a ballast against rationality, right up to the end when he said earnest;y that he loved this team.