Before the Browns and Steelers met in the Wild Card round of the playoffs after the 2020 season, then-Steelers wideout JuJu Smith-Schuster memorably said that “the Browns is the Browns” when asked if Pittsburgh’s divisional rivals were a different team than they’ve been in the past.
The Browns wound up with a win in that game and Smith-Schuster later said that he felt he probably provided some motivation to them with his comment. Bengals wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase may have done something similar ahead of this Sunday’s matchup with the Browns.
Cleveland has won 8 of their last 10 meetings with the Bengals and they were the only team to beat the Bengals by more than one score — a 32-13 rout on Monday night in Week Eight — last season. Chase was asked about that recent run of success and whether that adds extra fuel to the fire heading into this weekend and echoed Smith-Schuster while throwing in a dig at the Browns’ revived elf logo.
“It feels like a regular game to me,” Chase said, via Jeremy Rauch of Fox 19 in Cincinnati. “It don’t feel no different. It’s just the hooping and hollering about the Cleveland Browns. I was about to call them the elves. . . . I don’t really hear it. If you ask me, I don’t really pay attention to it because Cleveland is Cleveland.”
We’ll find out on Sunday if “Cleveland is Cleveland” leads to the same result as “the Browns is the Browns.”