On that day, Johnny Manziel was the team’s quarterback.  So yeah, it’s been a long time.  Of course, the Browns have only won 4 (and tied a fifth, of course) of those games, with the last coming back on December 24th, 2016.  That day, Robert Griffin III was the team’s quarterback.

So yes, it’s been a rough few years… or decade… or two decades, for Cleveland.  Over the team’s last 58 games, the Browns have been favored to win and actually won just one time — that game against the 49ers.  There have been a lot of bad days in Cleveland over the years, of course: the graph below shows each Browns game since 2008, along with the pre-game point spread.  Remember, a positive number means the team was the underdog.  In the graph below, you can see that most of the dots are above the 0 line, meaning Cleveland was usually an underdog.   The games that Cleveland won are in white dots with orange borders; the games that Cleveland lost are in brown dots with orange borders.

Do the Browns have a reason to be optimistic since the game is at home and the Jets will have to travel to Ohio on short rest? From 2012 to 2017, there were 87 games played on Thursday night excluding week 1, when both teams have equal rest. In those games, the home team won 49 times (a 0.563 winning percentage), although the home team was favored 52 times and a pick’em once. Of the 52 home teams that were favored, 37 won (0.711) and 28 covered (with 24 failing to cover). When the spread has been tight — the home team favored by between 1 and 3 points — the home team has won 9 of 16 games.

If the Browns manage to win the game, it will be just the second time Cleveland has been favored to — and actually won — a game in primetime.  The second-to-last time the Browns won a primetime game they were favored to win? They did it against a team that doesn’t exist anymore, with Bill Belichick as the head coach.

But guess what? After falling to the Bears today, 20-3, the Browns are now 3-12 against the spread (the second worst team is the Broncos, who are 4-10-1). And for the 7th time in 8 years, the Browns will again finish the season against the Steelers.

If you look at the teams that were 3-13 or 3-12-1 against the spread, they tend to do very well the next year. In other words, Vegas perhaps hasn’t quite caught up to the fact that teams that perform terribly against the spread do much better the next year.

But then you have… the Browns. Cleveland is now 6-24-1 against the spread since the start of last season, ensuring they will finish with the worst mark since 1978 over a 2-year period. The 2014-2015 Titans were the previous record-holder, at 8-23-1 against the spread, followed by the 2008-2009 Jaguars (9-23-0) and four teams at 9-22-1 (’03-’04 Raiders, 2007-2008 Broncos, 1990-1991 Rams, and well, the 2015-2016 Browns).

So not only has Cleveland been historically bad on the field this year, they have been historically bad against the spread for the second year in a row.