MD

Joe Thomas says he cried after playing a perfect game in a 30 point loss to Tom Brady and realized he had spent 10 years fooling himself into believing the Browns were a Super Bowl team before each season “The way I entered every season was like, if I need to get the most out of myself, I’ve got to convince myself this is a Super Bowl roster. That’s the mentality I have to have when I’m training, when I’m practicing, when I’m going through film study. And so you trick yourself every year, but after a while, you’re not that dumb anymore” “Going into year 10, we had traded away the first overall pick. We were trading guys away, saving capital for the future. The writing was on the wall that we were in a pretty significant rebuild. I kind of knew at that time, even though I was still trying to trick myself, in the back of your head you know you’re not going to be any good” “Then, about midway through that 10th season, we were playing the Patriots. Tom Brady comes to town, and I fucking hated Tom Brady, as everybody did in the league. I hated the Patriots. I just wanted to smash him so bad. We lost like 30 to 0. And I remember sitting in the car after the game, and I was just crying. I had ice on both elbows and knees. I was in pain, my wife was driving and I was just looking out the window. It was that moment when I realized I’d been kind of fooling myself for a while, and we were not going to win no matter what I did” “She finally said, ‘Are you okay? Did you have a bad game?’ Then the tears really came because I said, ‘I played a perfect game, and we lost by 30.’ It really sunk in at that moment that you don’t control the situation anymore. That feeling of loss of control is really hard. No matter what situation you’re in in life, it just feels like everything I’m working for, I have no control over the outcome. That’s a bad feeling” “I ended up meeting with the team psychologist and talking to somebody about it because it had been almost 10 years built up to that moment when you come to the realization that I’m kind of fooling myself. We’re not that team and we really don’t have a chance. And I don’t impact this game the way I’d hoped”