The Cleveland Browns let JuJu Smith-Schuster know exactly how they felt about him after beating the Steelers.
JuJu Smith-Schuster might possess tip-top TikTok moves, but there’s no dancing around the mess he’s in after Wild Card weekend.
Ahead of the Steelers showdown with the Browns, Smith-Schuster offered up some choice bulletin board material while trash talking his division foe.
“I think they’re still the same Browns teams I play every year,” Smith-Schuster now I famously said on Thursday. “I think they’re nameless gray faces. They have a couple good players on their team, but at the end of the day, I don’t know. The Browns is the Browns.”
It’s a quote that has now etched itself into the lore of the Browns-Steelers rivalry. To be fair to JuJu, he was playing a pretty good hand at the time. Cleveland was missing its top offensive lineman due to COVID-19, and head coach Kevin Stefanski had just been ruled out for Sunday’s game.
Despite that, the Browns sucker punched the Steelers by jumping out to a 28-0 lead that ended up an 11-point victory. Pittsburgh’s season was ended, Cleveland got the last laugh, and the egg is all over JuJu’s face.
Cleveland Browns trolled JuJu Smith-Schuster in locker room
The Browns didn’t directly say before the game that the quote was being used as motivation, but as soon as it was over let it be known just how closely they had listened to JuJu.
Of course, Smith-Schuster can’t be solely blamed for the loss. Ben Roethlisberger threw four critical interceptions and the defense was getting carved up by the Browns run game. Add to that mental errors littered throughout the game, as well as a mind-boggling decision by Mike Tomlin to not go for it on 4th and 1 late in the game, and you have all the ingredients of an upset.
But the JuJu quote speaks for itself, and will forever be known as the epitome of Pittsburgh getting too full of itself and motivating the Browns to unload two decades of pain and disparity on them in one of the most stunning and truly awesome upsets in playoff history.