Allan Dranberg/CSM/Shutterstock (Patricia), Stew Milne-USA TODAY Sports (Kitchens), Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports (Quinn)
The way the Browns tell it, Freddie Kitchens received a funny shirt as a gift and wore it on a birthday outing, naïvely thinking that he wouldn’t be recognized or photographed or made into some cautionary tale of embattled coaches in the internet age. It’s probably the kind of thing you don’t learn to avoid until it actually happens to you, even if a majority of sane, football-loving people couldn’t care less.
What’s harder to reconcile is what might have happened if Cleveland had beaten the Steelers for the second time in a season, pinning their rivals in the game after the fight and, in the court of public opinion, winning the fight of all fights.