When I switched over to Blogger’s new beta thingie a couple of months ago, I created a tag for situations just like this.

Only now, the tag seems completely, utterly inadequate.

The tag in question? “Hopeless Cleveland Sports.”

It was created with the Browns in mind, although the Indians’ weak 2006 season — the highlight was winning the series against the Pirates, in May, for crying out loud — definitely contributed to the mindset.

But in light of the Browns efforts — and I use that term loosely — against the Bengals and the Steelers in the past three weeks, I may have to rethink the tag. Hopeless? Yeah, it’s applicable, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Pathetic? Hm, that’s a candidate.

The thesaurus suggests Wretched, which has a nice ring.

Pitiable? Maybe.

Dismal? Feeble? How about just plain Sad?

I don’t know, and I’m not inclined to spend too much time thinking about it. In fact, I’m not too inclined to spend too much time or energy on the Browns these days … and that is sad, boys and girls. I used to be one of the people who lived and died with the Cleveland Browns. When the NFL allowed the team to move to Baltimore, I lost a fair amount of interest. I found other things to do on Sundays.

I was excited about the team’s return, but since then I haven’t had many other reasons to be excited about professional football in Cleveland.

Back to semantics. “Professional” probably isn’t applicable, at least not in a metaphoric sense. Yes, the players get paid, but “professional” also implies a certain level of competence and effort. I didn’t see either last week. I didn’t expect that Cleveland would win either game; I did expect to see a team that was at least trying, an effort worthy of being called “professional.”

What I got instead was, um, wretched. Dismal. Feeble. Pathetic.

The more frustrating thing is that I don’t have the first clue what to do about it. You could fire Romeo Crennel, but then we’re starting over. Again. That means another couple of years — at least — of suffering while the new guy installs his system and his players. That’s more than I could stand. I’ve been waiting for improvement since 1999, and another do-over would just be a sign that tangible progress is still out of reach.

I do know this. With a loss on Sunday against the Ravens, the Browns will have completed a first: They would have negotiated a full season without winning a single division game. Ouch.

I usually make a point of automatically disagreeing with anything that comes out of the mouth of Joey Porter, one of the Stillers’ linebackers and a world-class asshole. But when he said after the game that the Browns were soft…

Soft. That’s a pretty good one. Kind of hard to argue.