By Ty Schalter

[Editor’s note: Ty wrote this story for us last year but it has long been a staff favorite at The Athletic Detroit. So with the Browns and Lions getting ready for their showdown this week, we’re unlocking it and running it back. Enjoy!]

In the middle of the 2016 NFL season, there was a shipwreck.

A monument to some of the worst professional football ever played, lost off the coast of Lake Erie. A massive metal vessel, vanished without a trace.

The Great Lakes Freighter Trophy, an unwieldy hunk of bronze nicknamed “The Barge” by Cleveland Browns writers, had spent years gathering dust in the Browns’ media room. Commissioned in 2002 by one-time Browns CEO Carmen Policy as a prize for a preseason rivalry game with the Detroit Lions, The Barge was apparently decommissioned in secret.

During last season’s training camp, Cleveland.com Browns writer Scott Patsko asked his readers what the team should do with the derelict ship. By the end of the season, he realized it was gone.

The Great Lakes Classic preseason series was a throwback to the leather-helmet days of the NFL, an echo of decades-old college football traditions and a revival of a proven concept. It was an innovative way to generate excitement around exhibition games, and a clever leveraging of dollars earmarked for charity.

It was also an artificial rivalry between two of the worst sports franchises on the planet, contested by backups in meaningless games and commemorated by an unwieldy trophy that evoked a tragic disaster.

Somehow, the Browns and Lions committed to the bit for 13 of the worst years in either franchise’s history. Somehow, they stopped without anyone noticing.

How did a massive bronze sculpture commissioned by an NFL team just disappear? Where did the big ship go—and how did it get built in the first place?

***

Anyone who grew up around the Great Lakes, especially those who came of age last century, carries the weight of the Edmund Fitzgerald disaster in the back of their minds.

Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was played in schools as historical text, tolled over radio waves and deployed to inspire mandatory reverence. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized people born elsewhere regard the song as a plodding oddity, and regularly place it on (and sometimes on top of) their Worst Song of All Time lists.

Yet just this July, Wisconsin-native Speaker of the House Paul Ryan reportedly recited a few lines of the song to his colleagues in the wake of his party’s recent legislative failures. Such is the imprint the big freighter left on the Rust Belt’s collective psyche.

The Great Lakes Classic Trophy was supposed to generically represent the many iron-ore freighters which have plied Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and the other one. But many Ohioans and Michiganders saw Policy’s big bronze boat and thought disaster.

Policy was the first President and CEO of the “new Browns,” the expansion NFL franchise granted to Cleveland when the original became the Baltimore Ravens. But the Youngstown, Ohio native is best known as one of the architects of the San Francisco 49ers dynasty of the 1980s and 1990s. Policy told me the Great Lakes Classic replicated an event he’d dreamed up in San Francisco.

“Back in the old days, when teams set their own opponents, we traditionally played the Denver Broncos and the San Diego Chargers in the preseason,” Policy told The Athletic.

Close geography and close relationships between the teams’ leadership groups made standing exhibition games a natural fit. A consummate promoter, Policy approached Broncos owner Pat Bowlen about making their unofficial preseason rivalry official.

“I said, ‘Look, let’s try to make our preseason game as interesting as possible,” Policy said. “‘Let’s create a trophy, and we’ll call it the Rocky Mountain…something. Classic, or championship, or something like that.'”

Policy also proposed a little side action: each team would put $30,000 into a pot, and the winner’s designated charity would get the lion’s share of the kitty, complete with an on-field check presentation at the end.

The gambit worked: With a trophy at stake and some skin in the game, both teams had an interest in making it interesting.

“One year, the damn Broncos…” Policy began, laughing as he recalled a particular game. “We were leading in the fourth quarter, and they put some starters back in! They literally won the game at the very end. [Former Raiders and Broncos cornerback] Willie Brown was there to present it, and he made a great comment along the lines of, ‘Congratulations on your exhibition of poor sportsmanship.’ It really kind of caught on.”

Policy left the 49ers after the 1997 season, five Super Bowl rings richer.

He was lured back into the NFL by Al Lerner, a minority owner in the original Browns who’d been the highest bidder to incept the new Browns. Policy got a 10 percent stake in the new franchise, and he went to work rebuilding and cultivating the Dawg Pound’s love for their team.

“When we went to Cleveland, again, we were trying to invigorate the preseason game as much as possible. We had a decent relationship with the Detroit Lions, and I knew Matt Millen,” said Policy of the then-President and CEO of the Lions, who had played two of his 12 NFL seasons with Policy’s 49ers. “I proposed the idea. He loved it: ‘The Great Lakes Classic.’ We came up with this trophy—which was a nice trophy, have you ever seen it?”

No, I had not seen it. Not in person. Not yet.

“Again, it was starting to catch on—but then I left. Until you brought it up, I had no idea whether they continued the program,” Policy said.

When I told Policy the trophy had last been seen in the Browns facility, even though the Lions won the last contest, he expressed concern:

“Why don’t they have the trophy?”

The Lions didn’t win many trophies under Millen’s watch, so perhaps the four-time Super Bowl champion would take some pride in the Great Lakes Classic’s. But when I talked to him, Millen was dismissive of what he called “Carmen’s thing.”

“I was like, ‘Sure, let’s go with it, why not?'” Millen told The Athletic.

Yet Millen echoed what Policy had told me: It’s hard to build excitement for a preseason game, so any attempt to attract interest was worth a shot. Millen was also on board with using some of the Lions’ earmarked charity dollars to do the fundraising.

So, having given the Great Lakes Classic a shot, what did Millen think of the fan and media reactions?

“Me personally? I’m not big on any of that stuff,” Millen said. “As far as I was concerned, it’s like, ‘Ehh.’ I didn’t really care about that. I want to see how our players are gonna play, how we’re going to approach it. Everything else is just…kind of fluff.”

Almost immediately after agreeing to the series, Millen charged Lions PR chief Bill Keenist with handling Detroit’s end of the promotion.

So If Millen didn’t care about the fan interest, the rivalry or the trophy, who in Detroit did?

“To be perfectly frank with you,” he said after a considered silence, “I don’t recall anybody in Detroit ever caring about it.”

The Great Lakes Classic didn’t resonate much with Detroit Lions columnist Mike O’Hara, either. In fact, the name initially didn’t ring a bell.

“Oh man,” he groaned after I explained. “The Edmund Fitzgerald Cup?”

O’Hara, who was writing for The Detroit News at the time, recalled that when former Lions head coach (and Upper Peninsula native) Steve Mariucci first beheld the freighter, he blurted out that “it looks like the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Per O’Hara, someone dutifully reminded Mariucci 29 people died in the accident, and he shouldn’t make light.

But besides the unintended humor of the trophy, O’Hara didn’t think the series made any waves. He wasn’t sure the players even knew it was happening. If no one in Detroit cared about the trophy, then, perhaps someone in Cleveland did.

“It was kind of Carmen being Carmen,” ESPN’s Tony Grossi told The Athletic.

Grossi, then writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, said the idea itself was well-received.

“We were kind of amused by it, but he’s a promoter at heart,” Grossi said.

“At that point, everyone was so gung-ho about [NFL football returning to Cleveland], that they kind of accepted it as a good idea. It was a driveable game, and people were hungry to see the Browns again,” Grossi continued. “We were still in the honeymoon phase with the team, and people were up for anything at that point.”

But did Clevelanders like the trophy?

“Oh, that was hideous,” Grossi said. “It was so heavy, and big. It was just seemed like a waste of money, honestly.”

Grossi recalled that, early in the series, possibly after the 2003 game in Detroit, a presentation ceremony was held to award the trophy to the victorious Lions. Millen—a former Pro Bowl linebacker, still every bit of his listed 6’2″, 250 pounds and then some—refused to even try to pick it up.

Not long after that, Policy stepped down as CEO. The death of Al Lerner, internal strife over the already-quick firing and hiring of head coaches and Policy’s desire to return to the Bay Area all reportedly played a role in his decision. The franchise burned through quarterbacks, head coaches, chief executives and even owners from that point on, with zero institutional stability.

Yet the Great Lakes Classic continued.

In 2005, Lerner’s son Randy tapped former Browns scout Phil Savage, who’d followed the original franchise to Baltimore and worked his way up to director of player personnel, to serve as Cleveland’s general manager.

“Out of five hundred things you might have called me about, I can think of about 499 others before we’d get to this,” Savage told The Athletic, laughing. “Is it still a thing? Are they still battling for The Barge?”

I informed him it was not still a thing. But why, how, had it been a thing for so long?

“From a football standpoint, it made a lot of sense,” Savage said. “It was an easy trip, and otherwise you’d only play the Detroit Lions maybe once every four years.”

But Savage, now the director of the Reese’s Senior Bowl, didn’t remember the series as anything more than a scheduling convenience.

“I do remember seeing that trophy,” Savage offered. “It’s that long, barge-looking thing, right? Honestly, when you’re the GM of the Browns you have bigger fish to fry. I don’t remember it being a significant focus for us as we got ready for the season.”

He also doesn’t remember any specific talk of either prolonging or curtailing the event—yet it continued for six more seasons after he was fired in 2008.

Finally, when the Lions announced their 2015 preseason schedule, the Browns weren’t on it. O’Hara’s colleague Tim Twentyman wrote that the Great Lakes Classic couldn’t be played because of “scheduling conflicts.” Various reports have since described the series as “on hold,” or on hiatus, but there’s no indication it will ever resume.

Over the GLC’s 13-year run, the Lions and Browns were two of the three losingest teams in football, per Pro Football Reference. Over those regular seasons they ran out 29 different quarterbacks, gave 13 different skippers the whistle and posted a collective .339 winning percentage.

The series itself was evenly matched: The Browns won four of the first five games, the Lions four of the next five, the Browns the next two and the Lions the series finale. The last scoring play was a Kellen Moore touchdown pass to Corey Fuller, which secured a come-from-behind 13-12 victory in a game where quarterback Johnny Manziel was the Browns’ leading rusher.

Overall, Cleveland won seven games to the Lions’ six—but the Lions won the last contest, and by rights should hold the trophy. But not only did they not keep it after the 2014 game, Patsko and Grossi both noted The Barge had visibly sat in the Browns’ facility in Berea, OH for many years—regardless of where the game had last been played or who’d won.

Keenist remains the Lions’ senior vice president of communications, and he was willing to speak with The Athletic about the fate of the Great Lakes Freighter. He dropped a bombshell: The Lions do have the trophy.

Their copy of the trophy.

“That trophy weighed a ton,” Keenist said. “After the first year, or maybe two, we decided it wasn’t fair to our equipment guys to ask them to load and unload that thing every time, so we opted to have a second trophy made.”

It all fell into place: Rather than ship the giant boat along the coast of Lake Erie as often as twice a season, each team had simply been trotting out their copy of the trophy and putting it away afterwards, maintaining the illusion of a traveling rivalry prize. Browns PR staff confirmed that the original Great Lakes Freighter Trophy remains stowed in their facility, drydocked out of sight.

Further, the charity monies supplied by both teams had initially come from a leaguewide sponsorship deal which ran out in the mid-2000s. Neither team was eager to gamble with their in-house charity funds, so the side action that made the game interesting was set aside.

Without one coveted trophy to play for, or any charity dollars at stake, the Great Lakes Classic existed for a decade as a scheduling convenience and a media inside joke.

As for the fate of the series going forward?

Several sources explained that the run of the GLC bridged two eras in NFL scheduling. For most of its history, the league allowed teams to make up their own preseason slates. In 2002, this was mostly still the case—with exceptions for prime TV matchups, the International Series or other league-mandated one-offs.

By 2014, it had effectively become the opposite. Today, the NFL dictates preseason schedules, save one protected annual matchup—and the Lions already have one that takes precedence.

Late Lions owner William Clay Ford had a longtime friendship with late Buffalo Bills owner (and fellow Grosse Pointe native) Ralph Wilson; the two franchises’ deep ties are expressed in a standing preseason game that predates the GLC by decades. Similarly, the Browns often earmark a preseason game to play against the Bengals in Ohio State University’s Ohio Stadium.

“For [a preseason rivalry] to have any kind of momentum,” Policy told me, “it pretty much has to be played every year.”

Unless both of these squads decide to drop their other preseason traditions, it’s unlikely that will ever happen again.

I asked every source if there was any way to make this work, anything two modern NFL teams could do to get players, fans and media excited about a standing preseason matchup.

“In terms of ‘Go out there and win one for the Gipper’?” Millen asked. “No. Not for the second preseason game.”

Millen said teams run vanilla scripts—taking little notice of the other side, let alone worrying about the final score.

Savage echoed this sentiment: preseason is about getting prepared, seeing where you’re at and getting as many players off the field healthy as possible. If a team’s starters dominate the first half and their camp bodies blow it in the fourth quarter, who cares?

Like Lightfoot’s ballad, the Great Lakes Classic was an ambitious idea born from the best intentions, and those who care about the event will always remember both the song and the trophy with a kind of provincial fondness—even while we acknowledge they were both always a little ridiculous.