Is SI's Peter King Certifiably Insane?

By now, after reading the preceding sentence, Baltimore Ravens fans are either spitting out their drinks through their nostrils or gasping in earnest at the mere thought of the Super Bowl MVP wearing the brown and orange of the Cleveland Browns.

Sports Illustrated's Peter King wondered aloud that if the Browns made Joe Flacco an offer that not only he couldn't refuse, but one the Ravens couldn't come close to matching, how would it look to their fans as well as ours? He says it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of five years and $110 million, an average salary of $22 million a year, making Joe the NFL's highest paid player.

SB Nation's blog on the Browns, Dawgs By Nature, added to the hilarity by giving space on their site to King's speculation, while fantasizing on the possibility and trying to justify the Ravens mentality for making the move to a more-cap friendly quarterback, such as San Francisco 49ers back-up, Alex Smith, or drafting a young QB to spend the next few years re-building the team. Ha!

First of all, let's lay it out there to make it perfectly clear. Joe Flacco is not going anywhere. He will sign a long-term deal to stay in Baltimore for a long, long time. The worse-case scenario is that the team will place the Franchise Tag on him, but that would only be done to buy both sides time to work out the right deal for the Ravens and Flacco. Either way, Joe will be a very rich man and will continue to call Baltimore his team and home.

With that out of the way, to even suggest the Ravens will let Joe go, much less to a hated division rival, is ludicrous, if not so far-fetched as to give pause to consider if the writer is either trying to stir debate or certifiably insane. While King would stand by the former, Ravens fans would beg to differ and prefer the latter.

At least Dawgs By Nature had the sense to add the quote from the Associated Press' Tom Withers, who tweeted (@twithersAP) on the topic of the Browns winning a Super Bowl with Flacco as their QB:

"Sure, Joe Flacco would help the #Browns. If he brings Boldin, Smith, Jones and Rice with him."