Commentary: Ben Roethlisberger is an all-time Cleveland sports villain but nowhere near John Elway

Ben Roethlisberger is not retiring. Good. He owes Cleveland one or two really bad seasons to make up for the 16 seasons he toyed with the Browns. Big Ben is one of the great all-time villains in Cleveland sports history. How great? Funny you should ask. The top 10 Cleveland sports villains of all-time: John Elway: No brainer. "The Drive" — 98 yards, 15 plays, in 5:02 to score the game-tying, Super Bowl-denying (for the Browns) touchdown, with 37 seconds left in regulation — drove a stake through the hearts of Browns fans.Everything considered, this one likely will live alone forever at the top of Cleveland's sports misery. Craig Counsell: Two outs from the Indians winning the 1997 World Series, a journeyman named Counsell sent Indians fans looking for counseling by lifting a game-tying sacrifice fly in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7. You the know the rest of the story. In the regular season Counsell had one sacrifice fly in 182 plate appearances. Floyd Giebell: Who? Exactly. In 1940 he was a 30-year-old marginal major league pitcher for Detroit. The season came down to a season-ending three-game series between the Indians and Tigers. First-place Detroit had a record of 89-62. Second-place Cleveland was 87-64.The Tigers only needed to win one of the three games to clinch the pennant. But with Bob Feller scheduled to pitch the first game of the series, Detroit manager Del Baker bailed. He didn't want to waste one of Detroit's top pitchers against Feller, so he basically conceded the game by starting Giebell.Feller pitched a three-hitter, but Giebell pitched a six-hit shutout and won 2-0. The Indians won the next two games, meaning they would have won the pennant if they had beaten Giebell. Michael Jordan: It was typical Cleveland bad luck that the best pre-LeBron Cavs teams, the ones featuring Brad Daugherty, Mark Price, Larry Nance Sr., Ron Harper and John "Hot Rod" Williams, coincided with the peak years of Jordan's Bulls. It's like they were the Beatles and the Cavs were the Rolling Stones. And by "Bulls" we mean Jordan. That "The Shot" came just three years after "The Drive" and two years after "The Fumble" didn't help. World Series umpires in 1995: The greatest-hitting team in Indians history was rendered impotent in the World Series by an interpretation of the strike zone in which anything belt high, from on-deck circle to on-deck circle, was ruled a strike.That made it easy pickings for a Hall of Fame-studded Braves rotation (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz). The Indians averaged 5.8 runs per game in the regular season and 3.1 in the World Series. Dusty Rhodes: Who? He's the hitting-version of Giebell. In the bottom of the 10th inning of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series against the Indians, who won an American League record 111 regular-season games, Rhodes hit a pinch-hit, walk-off, three-run home run off future Hall of Famer Bob Lemon, giving the Giants a 5-3 victory.In Game 2 Rhodes hit a pinch-hit RBI single in the fifth to give New York a 1-0 lead and a seventh-inning home run off future Hall of Famer Early Wynn in the Giants' 3-1 win.In Game 3 Rhodes stroked a two-run single in New York's 6-2 win.In the Giants' four-game sweep, Rhodes, a career .253 hitter, hit .667, and his seven RBIs were only two fewer than Cleveland's entire team. Ben Roethlisberger: His career record against the Browns is 24-2-1. The Browns' career record in the playoffs vs. Big Ben: 1-0. Sorry, that doesn't even dent 24-2-1. That's a winning percentage of .923, although most of it came against awful Browns teams. Mike Davis ("Red Right 88"): On Jan. 4, 1981, with 13 seconds left in the game, the 11-5 Browns were in position to kick a short game-winning field goal to beat the Raiders in a divisional round playoff game. Sam Rutigliano called timeout. The play was designed to be a pass to Ozzie Newsome in the end zone. If Newsome was covered, Rutigliano told Sipe to "throw it into Lake Erie."They ran the play. Newsome was covered. Sipe missed the lake by a quarter of a mile. Jim Chones' foot: In 1976, the Miracle of Richfield year, the Cavs beat Washington in seven games in the first round, winning three of the games by one, one, and two points. Two days before the start of the Eastern Conference finals, Cavs center Chones broke his foot in practice. Chones-less, the Cavs lost to the Celtics, who beat Phoenix in The Finals. Major League Baseball: In 1908 the Indians were 90-64 and finished in second place, one-half game behind Detroit, which was 90-63. The Tigers had a game rained out that MLB inexplicably ruled didn't need to be made up. If Detroit had played and lost that game, there would have been a playoff to decide whether Cleveland or Detroit would go to the World Series. But MLB decided to bag it. Contact Jim Ingraham at jingraham4@gmail.com.