Joe Thomas built a Hall of Fame career in Cleveland, but even one of the greatest tackles in NFL history could not save the Browns from being the Browns. In 2016, New England walked into Cleveland and handed them a brutal 33-13 loss, another ugly reminder of just how far the franchise had fallen. For most players, it might have been another bad Sunday. For Thomas, it was the game that finally broke through years of denial.

“I remember sitting in the car after the game, and I was just crying,” Thomas said during his recent appearance on the Bussin’ With The Boys podcast. “I had ice on both elbows and knees. I was in pain. My wife was driving, and I was just looking out the window. It was that moment when I realized I’d been kind of fooling myself for a while, and we were not going to win, no matter what I did.”

The confession quickly caught Julian Edelman’s attention after sports and entertainment veteran @dank shared the clip on X. The former Patriots star jumped into the replies, writing, “Damn, sorry about that one big dog.” The original post was later removed from X.

But that loss did more than hurt. It broke something in Thomas, and his wife could see it.

“She finally said, ‘Are you okay? Did you have a bad game?’ Then the tears really came because I said, ‘I played a perfect game, and we lost by 30.’ It really sunk in at that moment that you don’t control the situation anymore. That feeling of loss of control is really hard. No matter what situation you’re in, in life, it just feels like everything I’m working for, I have no control over the outcome. That’s a bad feeling.”

Thomas referred to it as a 30-point loss, though the Patriots won the game 33-13, a 20-point margin.

Thomas entered 2016 determined to squeeze everything he could out of himself, even if that meant convincing himself Cleveland could contend. The problem was that the Browns were clearly rebuilding. They had traded down from the No. 2 pick in the draft, prioritized future assets, and were nowhere close to operating like a Super Bowl team.

Then Tom Brady came to Cleveland. Thomas badly wanted the Patriots game to prove that all that belief still meant something. Instead, New England beat the Browns 33-13, and the illusion finally collapsed. Thomas could play nearly flawless football, and it still was not enough to change where Cleveland was headed.

“I ended up meeting with the team psychologist and talking to somebody about it because it had been almost 10 years built up to that moment when you come to the realization that I’m kind of fooling myself,” the former tackle continued. “We’re not that team, and we really don’t have a chance. And I don’t impact this game the way I’d hoped.”

That became the cruel contradiction of Thomas’ career. He made 10 Pro Bowls, earned six First-Team All-Pro selections, played 10,363 consecutive offensive snaps and eventually entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But for all that individual greatness, he never played a single postseason game.