Wait 'til Next Year, Again

Public Relations 101

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:32:00 +0000

With Eric Mangini effectively in charge of every little thing coming out of Berea these days, it’s small wonder that the Browns aren’t any better off the field as they are on it.

All the missteps and high-minded disasters on the field have been well chronicled. But less is said it seems about how poorly owner Randy Lerner, through abdication to Mangini, has managed the Cleveland Browns brand.

Let’s not kid anyone here. The Browns are a laughingstock and deservedly so. But in that they aren’t alone. The NFL this season is a breeding ground of embarrassment. The Detroit Lions have exactly 1 win in two years. St. Louis, Washington, Tampa Bay and Kansas City have collectively 5 wins, three behind the New Orleans Saints. (By the way, isn’t one of the greatest stats of this season the fact that the Browns offense has only 5 touchdowns while the New Orleans defense has 7? In fact, this may be the greatest stat of all time.)

Yet it’s the Browns being singled out most weeks as the picture of ineptitude while their idiot cousins are being ignored. Part of the reason has to do with the housecleaning that Mangini and Lerner undertook shortly after Mangini was named head coach. In that purge, two key members of the public relation staff were let go, ostensibly for cost cutting reasons, leaving that department a bit short-handed.

Whether Mangini had anything to do with those firings isn’t exactly clear although the timing relative to his hire suggests that he at least knew it was coming and wasn’t of a mind to stop it. But what is far more clear is that Mangini, as major king domo, is now responsible for the approved messaging emanating from Berea.

It’s pretty apparent how that’s going. Listen to a Mangini press conference, if you can. It’s as painful as watching the Browns play on Sundays. Mangini steps to the microphone with a few opening remarks of little consequence and then spends the rest of the time either ignoring questions completely or giving half answers, at best. It’s a pretty damning display, really, and sets the overall organizational tone of don’t ask and don’t tell.

The Browns are in crisis and instead of addressing it publicly, directly and honestly, they’ve developed a bunker mentality befitting of the head coach who apparently came out of the womb believing that the other babies in the nursery were trying to steal his secrets about potty training.

Surely Mangini’s communications about the various quarterback changes throughout this season is a prime example. From treating the identity of his season opening quarterback as a state secret to explaining his various rationales for the subsequent benches has been loopy enough to leave even the most cynical among us aghast.

Then there’s been the whole George Kokinis was he fired or is he just in hiding thing. But as it turns out, these are just the tip of the iceberg. For the kids in college, the handling of the so-called protest being “organized” by a pair of long time fans serves as a case study in Public Relations 101 on exactly what not to do.

Anyone with a lick of sense knows these so-called fan protests are as trite and cliché as the bets that the mayors of the opposing cities make at Super Bowl time. Such protests never work on a large scale because the last thing most ticket-buying fans want to do when their team is in the toilet is call attention to the fact that they were dumb enough to buy the tickets in the first place. As for those fans who aren’t currently funding the enterprise, what do they have to complain about anyway?

Properly ignored, this protest would have died its natural death. In a nutshell here is how the Browns handled it instead. Lerner met with the two for a couple of hours and let them know that he really cares about the franchise and really wants to get it right. We know that not because Lerner or anyone associated with the team told us but because that’s what the two “fans” told us. It’s an interesting approach, public relations practiced one person at a time.

Given how quickly the Browns fan base has been dwindling the last few years, meeting with every remaining fan with an ax to grind probably isn’t the overwhelming task it once might have been. But is that really the best way to win the hearts and minds of those you’re asking to pay to clean up your messes?

Instead of getting out ahead of the story and shaping the message in a way they wanted it shaped, the Browns through the sheer incompetence allowed the two fans to become the team’s unofficial spokesmen instead. And their message: Randy’s a good guy who cares but nothing he said convinced us we’re wrong so guess what, we’re protesting anyway.

More strategically, though, Lerner going rogue on this demonstrated that it’s not just the big things the Browns get wrong, it’s the little things, too. Lerner essentially gave legitimacy to a nonsensical protest that always had far less traction than imagined by giving them a personal forum. Now these two have become the face of the franchise and Lerner’s little talking act all but guaranteed that they’ll be the face of this week’s broadcast, and not in a good way. There’s a way for an owner to connect directly with the fans but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.

Lerner would have been far better served by using Bill Bonsiewicz, the team’s spokesman, or, better yet, the services of a real expert crisis communicator to develop a more thoughtful plan for addressing fan frustration.

Had that happened, the meeting might still have taken place but certainly not in the way it did, privately and without follow-up. If Lerner really is the frustrated fan committed to righting this ship isn’t it better to hear that directly and constantly instead of indirectly and randomly through emails and unofficial sources?

But because Lerner knows more about scarves than he does organizational development it’s never occurred to him that having Mangini at the top of the pyramid, especially with George Kokinis in witness protection, essentially puts Mangini in charge of still another team function for which he’s uniquely unqualified.

The Browns are a public relations challenge but no more so than any number of other teams, all of whom suffer from the same problem—organizational incompetence. Years of bad decisions piled one upon the other are what cause teams or companies to tank like a Lindsey Lohan movie. But the problems aren’t insurmountable.

In the law, there’s a saying that if you don’t have the facts in your favor, argue the law. If you don’t have the law in your favor, argue the facts. If you don’t have either in your favor, argue public policy. Right now all the Browns have to argue is public policy and instead they clam up because that’s the personal comfort zone of their football czar. It’s a strategy that isn’t serving either him or the team any better than the team’s draft strategy last spring.

Doomed to Fail

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:57:00 +0000

To say that Cleveland Browns head coach Eric Mangini looks foolish again is to state the obvious. To say that this is the time he needs to look the opposite is to state the impossible.

Mangini, in the midst of the biggest crisis of his professional life and apparently hanging on to his current job by the strength of his lower bicuspids, used his bye week judiciously and proved it on Monday by declining to name a starting quarterback for next Monday’s game against Baltimore. And a whole fan base and the entire NFL just shook its heads and said “sheesh.”.

What’s the rush, really? Mangini claims he’ll address this in a few days because, among other things, he hasn’t talked with his quarterbacks yet. Apparently George Kokinis took the team’s phone book with him when he was escorted out a week ago. Brady, Derek, if you’re reading, coach needs your cell phone number, fast.

Naming a quarterback for this team at this point is like the governor picking out a turkey to pardon at Thanksgiving, except that the lucky turkey in this case is the one who gets to sit back and wear a ball cap during the game without worrying that Mangini will ruin his career further. But if past is prologue, and it is in this case, Mangini will end up sparing neither and sacrificing both. He is just that random, or foolish, take your pick.

With the second half beckoning, this can’t be at all what Mangini envisioned when it all began during the halcyon days of mid July. Then Mangini was a known commodity begging for both patience and the latitude not to be judged by his past mistakes in New York.

Four months later, patience has been pushed to their breaking point but at least he’s not being judged by his past mistakes from his New York days. He’s committed so many new ones in his short time here to put his job in jeopardy that it’s hard to remember why he was canned in New York. Oh yea, it was for treating the players like pawns, for being sneaky and subversive and, generally, for losing the respect of everyone in the building. Ok, some things are hard to escape.

It could be, though, that the reason that Mangini can’t decide whether the lowest rated quarterback in the league, two seasons running, deserves still another chance is because he’s been preoccupied with reports about owner Randy Lerner’s sudden fascination with credibility. The news that Lerner may be targeting former Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Holmgren to run the football operations in Cleveland can’t be seen as good news to or for Mangini.

Holmgren would indeed bring instant credibility to the Cleveland organization and would send the rest of the NFL, busy doubled over laughing at the Browns at the moment, a message that Lerner really is serious this time about improving his franchise’s prospects.

In some ways, the story of Holmgren is the story that Mangini is trying to carve out for himself. Like Mangini, Holmgren never played at the professional football, though he was drafted. Instead, Holmgren’s entrée into the NFL was through a series of coaching jobs starting with high school. He moved on to be the quarterbacks coach of Brigham Young before being hired as quarterbacks coach of the San Francisco 49ers. From there he went on to be head coach of Green Bay before taking the combined job of head coach and general manager of the Seattle Seahawks.

Ultimately, the combined job proved to be too much for Holmgren, just as it was with Butch Davis. Holmgren resigned his general manager’s job in 2002. That move proved to be beneficial to both Holmgren and the Seahawks. From 2002 until the 2008 season, the Seahawks didn’t have a losing record and went to the playoffs each season. In 2005 the Seahawks lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl.

The overriding question for those still invested in Mangini is whether a similar future awaits, particularly when you consider the parallels. From where things currently stand, that’s highly doubtful and for one overriding reason, Mangini himself.

This is precisely the time for Mangini to fall on whatever sword he’s been carrying and act like he’s learned something through this mess. Instead of seeing someone like Holmgren as an ally with whom he has much in common, Mangini more than likely will set the impeding relationship ablaze.

It’s not as if Mangini doesn’t have a track record of doing just that. He burned his bridges with Bill Belichick and then Mike Tannebaum, except when it comes to trades. Then Tannebaum extracts his revenge by fleecing Mangini at every turn. There’s also the little bridge burning Mangini just completed with George Kokinis and, for good measure, his former assistant, Erin O’Brien. These aren’t isolated examples. They’re a trend. At least his Christmas card list is manageable.

Then, of course, is the rest of the story.

Whatever Mangini’s success had been pre-NFL, his actual NFL experience has been very suspect. A hard worker, certainly, he’s learned a lot about Xs and Os by watching a lot of film. It’s a solitary experience that sequestered him from having to establish the people skills necessary to effectively translate that knowledge to those responsible for execution. It shows. He knows virtually nothing about handling actual people. As a result whatever book smarts he’s acquired hasn’t translated to success, particularly at the head coaching level. More importantly, though, he’s shown no capacity for change, either.

Having flamed out in New York all he’s done in Cleveland is ratchet up the paranoia as if that was the problem. Mangini’s biggest blind spot is that he thinks if he just keeps talking about his “process” and how long it will take enough times, everyone will magically buy in as if he’s really discovered cold fusion.

The reason no one is buying into what Mangini is selling of course has everything to do with the lack of respect he shows for those who he courts. Frankly, Mangini thinks the players aren’t real bright and can’t tell a ham from a wienie. Jamal Lewis, as established a veteran as exists in the league, candidly admitted that halfway through the season even he doesn’t understand what Mangini’s trying to accomplish.

Imagine, then, how any of the number of rookies on this team must feel. All they know of the NFL at the moment is that head coaches covet power, hate the media, and play games with players’ psyches as if it’s a blood sport. It would be one thing if sooner or later Mangini’s little mind games and overriding personality deficiencies revealed themselves to have some higher purpose. Instead it all just comes across as a guy in way over his head, which is exactly what he is.

If Mangini really had the capacity to change, he would have understood why he failed in New York and actually applied a few lessons learned. Instead, he views his New York experience a success on which to build. Pity.

When Mangini came in and immediately isolated Shaun Rogers, it made it seem like a matter of miscommunication. Everyone, myself included, gave Mangini the benefit of the doubt and essentially labeled Rogers immature, a narrative that fit with his experience in Detroit.

Instead and in context, the Rogers incident was heavy with foreshadowing. It may very well be that Mangini just didn’t see the big guy when they were at the same charity function. But given how much disdain Mangini seems to have with everyone lower than him in the food chain (and that includes pretty much everyone but the owner), it makes sense.

The point though is not to revisit the Rogers incident so much as it is to highlight exactly why Mangini won’t be able to co-exist with someone who will exercise real authority.

If indeed Holmgren comes to Cleveland or even if it’s any of the other names being bandied about, don’t look for Mangini to survive. Lerner may be saying that in his view Mangini will be back in 2010. But the lawyer in me sees the lawyer in him and just knows that Lerner’s parsing his words knowing full well it will be someone else’s decision.

Lingering Items--Lerner Finds His Keyboard Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:23:00 +0000

For anyone still clamoring to understand the root of the dysfunction related to the Cleveland Browns, just reference back the George Kokinis soap opera of this past week as your handy reference guide.

What exactly happened inside the walls of Berea and the minds of the participants is being guarded as if it’s a state secret on the level of troop deployment plans in Afghanistan. Check that, far more is known about troop deployment plans in Afghanistan.

Owner Randy Lerner is now saying Kokinis wasn’t fired as the Browns stick-figure general manager and no one is saying Kokinis voluntarily resigned. And while the notion that these two facts can only co-exist if Kokinis is, in fact, still employed by the Browns as its general manager, we now know that isn’t the case either. Yet Eric Mangini has nothing substantive to say on this topic, Lerner has been his usual ambiguous self and Kokinis, apparently, as entered some sort of witness protection program.

This is the essence of what makes Lerner a bad owner, despite his apparent passion for the team. He will talk in generalities about plans and leaders and credibility and then will exhibit none of those qualities himself as he’ll have underlings escort Kokinis out of the building as if this miserable season rested entirely on his shoulders without bothering to explain it to anyone in a way that makes sense.

It’s all well and good that Lerner met with a couple of self-promoting fans in a quasi-public relations gesture to let them know how much he cares, but it’s not all well and good that the house is burning to the ground and Lerner won’t explain not only how it happened but how he let it happened.

My guess is that the various legal entanglements of the parties is at the root of why the Browns are, once again, coming across as incompetent rubes practically anyone with a lick of senses believes they are.

This is speculation, of course, but it’s not as if the puzzle pieces are that hard to fit together. Lerner hired Kokinis as general manager at the behest of Mangini, ostensibly giving him final authority over football issues. Mangini, knowing that he really controlled everything in Berea from the paintings on the walls to the texture of the toilet paper, has been very visible in exercising that control. Whatever initial friction that may have created, and it likely created a bunch, it certainly had to boil over when Mangini traded Braylon Edwards, ostensibly without any help our input from Kokinis.

Now take a look at this from the various perspectives. Lerner thinks that maybe Kokinis isn’t doing what he was being paid to do, being that credible, front office leader of the team he thought he gave a 5-year, $1 million per year contract. Kokinis, on the other hand, is thinking that somewhere along the line he was misled about his true role. Then there is Mangini, the Machiavellian manipulator, asserting authority he felt was implied if not overtly stated.

As things have come to a head, what’s really revealed is that this is just the usual food fight that breaks out when an owner like Lerner doesn’t put together a clearly defined plan with clearly defined roles and then spends something more than a token amount of time overseeing it. Frankly, it’s not really any different than the fight that pushed John Collins out as president and vested complete power in former general manager Phil Savage.

Now, of course, not having learned from history, the same mistakes are being repeated, although this wasn’t so much an unwarranted power grab like Collins was making so much as it is about Kokinis trying to get Lerner and Mangini to live up to what was promised.

Lerner would love to paint Kokinis’ departing as a discharge for cause because it would save him money. But his legal folks are surely telling him that the charge won’t stick. Thus the reluctance to suggest publicly that Kokinis was fired for any sort of misconduct. Kokinis, on the other hand, is trying to ensure that Lerner honors the contract and pays him what is due, probably the most reasonable request being made. Mangini, meanwhile, just wants to be left alone with his “process” that “will take time” unencumbered by such petty concepts as “fans” or “competence” or “accountability” or “credibility” or, you get the picture.

If this strikes anyone at all that this whole thing has been handled by a bunch of rank amateurs, that’s because it should. The truth in all this isn’t really hard to discern as it was evident from the outset. There was abject role confusion the minute Lerner allowed himself to be manipulated by Mangini into hiring Kokinis in the first place. Maybe Lerner really felt this would all work because that’s what Mangini told him and Lerner, at a very basic level, is a wide-eyed optimist. Maybe Kokinis felt the same way. But all of this depended on Mangini allowing it to work just as it was written. That was never going to happen and if Lerner had really ever bothered to ask someone at the time, like Mangini’s former boss in New York, he would have known it before he ever had the contract drawn up.

**

It was interesting to read that Mangini expects to, once again, be involved in hiring the next general manager. It’s unclear whether that’s Lerner’s expectation as well because he isn’t talking, just typing. But if it comes to pass in just that fashion, then Lerner would be well advised not to give this new figurehead anything more than a one-year contract because that next hire is likewise doomed to fail. Given that inevitability, the last thing Lerner needs at the moment is to be paying off still another multi-million, multi-year contract for someone who didn’t deserve it in the first place.

One of the most puzzling aspects of this whole institutional goofiness is that Lerner seems hell-bent on making the same mistakes time and again as if he’s conducting his own personal game of chicken with his psyche.

Mangini in his first year of what looks like it will be a multi-year effort to bury this franchise once and for all has done nothing to earn him the courtesy of offering up dinner recommendations, let alone recommendations on who his next boss should be. As I wrote previously, Mangini should be the last person consulted about this issue. Mangini picking his own boss is what put Lerner in this pickle in the fist place.

If Lerner can’t see that it was Mangini all along who was responsible for the implosion of this past week, then court action should ensue and the franchise placed in receivership. More importantly, he also should have his “guy’s guy” permit revoked as it would be obvious that he’s never watched “The Godfather Saga” let alone learned anything from it.

Mangini is Hyman Roth trying to orchestrate everything behind the scenes in order to feather his own nest. It was Roth who tried to kill Michael. It was Roth who tried to kill Frankie Pantangelo and make it look like it was Michael. It was Roth who was behind the congressional investigation into Michael. Michael almost realized it too late.

In the same way, the Browns’ problems right now stem from Mangini trying to orchestrate some sort of grand plan that puts himself front and center of everything brown and orange in this town. When Mangini quickly figured that Lerner wasn’t keen to a Butch Davis-like front office, it was Mangini who got Kokinis hired to be his boss. It was Mangini who kept Kokinis from taking a public role with the franchise in favor of the dis-and mis- approach to doling out information. It was Mangini who kept Kokinis out of the loop on the personnel decisions. And for his final masterstroke, it was Mangini who made it all look like it was Kokinis’ fault. Well played.

It’s hard to know exactly Mangini’s end game, mainly because he’s never going to capture the hearts and minds of these fans. But if he ends up getting some equity in the franchise then you’ll know “the process” is nearly complete.

Lerner can choose to find his inner Michael and wake up now or continue the blissful bizarro slumber that has caused him to see green when the light is screaming red.

Unfortunately, Lerner seems to have chosen to remain asleep. For now he’s telling people, albeit through curt written responses to emailed questions, that he expects Mangini to be around in 2010 as well. Maybe that’s just to present a picture of relative stability for the moment and maybe it’s because there really isn’t a better answer to give at the moment.

Here’s one piece of advice that Lerner ignores at his own peril: if Mangini shows up at your door telling you that he’s subbing for your regular driver you walk out to get your newspaper, wear a flak jacket.

**

One of the growing myths about this whole debacle is that those who clamor for immediate regime change are just too impatient to be taken seriously. Far from it.

Although the history of the league is full of one-season turnarounds, by now pretty much anyone whose ever seen a NFL game recognizes that the Browns are years away from being competitive. Immediate results aren’t expected, immediate improvement is.

Look at last season for a moment to grasp the concept. At the halfway point, the Browns were 3-5. But only two of those losses, to Baltimore and Dallas, were by more than two scores. This season, five of their seven losses have been by more than two scores. It was not until the season fell apart amid quarterback and other injuries that the Browns became the total patsies they were in that final season 31-0 loss against Pittsburgh.

No one expected this year to be a playoff year, but surely Mangini could come in and turn some of those near losses into wins and keep most of the rest of the games competitive. Instead, his team put together his way with his players is the football equivalent of baseball’s Washington Nationals or maybe football’s equivalent of basketball’s Washington Generals. And with injuries stacking up likes planes above LaGuardia, there is no reason to think that the rest of the season will suddenly be a burst of sunshine.

This is the high crime and misdemeanor that Mangini has committed. He can talk all he wants about processes and doing things right but I’ve yet to hear a cogent reason why the Browns had to first become the league laughingstock in order to make that happen. Lerner may be getting laughed at these last few days from the national media because of all the dysfunction is light touch has brought. But it won’t be nothing compared to what happens if he allows this same train to leave the station next year.

**

One of the bigger non-stories floating around Browns’ camp this week has to do with Jamal Lewis’ retirement plans. It seemed like a story when Lewis let the cat out of that bag following last week’s perfunctory beat down. Now, of course, we’ve been subjected to an interminable number of are you really serious questions.

For the record, Lewis says he is definitely retiring no matter what. He appears to be frustrated by the season, but who wouldn’t be? Still, his retirement plans don’t appear to be related to the circus atmosphere in Berea so much as they relate to his truly diminishing skills.

One of the biggest problems with the Browns has been their lack of a viable running attack. Lewis had a nice first season in Cleveland and showed he had plenty left in the tank then. But the last few seasons have definitely shown the rigors of a decade long career.

Lewis always struck me as a final piece kind of guy and not someone to build a running game around for the next several years. In large part, that’s why he was signed by Savage. Unfortunately, when 2007 didn’t yield the playoffs, the Browns essentially switched course with Lewis and made him more of a long-term pick up. Now, of course, the Browns are woefully short at running back, even with Lewis on the roster.

As hard as it is to believe, there are only 3 tailbacks on the active roster, Lewis, Jerome Harrison and Chris Jennings. Lewis was finished before the season started, Harrison can’t seem to convince the coaches that he’s anything more than a change of pace runner and Jennings hasn’t seen any action. Maybe James Davis is the answer in waiting, as long as he can keep clear of post-practice skills sessions, whatever the hell that means.

We can talk about the quarterback situation until the last word has been written but has anyone checked into exactly how the Browns are going to build a viable running attack with this mess of a roster, especially with all of the other holes that also need to be plugged? No doubt there is a “plan” and a “process” for addressing this but just like everything else, fans are left to shoot in the dark as to what it is.

**

It’s the bye week. Get outside this weekend and enjoy the time away. You deserve it. But as you do so, here’s this week’s question to ponder: Who will be favored when the Browns face Detroit?

A Shakespearean Mess

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:38:00 +0000

It’s highly unlikely that anyone looks at Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner’s firing of general manager George Kokinis as anything more than a bone thrown to a salivating dawg pound. They may not spit it back out but it won’t solve their hunger problems either unless this is just a start and not an end.

Kokinis was the quintessential figurehead, hired to perform a job that lacked any coherent description. In his role as general manager, he performed roughly the same job that an exterior set on the Universal Studios lot performs. With the camera angle straight on, he looked like a general manager. Move that angle in either direction and it was apparent he was just a façade, someone constructed from plywood and paneling nails to look like a general manager. Three dimensional? He barely was two dimensional.

Kokinis probably never really had much of a chance to succeed in Cleveland. The circumstances of his hire never made any sense to anyone other than, perhaps, Eric Mangini, Kokinis and Lerner, in that order. Mangini got the weak hand of oversight a paranoid control freak craves. Kokinis got a nice title and a bigger paycheck. Lerner got peace of mind knowing that he did his job and brought in “football people.”

It’s funny how everyone not named Mangini, Kokinis or Lerner saw that this was a disaster in the making before any of the protagonists. Sure, there have been the occasional apologists and wishful thinkers. But as the season slides down an ever deepening and slicker cliff, even the most ardent are beginning to finally fathom that wreckage awaits the end of this ride.

The reason Mangini couldn’t recognize the problem he constructed is because he’s convinced he invented the sport and there’s nothing left for him to learn from anyone. Lerner didn’t know better because his thought processes are so malleable that he was easily manipulated in a way that he came to not just share but embrace Mangini’s self-created aura.

There’s a book or two to be written about this Browns season and if any of the parties are really ready to speak about it on the record and for attribution, they can give me a call. I’d be more than happy to write it and might even if they won’t cooperate. In all my years following every Cleveland professional sports team (ok, not every team, I wasn’t a fan of the Force or either of the two Arena Football teams) there’s never been a season this fascinating, even if it has been for all the wrong reasons.

It’s a Shakespearean tragedy being played out in real time. Lerner is King Lear, moneyed and aching to retire somewhere calmer. Mangini is at least Edmund, scheming to overcome his bastard status as the guy that never played professional football and got his start as a ball boy. King Lear, the play, didn’t end well for either of those characters and if the Berea adaptation continues to play out unencumbered by subsequent events it likely will end up much the same way—with Lerner going insane and Mangini being betrayed.

This is the time to begin encumbering those subsequent events. Lerner can save his sanity even if Mangini’s fate is sealed. Lerner, as I’ve already suggested, can actually construct a viable plan around which he can get out of this mess and then retire gracefully to England, faculties in tact.

Mangini, with the Kokinis firing on the heals of the Erin O’Brien firing, is just burning more bridges in a bit of a Sherman-through-Georgia career. He already burnished two allies here in Cleveland to save his shaky status. He alienated himself from anyone associated with the New York Jets before he got here and, for good measure, turned on his mentor and benefactor, Bill Belichick and his regime in New England, too. If there’s anyone left in the NFL to piss off, rest assured Mangini will get that done. It is, after all, part of his process.

Where this all is going to is that Mangini is quickly become a leper among institutional NFL types and has been banished to his own private Idaho. Lerner, who hasn’t shown himself to be a quick or savvy student of internal NFL politics, hasn’t yet figured that part out. When Lerner finally has that palm-of-the-hand-slap-to-the-head moment, Mangini will be gone, too. It’s the path Mangini has laid for himself and as he walks it, wreaking havoc and damage on the way, no one will shed a tear when he disappears from view.

The one thing that should worry Browns’ fans most right now is how Lerner will go about repairing this mess. He’s not shown any affinity to fixing anything, only an affinity for being easily manipulated. It’s more than fair to suggest that Lerner shouldn’t even try. Instead, he should delegate this task to someone beyond question, an Ernie Accorsi-type (although Accorsi denies he’s coming out of retirement). But even having Lerner find that type brings far more risk than most should be comfortable with.

There is a lot of speculation at the moment that Bernie Kosar may be the person Lerner ultimately turns to as the franchise fixer. As much as Kosar remains a fan favorite, there’s nothing in his background that suggests he’s the right guy for that job. In fact, there’s more in his background that suggests he’s not.

That’s not to besmirch Kosar and the troubles he’s had in his post-football professional and personal life so much as it is to point out that if Lerner thinks he can curry favor with the fan base by leveraging Kosar’s fading status in Cleveland as the new face of the team in some sort of quick fix move, the fans won’t be so easily fooled.

Anyone listening to Kosar on pre-season broadcasts can’t help but be impressed by his deep knowledge of offensive Xs and Os. They also heard Kosar be brutally honest at times about the sorry state of affairs, even in preseason. It was refreshing. But that doesn’t mean Kosar has an eye for talent, just an eye for schemes. Right now this franchise is so talent-deprived in every aspect of its operations, a person like Kosar will be easily overwhelmed.

The dire straights of this team need a far more experienced eye. If Ozzie Newsome really can’t be bought (and I’m betting someone like Dan Gilbert could find a way to make that purchase), then Lerner needs to turn to someone like Bill Cowher, not as the head coach but as the club president. Cowher doesn’t strike me as someone eager to get back on the field anyway. But given a chance to run a franchise, and perhaps get a piece of the ownership in the process, Cowher could very well be lured out of retirement. I don’t buy into the notion that the Browns are beyond hope. To the right person, the chance to run this franchise right remains an alluring opportunity.

But whichever way this needs to go, Lerner would be well advised not to rush the decision this time. Lerner needs to really go through a credible, thoughtful and deliberate process (that damn word again) to get that person. Whether it’s Newsome, Cowher or someone else, it has to be someone above reproach. This franchise can be turned around and if the fans have demonstrated anything to this point, it’s that they will buy into a realistic, credible plan. Not something cobbled together by a discredited coach who probably doesn’t even trust his mother.

Coming Out of the Closet

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:17:00 +0000

Writer’s Note: Although the following column was written before Randy Lerner fired general manager George Kokinis, nothing much else has changed. How do you fire someone who was never really there in the first place? All Lerner did was save some money, maybe, although that never seems to be much of a concern as the money he’s currently paying all the former coaches and front office types still his payroll could probably push the Cleveland Indians into the top third of baseball payrolls. Although the Browns haven’t commented on the Kokinis firing other than to confirm it, speculation is that Kokinis was offended by Lerner’s public comments about the team seeking a credible front office leader. Why Kokinis would be offended by that statement is anyone’s guess. He had to know from the outset that the circumstances of his hiring made him neither credible nor a leader. Lerner was just speaking the truth. With him gone a void still exists, no less or no more than when the day began on Monday. As for where this leaves Mangini, just picture Michael Corleone in the Godfather as the world around him begins to close in.
Apparently both Eric Mangini and Randy Lerner have a gag reflex. And, as should be expected when dysfunction is the chief characteristic of their operating manual, they are on the wrong page again.

Mangini finally saw enough of Derek Anderson on Sunday to realize that simply saying an improvement is happening, even if you’re saying it over and over, doesn’t mean it’s actually happening. After seemingly hitting rock bottom two weeks ago against the Green Bay Packers, Anderson proved that there are still more depths to plumb against Chicago. With 3 minutes remaining, even Mangini couldn’t stand to see anymore and put in Brady Quinn.

Sure, the Browns had already been embarrassed again and sure the move, in context, didn’t make any sense. But in a season where nothing else has made sense, this was just another twig on the pile. In actuality it was probably Mangini making a point to offensive coordinator Brian Daboll about disastrous weekly game. It was the wrong point.

The right one came from Lerner, the most elusive of owners, finally coming out of the closet to witness the massacre for himself from a field-level tunnel inside of Chicago’s Soldier Field.

After the game, Lerner finally dropped word that he has seen enough. Not enough, perhaps, to fire Mangini, but enough to say that at 1-7 heading into the bye week, this team has regressed to the point that the season thus far has been a near total waste for everyone involved, coaches, fans, and players. Now Lerner wants to install a credible voice at the top of the organization. Apparently that means Mangini is neither credible nor omnipotent.

Whoa, Randy, not so fast.

It’s not news anymore that Lerner more than anyone else is to blame for the sorry state of affairs. I was suspicious of the hiring of Eric Mangini from the outset and said so because of the half-assed process Lerner used to make that decision. Feeling burned by the hiring of Romeo Crennel, a lifelong assistant repeatedly passed over for head coaching jobs, Lerner felt he needed an experienced head coach and needed him NOW. When Mangini was suddenly available after being fired by the New York Jets, Lerner pounced like an alcoholic at a beer truck and negotiated against himself to hire someone no one else wanted anyway.

To further compound the problem, he hired Mangini before he could even put in place a general manager. Then Lerner let Mangini hire his own general manager, which put the Claude Rains of general managers, George Kokinis, in the unenviable position of being beholden to Mangini instead of it being the other way around.

It’s fascinating that 8 games into the season when another year has been lost and perhaps more, Lerner is just now starting to see the errors of his ways and articulating answers before he truly understands that the problem lies deep within. It’s just as fascinating that Lerner will be meeting with the two fans trying to organize a protest for the Monday night game against Baltimore. If Lerner is doing it to stave off an insurrection, then he’s miscalculated again. Whether or not this little protest would ever have gained much traction, Lerner has long since lost a generation of fans over the sheer incompetence that has exemplified the operations in Berea since his father bought the team.

As fascinating and troubling as this all is, just know that one of the few positives of this miserable season is that Lerner has arrived at the party, finally. He may be late. He may not even realize that he’s late. But he’s now at the party and continuing to beat him up for being standoffish about the whole thing initially is mostly beside the point.

Taking Lerner just at his few words, he seems to get it. He seems to really, finally, understand that hiring Mangini was a mistake, at least without pairing Mangini with an even stronger voice to whom he has to report.

If you accept as fact, as I do, that Lerner has no plans on selling the team, then this time is really best used to help Lerner help himself. The two so-called fan representatives with whom he plans on meeting is a nice public relations play but it won’t help the cause. There’s been enough of the “I’ve been a fan for X years and this is just sad” kind of comments. What Lerner needs is advice and not just on who to hire next. The advice he needs is far more fundamental. Here’s some:

First, before concluding that he’s going to keep Mangini or his sock-puppet boss George Kokinis, and before landing on whomever he wants to run this franchise, Lerner needs to do more than a little soul-searching. He needs to grab himself a yellow pad, a ball point pen, and lock himself inside his home office or whatever man cave he retreats to when he wants to contemplate the cosmos.

Alone, he must use the time wisely. He’s 47 years of age, now is the time to find out what he stands for as a person. What are his core values? What does he expect from himself not just as a business person but as a member of this planet? He may think this is unnecessary. He may think it’s mindless. But he ignores it at his own peril because it fundamentally sets up what is to come next.

Second, Lerner has to translate those deep thoughts to this business. He needs to ask himself what the Cleveland Browns should stand for? What should its core values be? Are he and his team on the same page? If they aren’t how can he expect anyone associated with the team to work in concert? It’s time for Lerner, alone, to set the tone for this franchise based on what he’s all about.

Part of the problem with Lerner all along is that he’s let everyone from Butch Davis to Phil Savage to Romeo Crennel to Eric Mangini and God knows how many others tell him what his team should stand for. But everyone of these fine ideas spun out of control because the person at the controls, Lerner, never was given a map. As a wise men once told me, if you don’t know where you’re going anywhere will get you there. For too long, Lerner has been about trying to accomplish what someone else wants done. It’s why progress never gets made. There is no measuring stick.

It’s easy for those looking for a job to mouth words like “excellence,” “discipline,” “pride.” But everyone has their own definitions of what that means. Lerner’s task is first and foremost to define those values for himself and his franchise and then interview anyone seeking employment with his team, from the top job to the next ball boy-head-coach-in-training, against those principles. Don’t test them to see if they say the right things. Make them show you in word and deed that they are completely in sync with what you want to accomplish. If they aren’t move on to the next candidate.

Second, once having decided what he and his franchise truly are about, he should fire Mangini. This may seem somewhat inconsistent with the first point until you realize that no matter what Lerner stands for Mangini doesn’t.

Mangini lost his job in New York because the owner felt he lost the locker room. In Cleveland he never got it. True, every new coach has to earn it, but Mangini thus far has shown no capacity of cracking that barrier. The players, as is their wont, were skeptical of him coming in and all he’s done since is give them reasons to be more skeptical. He treats the media, who, after all, serve only as a proxy for the fans, with derision. His thought processes are just random enough to keep everyone ill-informed. His system of discipline is sophomoric. In short, Mangini treats no one with the dignity and respect he demands for himself.

You don’t need to take my word for all of this, just listen to the words of players like Jamal Lewis. He’s been around enough coaches and enough situations to know that when something’s not right, it’s wrong.

Lewis, emotional after the Chicago game to the point of announcing his retirement, summed up well what the rest of us have been trying to tell Lerner for some time now. As Lewis said, “I don’t know what’s going on. In the past, where I’ve been, that has never happened.” Lewis then said that the players supposedly bought into the Mangini system in training camp, but then it all just mostly fell apart in the blur of loss after loss after loss after loss.

Taking some pains not to completely blame Mangini, Lewis nevertheless essentially did, explaining that he doesn’t understand what Mangini is trying to accomplish on either side of the ball. Amen. No one does.

Third, if Lerner can’t find it in his heart or his wallet to dump Mangini now, then at least have him dump Brian Daboll, as overmatched of an offensive coordinator as there ever has been in the league.

Mangini gave Daboll the job because Daboll used to coach the quarterbacks in New York. That in and of itself is stunning but probably explains why Brett Favre is in Minnesota. All Daboll has done here is take two quarterbacks, one very average and the other completely untested, and made them worse. Derek Anderson looks as if he’s never played the pro game and Brady Quinn is so robotic and mechanical in his approach that it’s difficult to remember that he used to be able to make athletic plays when he was in college.

Daboll appears to be trying to establish a rushing attack but his play calling during each game is so scattershot that not even his own players can figure it out. Rather than view the Wildcat formation, for example, as a component piece to a broader attack, Daboll treats it like a gimmick and it shows. As a corollary, Daboll treats Josh Cribbs like he’s a gimmicky player, as if he’s the reincarnation of Kordell Stewart.

It’s unlikely that Daboll has ever had a player quite like Cribbs and that shows, too. By not figuring out any cohesive way to use him on offense, the only time Cribbs plays like he’s not confused is when he’s returning punts or kicks.

Finally, Lerner needs to go with his instinct and hire an experienced football executive and plant him on top of the pyramid, but only after first defining the franchise for himself. There is one proviso to all of this, assuming he does end up keeping Mangini: don’t seek any input from Mangini on who this person should be or the role he should have. Indeed, the person Lerner chooses should make Mangini uncomfortable and sweat profusely. Mangini carries himself with an odd sense of entitlement and job security when he’s earned neither. It’s time that Mangini understand that he isn’t the smartest person in the room, not even close.

As advice goes, it’s really pretty simple stuff yet so elusive for Lerner. The overarching problem with Lerner all along is that he fundamentally hasn’t put his imprint on this franchise. Instead he’s delegated to others these fundamentally non-delegable duties. He uses his fear of public speaking as a crutch when all it’s really doing is masking who he is and what he stands for. It’s a mistake and always has been.

This is his chance to finally get it right. But it all starts with him. It always has.

Bring on the Bye Week

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:06:00 +0000

For as much controversy that has swirls around the Cleveland Browns, and this past week was no different with owner Randy Lerner letting it be known that this team could desperately use a legitimate football man as its franchise leader, there were some reasons for the naïve among us to at least be optimistic about the matchup with the Chicago Bears on Sunday.

After all, the Browns had won 3 of their last 4 against the Bears. Then there was the fact that the Browns were 9-4 lifetime against the Bears. There also was the fact that the Bears were coming off a humiliating loss to the Cincinnati Bengals and were perhaps taking the woeful Browns a little too lightly. And if none of that was good enough, then there was always the hope and a wish that things couldn’t possibly get worse.

Depending on your perspective, things didn’t get worse, if only because that would be impossible. They didn’t get much better either, unless you consider progress as measured by a semi-inspired effort by the league’s worst defense coupled with the fact that Derek Anderson may have taken his last snap in Cleveland. Even then, the Browns still were manhandled by another NFC North team, losing 30-6 in a game that was closer than it should have been, considering the Browns turned it over 5, count ‘em 5, times.

Credit for the relatively close score goes mostly to defensive coordinator Rob Ryan. Ryan, one of the best quotes and more fascinating coaches in the league, had his defense constantly pressuring Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, sacking him 4 times. It didn’t keep the Bears from scoring more than enough points but it did give Bears fans something further to consider, like maybe they really did get the wrong end of the Kyle Orton/Jay Culer trade. Ryan’s edge-of-the-cliff game plan kept the Browns in it, technically, until the roof fell in for good during the fourth quarter.

And fall in it did. After trailing the bears 16-0 at the half, the Browns had an opportunity to get back into the game quickly in the second half.

After the defense held the Bears to a quick 3-and-out to start the half, the Bears’ first punt by Brad Maynard was nullified by a penalty. His second punt was shanked like an 22-handicapper’s 4 iron and traveled 12 yards, giving the Browns the ball at the Bears’ 30-yard line.

And for one of the few times this season, the Browns stared at good fortune and didn’t blink. Jamal Lewis, taking advantage of gaping holes along the Bears’ defensive line, ran for 13 yards on first down, added 6 more on his next run and another 10 yards after that. Anderson then snuck it in from inside the 1-yard line. The Phil Dawson extra point was blocked and the Browns trailed 16-6.

The defense then held serve on the Bears’ next possession. Maynard this time hit a nice punt which the Bears downed at the Cleveland 1-yard line. The Browns were able to move it out of the shadow of the end zone on a nice Jerome Harrison run but the drive died three plays later.

There was still nearly 7 minutes left in the game but it was at this spot where most other games have died. The offense, having done something positive for one of the few times this season, had just seen its momentum come to a screeching halt. The defense, though, was doing its best to make sure it didn’t happen, containing Cutler and a Bears offense that was more stagnant than stunning. If only the Browns’ offense could respond.

And just when it seemed it might, a pass from Anderson to Heiden that looked to extend a key drive was fumbled by Heiden and picked up by Manning. For as hard as it had been playing, the defense looked spent and dispirited after the fumble. It gave up a 31-yard pass from Cutler to Johnny Knox that took the ball to the Cleveland 10-yard drive and then Forte drove home that fact with a 10-yard touchdown run that helped give the Bears a 23-6 lead with just under two minutes left in the third quarter.

Not quite dead but clearly dying, the Browns looked to have something going on their next drive but it wasn’t much. The drive and the team died its natural death at the Bears’ 27-yard line when a 4th and 1 pass by Anderson to Heiden fell incomplete, giving the Bears the opportunity to put the game away for good.

The Bears couldn’t do it, at least not initially. Cutler, after seeing one pass almost intercepted, saw his luck run out two plays later when Brodney Pool intercepted a pass off a Kaluka Maiava tip, giving the Browns the ball at the Bears 35-yard line.

Anderson then completed his best pass of the day, a 19-yarder to Mohamed Massaquoi, but Massaquoi fumbled it and the Bears recovered. It was the Browns’ 4th turnover of the game.

This time the Bears put the game away for good, perhaps not the way their fans would have initially liked, but for good nonetheless. After recovering the Heiden fumble at the their own 15-yard line, Cutler drove the Bears down to the Cleveland 1-yard line. But on 4th and 1, Cutler couldn’t connect in the end zone, giving the Browns the ball with just under 5 minutes remaining, 1st and 99 yards and 17 points to go.

As he exited the field, Cutler and Ryan could be seen barking at each other, with Ryan dropping a few f-bombs in Cutler’s direction. Perhaps Ryan should have waited before beating his chest. After all, Anderson was still behind center at that point, clinging to his career. The pressure proved to be too much. After two handoffs to Lewis almost resulted in safeties, Anderson, eschewing taking the safety when he could find no one downfield, threw it up for grabs. Bears defensive back Charles Tillman apparently called for it and then promptly returned it for a touchdown giving the Bears the 30-6 lead.

Even that was too much for head coach Eric Mangini, who must be feeling the pressure himself. Apparently after getting word from the press box that it would now be impossible for Brady Quinn to earn any sort of bonus for snaps taken, he turned to Quinn with just 3 minutes remaining.

Quinn hit his first pass but saw Heiden drop a potential first round pass on third down. Mangini will likely blame Quinn and start Brett Ratliff following the bye week.

If this is indeed Anderson’s last start, barring an injury, then he went out with a blaze of glory. Already the worst rated quarterback in the league, and by a healthy margin, Anderson completed 6 of 17 passes for 76 yards and 2 interceptions. It gave Anderson a rating of 10.539. It dropped his league low rating from 40.6 to 36.1.

But really, the story of Anderson is the story of the Browns this season. Although Anderson was the lowest rated passer last season, he’s worse this season for the simple reason that there is even less talent surrounding him, both on the field and on the sidelines. All its done is highlight every single shortcoming in his very limited game.

Quinn, too, has his share of shortcomings, but they aren’t nearly as fully developed. Where he is better than Anderson is on short to mid-range passes and right now that’s the area where the Browns suffer the most. If Quinn does indeed get the starting job back, it probably won’t make a huge difference. Same players, same coaches.

The running game, not particularly strong, was at least finding enough holes to keep the offense moving on occasion, particularly in that second half. Lewis had 69 yards on 16 carries, Josh Cribbs had 28 yards on 6 carries out of the Wildcat formation and Jerome Harrison added another 19 yards on 5 carries. Those aren’t great stats, certainly, but enough to suggest that the onus wasn’t just on Anderson.

Although Ryan’s defense gave up 23 points, it could have been far worse. With 5 turnovers to go along with their general ineffectiveness, the offense was constantly putting pressure on the defense.

After holding the Bears to 3-and-out on their opening two possessions, the defense gave up four straight scores, 3 of which were Robbie Gould field goals. On the drive that led to their first field goal, for example, the Bears had the ball at the Cleveland 15-yard line but couldn’t advance it any further.

After Anderson was picked off on a great effort by Danieal Manning, who returned it to the Browns’ 13-yard line, the defense again held Cutler. On another drive started by a Cleveland turnover—an Anderson/Lewis botched handoff, the Bears took it to the Cleveland 9-yard line but had to settle for another field goal after Kamerion Wimbley sacked Cutler for an 11-yard loss. The problem, though, is that this third field goal put the Bears up by two scores and given how little the Browns were doing offensively, it looked like a huge hill to climb.

The hill got even higher when the Bears finally found the end zone on their next drive thanks to 1-yard Matt Forte run that helped give the Bears a 16-0 lead. That drive would have ended much sooner and without a score but on 3rd-and-8 from Chicago’s 31-yard line, Wimbley went helmet-to-helmet with Cutler and was flagged for the roughing penalty. It will probably cost Wimbley about $10,000. It also cost Cutler a few moments of clarity, but only a few. Cutler completed his next 4 passes to put the team in position for the Forte touchdown run.

As this most miserable of half seasons comes to an end, the Browns and their fans get a much needed week off. That’s probably bad news for those in the league that look at playing the Browns the same way that someone with allergies looks at a bottle of Zyrtec. Relief will just have to wait.

As for what the second half of the season holds there’s no way of knowing. Everything the Browns have done to this point has been a crashing disappointment. But at least there’s one bit of good news. The only NFC North team remaining on the schedule is the Detroit Lions.

Shutting Up the Statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:14:00 +0000

There’s a Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schulz in which Charlie Brown’s beleaguered baseball team is getting hammered once again. Linus, I believe, is rattling off the statistics on just how bad it all is and Charlie Brown yells “tell your statistics to shut up.”

It’s easy to appreciate Charlie Browns’ angst. It’s sometimes hard facing the absolute truth of what the black and white numbers reveal. Ignoring them may have been a plot point for Peanuts, but ignoring them when it comes to the Cleveland Browns is no more a strategy than hoping that they’ll change. Reality may bite and it may bite hard, but you ignore the venom at your own risk.

A statistic caught my eye today. It’s a statistic that more than any other I’ve seen chronicling the mess in Berea, places the awfulness of it all in just the right light. The Plain Dealer reported that in the Browns’ last two games, the differential in yards between what the defense has given up and what the offense has gained is a staggering 667 yards (1003 yards given up, 336 gained). Even more alarming, it is the worst two-game differential in the entire history of the franchise, which covers over 900 games dating back to 1946. For further perspective, consider that the second worst occurred during the first two games of the 1999 expansion year.

This is a statistic you can’t easily shut up. It serves as about the only counter-argument to the nonsense of those counseling patience with the new regime.

The popular theory making the rounds of the Mangini Apologist Movement is that things will inevitably get worse before they get better. By using this as the backdrop, the Apologists dismiss the mounting evidence on how bad things really are with this franchise as saying, “well, it’s to be expected.”

Let me take a novel approach: why? Where is it written that things must get worse in order to get better? Why can’t things simply improve from where they stood initially?

It’s fascinating how the narrative on this Browns’ season has changed from one of steady progress to one where it’s all about tearing it down in order to build it back up. Yet that’s become not just the official narrative of the fledgling Apologist movement but also the official narrative of an increasingly disingenuous head coach.

What is being lost in this rush to change the storyline to one that better fits what more reasoned observers see as an abject disaster is the fact that the Browns weren’t an aging team on the tail end of a good run that had reached an inevitable rebuilding point in their cycle. When Eric Mangini and his hand picked sock puppet George Kokinis took over, it was a young team with a smattering of talent. It had only upside, or so most people thought.

What’s turned out instead is that it had a much further downside, a historically, unprecedented, hide the women and children, put on the Haz Met suit, lock the doors, move out of town, shut your eyes, turn off the TV, liquidate the assets, run don’t walk, gut wrenching, vomit inducing, downside.

I’ll concede that the franchise wasn’t in the greatest shape when Mangini and Kokinis buffaloed owner Randy Lerner, but it wasn’t as bad as it is now. In fact, the franchise probably wasn’t even in as bad of shape for Mangini and Kokinis as it was for former general manager Phil Savage and former head coach Romeo Crennel.

The Browns’ receiving corps this year may be awful, but remember that when Mangini and Kokinis took over it also included Kellen Winslow and Braylon Edwards. Whatever you think about either of those two players, each was statistically better than anyone on the roster at the end of 2004. There was no Joe Thomas or Eric Steinbach on that 2004 squad, only Ryan Tucker and Ross Verba. There was no Shaun Rogers on that 2004 team. They were making due with the likes of Gerard Warren, Mike Myers and Ebenezer Ekuban. The defensive backfield in 2004 was better than what Mangini and Kokinis inherited, but Phil Dawson is still the place kicker and the 2004 didn’t have anyone close to Josh Cribbs on special teams.

Whatever problems that 2004 team had, it never once sunk to the depths of what’s now being experienced under Mangini. Savage and Crennel didn’t improve the talent level enough to make the Browns a materially better team but it would be hard to make the case that they made the franchise worse. All they really did was stunt its progress, an unpardonable sin given the promises they sold.

But Mangini and Kokinis have made things far worse. It’s not opinion, it’s fact. By every statistical measure one wants to use, this franchise is worse now than when those two took over and there is absolutely nothing to suggest that it will get any better, certainly not this year and probably not next except perhaps just through the law of averages.

But the Mangini Apologist Movement nonetheless keeps counseling patience in the midst of an absolute shit-storm of ineptitude as if things will magically get better if we just accept the awfulness and wait it all out without question or concern. I appreciate someone taking the alternate view as much as anyone and I don’t think less of them for doing so. But the whole basis for their view is that Mangini has somehow inherited remarkable circumstances and thus more slack must be cut.

Well, let’s go back to the statistics, shall we? The roster Mangini inherited was bad, but it wasn’t historically bad. He then turned over nearly half of it between his trades, his draft picks and his refugees from New York. If these are remarkable circumstances, despite how abundantly unremarkable they actually are, just know then that they are self-inflicted. A killer doesn’t get sympathy for murdering his parents just because he’s now an orphan and Mangini doesn’t get sympathy because he blew up the team and now is left with nothing but shrapnel and spare parts.

If Lerner can ever get engaged with his $1 billion investment long enough to realize that his franchise is on the precipice of sinking into complete irrelevance with a formally proud and loyal following, he might come to realize that this has nothing to do with having a hair trigger reaction to a little bad news.

This is all about correcting a major mistake that almost everyone saw coming except him. In 2007, the Miami Dolphins hired Cam Cameron, the offensive coordinator with San Diego, to lead their team. Under Cameron, the Dolphins eschewed picking Brady Quinn in the first round when they truly needed a quarterback and instead picked Ted Ginn, Jr. It was a surprise pick that turned out to be a major mistake not just because of the personnel involved because of the thought process. It ultimately revealed Cameron as someone in over his head.

Under Cameron, the Dolphins were a confused and ill-run franchise and finished the season at 1-15. As that most bitter of seasons was winding down, owner Wayne Huzienga had seen enough to know that he needed a real football professional to run the operation. He hired Bill Parcells.

Parcells didn’t move on Cameron right away, he didn’t need to. The year was almost over. But he did move on him quickly enough and Cameron’s head coaching career ended, mercifully, after one year.

I point all this out as evidence that things don’t have to get worse before they can better. Things can actually get better pretty quickly. The Dolphins aren’t a great team two years later but on the other hand they did go 11-5 one year after going 1-15. All it takes is competent football minds, not head coaches with insecurity issues and wannabe executives so anxious to advance that they’ll take a job on whatever bizarre conditions are imposed.

There’s probably no final straw in any of this only a million little straws breaking the will of the fans being charged to support this dying franchise. And while debating the quarterback situation is tiresome for everyone involved, just consider that irrespective of your feelings on either Brady Quinn or Derek Anderson, you have to concede that both are measurably worse as players under this regime. It may be the offensive philosophy. It may be the lousy coaching. It may be a hundred other things. But again, statistically this is just a fact.

The Mangini Apologist Movement deserves the right to defend its patron saint just as much as the rest of us deserve our right to dream of a day when this franchise actually gets on the right track; a day when no one tries to advance the faulty paradigm that you must get worse to get better; a day when a truly competent football professional is running this franchise; a day when the right moves are actually made so that showing some patience actually makes sense. Let them defend Mangini all they want, but in doing so the statistics don’t just have to shut up, they have to wither up and die.

What About the Fans?

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:31:00 +0000

It’s nice to have some company.

A few weeks ago I suggested on these very same pages that Cleveland Browns head coach Eric Mangini and staff were in over their collective heads and that the product was as bad as it’s ever been. I also suggested that Mangini would be in line for one of the quickest exits in NFL history if not for owner Randy Lerner’s serial indifference to the wants and needs of his fans.

Now Patrick McMannamon of the Akron Beacon Journal has written likewise. It would be nice if just a few more in the media, as proxies for the disgruntled fan base, would join the chorus. Maybe, just maybe, Lerner would hear the drum beats banging furiously for the head of his latest mistake.

I’m not suggesting that Lerner run the team based on a vote of the fans. I am suggesting that he stop the abuse. The Browns performance on Sunday was absolutely the most dispiriting performance I’ve ever witnessed and believe me, I’ve witnessed a whole bunch of bad over the years. Mangini himself said that the team lacked intensity and, for once, I won’t bother to argue with him.

I know Josh Cribbs took a little bit of an issue with Mangini’s assessment and, in truth, any assessments regarding the lack of intensity or professionalism always exclude Cribbs. He’s the one shining light on this miserable wretch of a franchise. If Lerner really wanted to do something positive for Cribbs, he’d fire Mangini now and give Cribbs that money.

Instead, in this topsy-turvy world where incompetence is rewarded and faith and persistence is overlooked, Cribbs is made to sweat out a bad contract he stupidly signed while Mangini and his band of merry idiots thrives as if everyday is Christmas. Well, Christmas can’t come soon enough for most Browns fans. It means the season will be nearly over.

Sunday was a perfect fall day. From all the various choices that laid in front of most people, inexplicably too many of us wasted 3+ hours watching this franchise find new ways to embarrass itself. Leaves could have been raked and golf could have been played. Cars could have been washed and kids could have been taken to the park. Instead on what is likely to be the last decent Sunday until the spring, too many Browns fans had toxic waste dripped on their eyeballs for the 7th straight week.

You could start with the quarterback situation but really you could start anywhere. When it comes to picking apart the carcass of this pathetic team it’s a never-ending supply of rancid meat. Mangini has yet to offer a cogent explanation as to why Derek Anderson is still on the team, let alone its starting quarterback. Anderson is making JaMarcus Russell look like a keeper.

Anderson is the worst-rated passer, statistically, and even that doesn’t do him justice. He has a quick release, yes, but he uses it to get rid of the ball well before the play has developed. Sunday’s game was a virtual greatest hits of reasons why Anderson isn’t a viable starting quarterback in this league. He has no touch on mid-range passes, he doesn’t throw particularly well on the run (and if you’re a quarterback in Cleveland, you better be able to throw on the run), and he’s not particularly accurate on anything other than a really deep pass down the middle of the field and even then that’s only occasionally. If he were trying to play this bad on purpose it couldn’t get much worse.

The fact that Anderson only completed three passes to wide receivers on Sunday may, to some, be a tribute to the defensive prowess of the Packers’ Charles Woodson and Al Harris. But they aren’t gods, except when they have the good fortune of playing against a team with quarterback who can’t throw.

Anderson isn’t a particularly effective leader, either, at least at this point. I have no doubt that he’s working hard or at least he thinks he’s working hard. But that’s irrelevant. Anderson can’t work himself into competency. He’s only effective when the talent around him is at a much higher level. Well, guess what? The league is full of back-ups with the same story.

As for why Mangini is giving Anderson such a long leash when he virtually yanked Quinn by his after just 10 quarters remains unexplained except in the most generic and meaningless way. The longer Mangini continues to try and rationalize the decision, the less it looks like one he made.

It’s well known that Quinn has an incentive in his contract that will pay him $11 million if he plays 70% of the team’s snaps this season. It also boosts his salary for next season. With the Browns falling off the radar screen of even the most ardent fans and late season sell outs looking less and less likely, Quinn’s banishment is looking like it has less to do with ability and more to do with money. And each day that goes by and Mangini continues to play word games while his owner sits mute, the more likely this scenario becomes.

But maybe the real answer in all of this is that there isn’t a quarterback out there that could do much better than either Anderson or Quinn under this regime The offensive line, once thought to be a strength, has played down to the level of the rest of the team. Jamal Lewis is finished as an effective running back in this league. The fact that he has an occasional good run is meaningless. It’s like Barry Bonds coming back into baseball and hitting a few home runs. The receivers weren’t very good when training camp started and aren’t very good now. Layered on all of this is an offensive coordinator, Brian Daboll, just learning his craft. It’s an offense that can’t even offer hope as a strategy.

If that’s the case, then it would be hard to play Quinn given the financial ramifications that decision entails. Businesses and people make those kinds of decisions all the time. Look at it this way: if season ticketholders knew that the price of next year’s tickets increased with the number of games they attended this year, do you think they’d continue to go to the games?

On defense, the Browns have been every bit as horrible as they have been on offense and, in some sense, it makes matters worse. Fans are certainly for high-powered offenses, but fans in towns like Cleveland take far more pride in a good defense. Scoring is nice but it’s infinitely more satisfying to punish another team’s players. Watching this defense, with a supposedly Pro Bowl nose tackle, give up huge chunks of yards to the Ryan Grants of the world makes your knees buckle. Watching Spencer Harvan, a rookie tight end/linebacker (according to the Packers’ official roster) run through the defense on a routine outlet pass makes the heart sink. This defense is actually worse than last year’s model which is as hard of sentence to write as it is to believe.

Is all of this on Mangini? Yes and no. No in the sense that only about half the players on this miserable roster are attributable to him. Yes in the sense that about half the players on this miserable roster are attributable to him. Throw in the entire coaching staff belonging to Mangini and all of the sudden the scales trip decidedly against his short tenure.

It’s not that the Browns aren’t trying to work on things. I’ve tried to be both positive and fair on this front. You can see them trying to establish a running game, even without the talent. You can see Mangini trying to establish discipline and rigor in approach. Those are the right things to establish.

The problem is that week after week the same excuses keep getting made and most of them start and end with the phrase “we just need to execute.” Well, it’s nearly halfway through the season and the team still can’t execute even the most basic of tasks, like blocking and tackling? What that really says is that this regime can’t teach and this team isn’t listening, if they ever were.

With Mangini at the helm and the product that his weird little machinations creates, there is absolutely no reason to even bother with this team any longer. It has lost all its capacity to either surprise or entertain. People will watch a car wreck on YouTube a few times because of the perverse pleasure it brings. But they won’t keep watching it repeatedly and that’s where the Browns now find themselves. They are a perverse pleasure no longer.

After 7 games, nearly half a season, the weekly wreck that awaits holds no appeal to anyone. Sure, some fans that already bought tickets will show up early in the Muny Lot and party. But they do so for the same reasons friends gather at a wake. They have absolutely no delusion that this corpse of a team will come back to life, at least not with this Dr. Frankenstein at the controls.

Sure, you can argue for the long-term theory which suggests that patience will eventually be rewarded. But for that to work, the right group needs to be in charge. What is there in this group that would lead anyone to believe that it can eventually bring long-term success.

You can also look at it from the perspective of other cities like St. Louis and Oakland. The fans there must be just as miserable. But there’s no comfort in that. The problems here still remain and have to be addressed.

Mangini was fired from his last job because the owner became convinced that he had lost the locker room. Here in Cleveland, Lerner doesn’t even need to worry about the locker room. Mangini never had it. What Lerner should be asking himself is the same thing the rest of us are asking: What about the fans?

Utterly Predictable

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:29:00 +0000

It would be nice to believe that the drama-queen of a football team that calls itself the Cleveland Browns would have the attendant unpredictability accorded that status. It doesn’t. In its utterly predictable fashion, they were drilled Sunday by the Green Bay Packers, 31-3.

In one sense, this loss could be attributed to any number of issues that plagued the team this week; swine flu, car wrecks, no tight ends, bad clams perhaps. In another sense, it’s always something.

The outcome was basically known before kickoff but confirmed on the Browns’ first drive. It featured everything that plagues them as a franchise.

Green Bay, fearing the only player in a Browns uniform they needed to fear, kicked away from Josh Cribbs and had the ball hit the pylon. It was ruled out of bounds and the Browns started their drive at their own 40-yard line. They ended it at their own 42 after having taken a step backward first due to an offensive pass interference call on Mohammad Massaquoi on a ball that he couldn’t have caught no matter how hard he pushed off Green Bay defensive back Al Harris.

Despite setting that tone, there was a moment, however brief, where the team actually showed a whiff of life and actually got on the scoreboard first. After squandering good field position on their first drive, the Browns’ offense found some rhythm on its second drive or for most of the drive anyway. Taking over on downs after the defense stopped Aaron Rodgers and the Packers on 4th and 1 from the Cleveland 34-yard line, the Browns methodically marched down the field as if they’d done it a hundred times this season.

But what they’ve really done a hundred times this season is squander opportunities and this one was no different.

The rhythm established was summarily broken and for the rest of the game after Jamal Lewis got the ball down to the 2-yard line on second down. Anderson was forced to call time out for some such reason and on consecutive plays thereafter fumbled and nearly threw an interception. Billy Cundiff, subbing once again for Phil Dawson, converted the chip shot field goal, after hitting the left upright, and the Browns had a 3-0 lead just seconds into the second quarter. The doink sound the ball made after hitting the upright aptly captured the collective thoughts of thousands.

The Browns’ minor uprising apparently was enough to shake the sleep out of the eyes of the Packers. On the ensuring drive, Rodgers put together a 6-play, 71-yard touchdown drive that featured a 45-yard touchdown pass to tight end Spencer Havner, helping the Packers grab a 7-3 lead. It was shades of the Steelers’ game. Havner was an outlet for Rodgers on 3rd and 1 who then rumbled nearly untouched the entire way to the end zone.

Predictably, the Browns responded with a 3-and-out. But the Packers had 12 men on the field and with that penalty the Browns got another chance. Unbowed, they went 3-and-out again.

The Packers then made it 14-3 when Rodgers hit Donald Driver on what was supposed to be a quick strike but turned even more quickly into a 71-yard touchdown. Defensive back Brodney Pool had a chance at Driver but couldn’t make the tackle. It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Then it got ugly. On the Browns’ next drive, Anderson spent most of it alternately scrambling for his life and throwing wildly off the mark. The Browns got a gift first down, however, on an illegal contact penalty and Anderson used the extra downs to get his weekly interception out of the way early, this one to Charles Woodson, who took it to the Cleveland 13-yard line.

The Browns’ defense looked to have held the Packers to a field goal but on 3rd and goal from the 2-yard line, Brandon McDonald interfered in the end zone with Driver, giving the Packers 4 more chances to score. They needed 3 but got what they needed when Ryan Grant pushed it in from the 1-yard line. It helped push the score to 21-3 with just under two minutes in the half.

The Browns then made a predictably half-hearted effort at a two-minute drive, half-hearted because they threw short and in the middle of the field mostly. After Anderson was sacked with two seconds remaining and the ball sitting their own 48-yard line, the Browns inexplicably called time out. It was explained 30 seconds later when offensive coordinator Brian Daboll gave Anderson a final opportunity to throw another interception. Anderson’s heave to the end zone was knocked away harmlessly instead.

The rest of the game had the look and intensity of a mid-summer scrimmage, with the Packers testing various aspects of their offense and the Browns willingly complying.

The Packers worked on the run in their first drive but it ended with a missed 55-yard field goal by Mason Crosby. The Browns took over at their own 45-yard line but on 3rd and 2, Anderson hit Cribbs on a short pass, Cribbs fumbled and it was picked up by linebacker Brandon Chillar at the Green Bay 49 yard line. Head coach Eric Mangini challenged the call and, predictably, he was wrong.

When the Packers took over again, they worked some more on their running game. It should bode well for the rest of the season. Grant ran four of the next 5 plays and ran well. That drive, too, though ended just short of the end zone and Crosby hit the short field goal that gave the Packers a 24-3 lead.

The Browns, meanwhile, looked to be working on, well, it was hard to say what they were working on. There were a few perfunctory runs by Lewis into a stacked line of scrimmage, an occasional fumbled snap and a variety of passes that didn’t appear to have intended targets. And the drive would have ended predictably and quickly but the Packers did their level best to keep the drive alive by continually committing penalties, including holding and a late hit after Jerome Harrison had stepped out of bounds after a swing pass and then was inadvertently hit by safety Atari Bigby.

All that nonsense allowed the Browns to get the ball deep into Green Bay territory. Then Anderson hit recently-signed tight end Michael Gaines inside the 5-yard line and he took it to the 1. Lewis then lost 2 yards, Anderson overthrew Massaquoi in the corner of the end zone, Lewis got his two yards back and then Anderson missed badly to Massaquoi in the end zone on 4th down, leaving the ball at the Packers 1-yard line. On the plus side, Mangini didn’t attempt the field goal.

The Packers got out of that jail as if they were in Mayberry. Anderson hit Driver on first down for 18 yards. He then hit Havner for another 14 yards. Two plays later, Rodgers scrambled 19 yards on 3rd and 6. Grant then went off tackle right for 37 yards, getting the ball to the Cleveland 5-yard line. Rodgers finished off the drive with a 5-yard touchdown pass to James Jones and the Packers had a 31-3 lead.

With the Browns deeply entrenched once again in garbage time, it’s hard to know exactly what Mangini was thinking, except that he wasn’t thinking Brady Quinn. Anderson was awful in every way a quarterback can be awful and offered absolutely no resume for why he should see another snap. In fairness, he did have the one good drive late in the first quarter, but as long as we’re being fair let’s not that he helped that drive come unhinged.

Meanwhile, Quinn sat idly on the bench wondering why someone who was 12-26 for 99 yards and 1 interception to that point and a quarterback rating around 40 was playing ahead of him. Maybe this really is a money thing.

But there was Anderson anyway, throwing his next pass at the feet of Lawrence Vickers and another out of the reach of Massaquoi. When it was all over, Anderson didn’t complete another pass and finished the day 12-29.

Rodgers, on the other hand, was brilliant. He threw only 20 times but completed 15 and had 3 touchdowns and 246 yards. He finished with a quarterback rating over 150. The Packers also rolled up 202 yards on the ground. In all, they had 460 net yards while the Browns had a meager 139.

The Browns are now 1-6 and probably petitioning the league office as to why they have to wait still another week until they get a bye. So are their fans.

As for Sunday’s outcome, it’s not so much that it was a set back because this team, despite its win in Buffalo, has shown absolutely no progress since the first game when they were similarly blasted by the Packers’ divisional rival, the Minnesota Vikings. But just as this loss and everything about it was predictable, so too will be the inevitable silver lining that Mangini will find somewhere, especially when it comes to Anderson. There was that one drive. And just as predictably, the fans will mutter, “huh?”

Lingering Items--Steelers Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:02:00 +0000

Disaster, at least when it comes to professional sports teams, often is a matter of scale. The Cleveland Browns are in the 11th year of a never-ending odyssey to somewhere, destination unknown. One thing is certain though, few if any fans are happy about it. Ok, one other thing is certain, most if not all fans have have plenty to say about it.

Meanwhile, over in Washington, D.C., the locals are perhaps even more verklempt and it has nothing to do with health care, cap-and-trade or the wars in the Mideast. Apparently those are transient issues when compared to the relative woes of the Redskins. What’s more fascinating though is the remarkable parallels it has to what’s taking place with the Browns.

Daniel Snyder is in his 10th year of ownership of the Redskins. He came into the league like most young owners with too much money came into the league—loudly. He paid fleeting attention to the team’s salary cap and far more to its Q rating. Deals that no general manager outside of Phil Savage would consider making Snyder made anyway. He’s probably still in debt to Deion Sanders.

But recently, Snyder has become nearly invisible. A victim of his past hubris, Snyder has aged into a far more traditional owner, laying low and supposedly letting his football people run the franchise. In that vein, Snyder brought back Joe Gibbs to run the franchise a few years ago but that didn’t do much to restore former glory. Gibbs now hangs around as an unpaid consultant.

The bottom line is that Snyder’s ownership has looked an awful lot like the Lerner family’s ownership of the Browns, but without the glitz. And, guess what? The fans are screaming for Snyder to sell as the only viable path remaining for returning to respectability. That has a familiar ring to it. It won’t happen there as it won’t happen here.

The mess surrounding current head coach Jim Zorn makes the tenure of Eric Mangini in Cleveland look positively tranquil by comparison. While Mangini’s relationship with Lerner is, by contrast, rock solid, the turmoil enveloping each franchise still has the same impact.

Not even halfway through the season Zorn is on the shortest of leashes, hamstrung by an idiot owner who can’t seem to understand that he’s the far bigger problem. Whatever it was that made Snyder rich enough to buy the Redskins, and it’s hard to remember that far back at this point, Snyder believes it doesn’t apply to his current business interest. I’d say the same thing about Randy Lerner, but really, his riches are inherited not earned and there is no business success to translate over.

But maybe none of that matters. If Forbes magazine is correct, then Snyder’s abject mismanagement hasn’t affected the franchise’s value one iota. The same is true in Cleveland. In fact, according to Forbes, the Redskins have doubled in valued from when Snyder bought the team for a then unheard of $800 million and is second in worth behind the Dallas Cowboys.

Unless Snyder is strapped for cash, why would he sell, performance on the field notwithstanding? And that is true of Lerner as well. The economy runs in cycles but NFL franchises are still about the safest investment vehicle out there for the truly rich. The Browns, despite both the economy and their on-field performance, didn’t lose a single percentage point of value in the last year, according to Forbes. More to the point, they are the 13th most valuable franchise, valued at $1 billion, which means that the Lerner family has almost doubled its initial investment of $530 million. At least the Browns are on the right half of something positive.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist by nature, but even someone with the naïveté of Simple Jack can recognize that there is little connection between what takes place on the field and the value of that franchise, except of course when it comes to the Oakland Raiders. They are the worst franchise in the league and their value bears that out.

Lerner, like Snyder, can run through coaches, mission statements and master plans like others run through paper napkins and it isn’t going to impact their real bottom line.

All that means, of course, is that for all the bitching that fans may do about the product being put out on the field, owners like Snyder and Lerner only give it a fleeting thought, no matter what they say publicly. Put it this way, if you knew that you’d continue to get healthy wage increases at work no matter how bad you screwed up would you really care if your co-workers kept complaining about you and asking you to quit?

**

The final score notwithstanding, the thrashing that the Pittsburgh Steelers put on the Browns last Sunday was every bit as bad as that put on them by the Baltimore Ravens, maybe worse. In the Ravens game it was apparent that the team quit playing somewhere around the 13:15 mark of the third quarter. In Pittsburgh, the team appeared to be trying the whole game. That’s a problem.

The talent deficit between the two teams is huge but it’s not as if you need me to confirm that. What makes it scary to think about, though, is that the dominance by the Steelers of the Browns doesn’t look to end any time soon.

The players claim that a rivalry still exists and it’s nice that Mangini thinks of the Steelers as a rival, but that’s just not the case. They are just another team in a division playing in a game that the Browns have no hope of winning.

That’s really the biggest problem with the Steelers’ abject dominance. It takes any fun out of what used to be a great rivalry. And when you begin to measure what it’s going to take before fans start to believe that this team is on some sort of road to redemption, becoming competitive again with the Steelers would be a good start.

The Browns of the early ‘80s could never seem to get a win at Three Rivers Stadium but the games always seemed to be hotly contested. The 1984 and ’85 games were particularly agonizing as the Browns lost both games in Pittsburgh by a combined 4 points.

But the Browns solved that dilemma in 1986 with a 27-24 win on their way to a 12-4 record. That victory didn’t just put the so-called Three Rivers Jinx to rest, it gave the team a platform and an ability to hold its head high. It also started a 4-year win streak in Pittsburgh, culminating with that magical opening game in 1989 when the Browns, under Bud Carson, blasted Pittsburgh 51-0.

But since then it’s been one pathetic performance after another for a franchise that’s been going in the wrong direction. In the 17 games played in Pittsburgh since that win streak ended, including the playoffs, the Browns have lost 15 of them and rarely has it been even close. The average score has been 28-13. Three of those losses have been shutouts and in 6 others the Browns have scored less than 10 points. It’s also a trend that’s getting worse. The average score in the last 4 losses has been 29-12.

If nothing else, reversing this trend is the real marker for determining whether this franchise is on the right track. No one expects the Browns to suddenly begin dominating Pittsburgh on its own turf, but getting competitive there would be a nice first step.

**

Another week and another controversy bubbles around the Browns. This time it was Eric Wright rolling his car on the wet pavement early Thursday morning, apparently after a night out that may or may not have included attending the Jay-Z concert.

In his Friday press conference, the media drones from Sector G found every conceivable way of asking Mangini about Wright and what he thought about his being out at 2 a.m. but Mangini, ever the rock when it comes to saying anything meaningful, wouldn’t bite.

The best Mangini would offer is that he personally wouldn’t be out that late and that he wishes his players were home studying their playbooks and thinking work thoughts. But he said that the Wright incident appeared to be an accident, nothing more.

It’s hard to know what happened exactly with Wright but cars don’t typically rollover without some sort of help. That means driving at a high rate of speed, falling asleep at the wheel, driving impaired, or some other such thing. That’s not to suggest that Wright is guilty of any of that. All it is to suggest is that there’s more to the story.

But putting that piece of it aside, Mangini is correct in wondering why his players find it necessary to party into the next morning, especially given the challenges it faces. A lot of fans have the same question. Wright plays on the worst defense in the league and he’s every bit as much the reason for that as any other player on that side of the ball.

Even if Wright hadn’t rolled his car, that wouldn’t have erased the fact that he was out pretty darn late on a school night and there’s a pretty good chance he had some company in the form of teammates. It’s a pretty sure bet too that if nothing else the ensuing lack of sleep ensured that they wouldn’t have been 100% at what amounts to the last significant practice before the next game.

All it really does it underscore that Mangini still hasn’t come even close to securing the hearts and minds of the players he needs to convert. Wright’s undoubtedly glad he didn’t get hurt in the accident but given Mangini’s reaction to the last player that had a late night out, he’s probably just as glad that the trade deadline has passed.

**

For those keeping score, the Wright car accident was the second of the season for a Browns’ player. James Davis had the first one, which occurred, oddly enough, about a week before he injured his shoulder for good in what’s being termed a post-practice “controlled environment.”

The rumor, fostered by ESPN, was that Davis was injured in some sort of drill after practice when a player in pads, later identified as linebacker Blake Costanza, hit a padless Davis.

Mangini said at the time that he felt there were no league policies violated and that was confirmed by the league office on Friday. Of course Mangini never volunteered what happened in the first place and spoke of it reluctantly only after the reports surfaced from unnamed sources. Someday he’ll learn that early disclosure keeps him from looking so guilty.

For those keeping score, this also is at least the second investigation the league has undertaken of Mangini and his policies (the other had to do with the infamous bus trip in the offseason) to go along with the 5 or so pending grievances. That’s a pretty hefty load in such a short period of time: two investigations, 5 grievances, two car accidents, one in-season trade. For a team trying to avoid distractions, it has a funny way of finding them anyway.

**

Given how exhausting it is to follow this team on a daily basis, this week’s question to ponder: Who is looking forward to the bye week more, the coaches, the players or the fans?

Performance-Based Privileges

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:28:00 +0000

It may be darkest before the storm, but for Cleveland Browns fans the clouds hanging over their franchise have been so thick for so long it’s difficult to remember what the sun once looked like.

The news that linebacker D’Qwell Jackson is not out for the year because of a shoulder injury should have had more of an impact than it actually does. Jackson is a decent player, maybe even the best player on the defense. But the unit already is the worst in the league and has looked bad far more often than it’s looked good. How much of an impact can the loss of Jackson or any member of that defense really have?

The other news, of sorts, of the week regarding the Browns relates to what they didn’t do, as in they didn’t trade any more players. No one expected head coach Eric Mangini to trade Josh Cribbs so the fact that the trade deadline passed without any action with him isn’t a surprise. But it is a little surprising that something didn’t happen at some level, or maybe it’s not.

There are a few players on this team that would be immediately useful on other teams; players like Joe Thomas, Josh Cribbs, Shaun Rogers and Dave Zastudil come to mind. You could probably throw Eric Steinbach on that list as well. There also are some players that would be useful down the road to some teams, players like Mohammad Massaquoi, Jerome Harrison, and Alex Mack. There may even be a few others that could find roles on other teams if they were available, players like Brodney Pool, Alex Hall and Eric Wright. But no team is going to give you much or anything for them.

And that’s really the point. Mangini isn’t rebuilding this team, he’s building it from scratch and he has very little to work with and very little to dangle in front of anyone else.

So let’s go back for a moment to a time when the last regime was in its salad days and owner Randy Lerner was feeling particularly sprite about its prospects; a time when he was more prone to giving interviews.

It was March, 2007 to be exact when Lerner made the rounds of the local newspapers and more or less gave his state of the Browns address, personalizing it a little for each reporter. I wrote about it here and it’s instructive to visit with Rappin’ Randy a bit to give some perspective on what hasn’t happened since.

Lerner told the media then that owning the Browns was a performance-base privilege. He posited the question that if he can’t perform as an owner, why should he continue to own the team. Since then, he’s answered his own question, he shouldn’t. Don’t take my word for it, take his.

Using the yardstick that Lerner laid out for himself, he said that when Savage took over, there were maybe “five or six or seven” football players on the team, though he left it to others to debate the names. He also said that a team needs about 35 core players in order to be successful. He named 19 players currently on that 2007 roster who fit that category: “I have (Joe) Jurevicius, (Orpheus) Roye, Kellen Winslow, Braylon Edwards, Kamerion Wimbley, Sean Jones, Brodney Pool, Eric [Steinbach], Jamal Lewis, Andra Davis, Charlie Frye, D'Qwell Jackson, Leigh Bodden, Josh Cribbs for special teams certainly if not other, Steve Heiden, and emerging players like Leon Williams, Lawrence Vickers, Jerome Harrison, Travis Wilson.”

It’s an interesting list for a variety of reasons. It gives insight into what both Lerner and Savage were thinking at the time and in that context explains why Savage really is gone and why Lerner should sell. But more instructive still is the fact that it’s just two short seasons later and the only ones still on the team are Wimbley, Pool, Steinbach, Lewis, Jackson, Cribbs, Heiden, Vickers and Harrison. Assuming for the moment that Lerner’s assessment on the players was correct, that means that over half of the “core” players are no longer with the team. And of those 9 still remaining, two are now on injured reserve and a third, Wimbley, continues to tease as he’s done throughout his career. He’s yet to make a real impact.

That means that only two seasons removed from Lerner’s assessment, the Browns are utilizing the services of 7 core players at the moment.

If Lerner were still in a talking mood, it would be fascinating to learn how many core players he now sees on this roster and who they might be. Let’s speculate.

Starting from Lerner’s original list, you have to assume he’d still put Wimbley on it even though nothing’s happened in the last two years to make anyone else put the words “Wimbley” and “core player” in the same sentence unless the word “not” also is thrown in. You can also assume that a case can still be made for Pool, a consummate and underappreciated professional. Certainly, Steinbach, Jackson, Cribbs and Harrison still qualify. But of those still on the roster and Lerner’s original list, the same case can’t be made for Lewis, because of his age and, frankly, his diminishing skills, Heiden, because of injuries, and Vickers, because he’s easily replaced. (As an aside, I’m not sure how Vickers ever really got on the list, but then just look at Lerner’s original list and ask yourself the same question about Leon Williams, Travis Wilson and Charlie Frye.)

Now, from the current roster, you can add in Thomas, Rogers, Zastudil (though Lerner didn’t have him on that list in 2007, hmm), Massaquoi, Mack, and Hall. If Lerner’s being really generous, he’d add, well, actually, I’m not sure who else he’d add without arousing a howl from the fan base. But assuming that there are a few others, that still puts the team well short of the 19 Lerner targeted in 2007 and well short of the 35 players the team supposedly needs to be competitive.

In other words, in 2007 the Browns supposedly were roughly halfway toward the required complement of core players. Now, they are maybe a third of the way there, depending on whether or not you’re an easy grader. (Another aside: I recognize mightily that Lerner’s original list was ridiculous. The 2008 season bore that out. Still, it’s a useful premise for purposes of illustrating the far larger point.)

The other thing that’s noticeable about the list of current so-called core players is the lack of any quarterback on it. Lerner originally had Frye on his list but he obviously didn’t foresee that Savage would dump him a few months later after a bad opening game. When Derek Anderson emerged in 2007 in place of Frye he certainly would have been on that list but his 2008 season, his inability to secure the starting spot going into 2009 and the fact that he’s currently the worst rated quarterback in the league removes him from any consideration as a core player.

There was a time, probably last season, when Lerner would have put Brady Quinn on that list, but he isn’t there anymore. Mangini has effectively written off Quinn and will dump him in the offseason, apparently with Lerner’s blessing. That leaves Brett Ratliff. Mangini may like him well enough but if a 3rd string quarterback really is considered a core player on this team then just forfeit the rest of the games now and bring the season to a close.

Mangini will be finding out, if he doesn’t know already, that there aren’t enough hours in the day or days on the calendar to fix this mess in any reasonable time frame. You can constantly churn a roster as most NFL teams do, you can listen to the siren song of free agency, you can gather draft picks like they’re acorns on a fall day, and you still can’t go from 12 core players to 35 in just a few short seasons.

The other part of this treadmill is that as the years pass, the core players you once had drop off the list for a variety of reasons, including injury, age and salary demands. They also drop off because as impatience kicks in, the temptation to trade one away for the chance on getting two more can be irresistible.

For example, Savage traded Bodden for Rogers. Rogers is the better player, certainly, but it did nothing toward the goal of increasing the nucleus of the team. All Savage did was trade one core player for another. (Another aside because I feel the need to explain: I don’t think Bodden was a core player, Lerner did, that’s all. Lerner was wrong. He often is.) When Mangini traded Edwards for Chansi Stuckey and Jason Trusnik, the team took a step backward from the standpoint of building its base. Maybe Stuckey and Trusnik eventually become core players, but they aren’t now. Ditto for the draft picks received in exchange for Edwards.

And that’s how this gamble really works. Trading anyone worth trading on this current roster would have done little for building a stronger base. Giving away marginal players for late round picks has no promise of accomplishing anything for the long term and nothing for the short term.

For Mangini to effectively accelerate the long process of building the base he’s going to have to develop some of these marginal players into core players and then he’s going to have to get awfully lucky with the draft in a hurry. That’s the task Lerner really has thrown at the feet of his new head coach. It was the same task Savage had and failed at. And if Lerner is every bit as good as assessing the ability of someone to make this transformation as he was at identifying the team’s core in 2007 or picking the last architect, then something tells me those dark clouds won’t be dissipating anytime soon. And, for good measure, just know that in Cleveland if ownership is indeed a performance-based privilege, it’s apparently a fleeting and ill-defined concept.

Bring Back the Bills

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Thank you, sir, may I have another? That’s about the only thing to say these days when the Cleveland Browns face the Pittsburgh Steelers and it was the most appropriate thing to say on this day as the Browns were once again spanked by the Steelers, this time 27-14. It was the Steelers’ 12th straight win against the Browns and 18th in their last 19 tries.

It wasn’t the blowout 31-0 that the Browns suffered against the Steelers at the end of last season, but the Steelers’ victory wasn’t ever in doubt, either. At least there won’t be any talk this week of good losses or bad wins. This was a solid, old fashioned loss. So for those Browns fans still making goofy bets with co-workers that are Steelers fans, wear that Steelers jersey with pride at work this week as you hang your head in faked shame. Maybe next time you’ll learn to keep your big mouth shut.

In some ways the final score isn’t indicative of the kind of game it really was. The Steelers dominated everywhere but on the final score board, although they won by plenty. They ran up over 500 yards in offense, the first time they’ve done that since 2006 when the Browns were also the victims. But three straight turnovers by the Steelers, two of which were greeted with turnovers by the Browns, kept the Steelers from inflicting more damage.

What they did inflict was plenty enough and it was done by the usual suspects, Ben Roethlisberger, Hines Ward, Santonio Holmes and Heath Miller. Roethlisberger threw for 417 yards with two touchdowns against his one interception. Hines Ward was the beneficiary of most of that, catching 8 passes for 159 yards and one touchdown. A second touchdown catch was nullified on a replay review near the end of the first half.

Holmes likewise had a big day, catching 5 passes for 104 yards. Miller had 4 catches, most of them at crucial moments, for 80 yards. On the ground the Steelers added another 140 yards, with Rashard Mendenhall leading the way with 62 yards on 17 carries.

On the Browns’ side of the ball, they had a meager 197 net yards on offense. The running game, strong the previous two weeks, was held to 91 yards total, with Josh Cribbs serving as the leading rusher with 45 yards on 6 carries.

Quarterback Derek Anderson was perhaps better than he was against Buffalo, but it’s a matter of degree. He completed more passes, but he had more turnovers. In all he was 9-24 for 122 yards, but fumbled twice and was intercepted once, at the Pittsburgh 1-yard line late in the game. Look for head coach Eric Mangini to note Anderson’s improving quarterback rating. He went from just over 15 last week to 51.04 this week.

Cribbs, demonstrating why he deserves a new contract, in addition to his 45 yards on the ground had a 98-yard touchdown return and was used more liberally on offense than he had been all year in the so-called “wildcat” formation.

After an initial few series by each team that went nowhere, the first break of the game went the Browns’ way when Roethlisberger fumbled the snap and Alex Hall recovered it at the Steelers’ 39-yard line late in the first quarter. Utilizing Cribbs as quarterback with Anderson serving as a decoy receiver, the Browns initially were able to move and perhaps take the early lead. But the drive imploded on the wings of good intentions as head coach Eric Mangini and offensive coordinator Brian Daboll went to wildcat well one too many times with one too many looks. On 1st and 10 from the Pittsburgh 14-yard line, Cribbs passed low to Chansi Stuckey who couldn’t handle it. Then, on 2nd and 10, Cribbs passed again for Stuckey but was easily picked off by safety Troy Polamalu, who appeared to be hurt on the play.

That seemed to be all the spark the Steelers’ needed. With virtually no pressure being applied, Roethlisberger was able to literally look at every receiving option twice as he picked apart the defense on his way to putting his team up 7-0 with an 8-yard pass to Miller. The key play on the 8-play 85 yard drive was a short pass to Holmes that Holmes turned into a 41-yard gain. In all, Roethlisberger was 5-5 on the drive.

The Browns’ couldn’t respond, but then again they haven’t been able to respond to anyone all season.

The Steelers then pushed it to 14-0 after Roethlisberger hit Ward for a 52-yard touchdown. The pass looked to be for Holmes but Ward stepped in front, apparently fooling the Browns’ secondary. Not to worry for Holmes. Again he set the drive in the right direction with a 21-yard catch a few plays earlier.

Cribbs, who seemed to be touching the ball on every play at this point, made it 14-7 with the 98-yard return on the ensuing kickoff. It was the second kick return for a touchdown against Pittsburgh in Cribbs’ career. It made the game look closer than it really was but it also gave Cribbs’ agent more fodder for his drive to land Cribbs a new contract. Good luck finding someone on the other end of the line in Berea who’s sympathetic.

It was nice moment that didn’t last nearly long enough. The Steelers were able to hit their “easy” button or so it seemed and looked to have pushed the lead back to 14 points but a 13-yard pass from Roethlisberger to Ward for a touchdown was overruled on review. Hines couldn’t maintain possession through the catch. Then, on third down, Roethlisberger, finally under some pressure, threw recklessly and had it almost picked off. Jeff Reed stepped in and kicked a 32-yard field goal for the 17-7 halftime lead.

That drive also featured a bit of controversy, still unexplained, regarding a very questionable first down call that went the Steelers way and enabled the drive to stay alive. On television, it looked as if the Steelers had come up inches short on 4th and 1 and the first down markers seemed to confirm as much. Oddly, though, and without any further review or discussion, the Steelers were awarded the first down. Defensive coordinator Rob Ryan could be seen liberally dropping f-bombs at that result and he seem well justified in doing so.

The Browns got on the board to start the second half with an honest-to-gosh offensive touchdown on their most professional drive of the season. After having thrown interceptions on their first possession of the second half in 4 of the first 5 games this season, the Browns marched down the field on the strength of some excellent passes from Anderson to Mohammad Massaquoi, including a 43-yarder that got the ball inside the Pittsburgh 10, and then finished off the drive with an Anderson to Lawrence Vickers 1-yard touchdown pass. The brought the score to 17-14 and at least gave the Steelers something to think about.

But if the Browns were going to be able to make a game of it and really give the Steelers something to think about, the defense had to hold the Steelers on the next drive. It wasn’t close. A 9-yard pass to Miller, a 45-yard pass to Ward and just that quickly the Steelers were back threatening. Then an end around from Rashard Mendenhall to Wallace got the ball to the Browns’ 1-yard line and Mendenhall finished off the drive with a 1-yard carry up the middle. Three minutes, 6 plays, 79 yards and the 10-point lead was restored.

Unlike the Steelers, the Browns’ offense couldn’t respond. A quick 3-and-out clearly delineated the differences between these two franchises, two hours apart by land, two million miles apart in ability.

Then things just got outright sloppy. The Browns tend to bring that out in teams.

Pittsburgh, showing the kind of indifference that can creep in against an inferior opponent, looked to try to level the playing field through a series of interceptions and fumbles. The Browns would here none of it.

First, Roethlisberger was intercepted by Brodney Pool, who returned it to the Cleveland 48-yard line. But on a 3rd and 16 Anderson, under pressure, fumbled and Pittsburgh’s James Harrison recovered. Then Willie Parker returned the favor two plays later by fumbling, with Abe Elam recovering at the Cleveland 16-yard line. Four plays later Anderson fumbled again, this time at the 24-yard line, but again Pittsburgh decided the potato was still too hot as Mendenhall then fumbled on the next play with Bowens recovering at the Cleveland 15 yard line.

After it was all over, Cleveland had the ball, couldn’t move it and was forced to punt. All that really happened was a lot of time was chewed up and the Browns, despite having a superior team almost gift wrapping the opportunities, still found themselves on the wrong end of a 10-point deficit.

The Steelers pushed it further on the strength of a Jeff Reed 39-yard field goal that was the culmination of a drive that started at the beginning of the 4th quarter and consumed over 6 minutes. The Browns and Anderson seemed to be moving it well in what was now garbage time but Anderson threw his obligatory weekly interception that sealed the loss.

It’s hard to know where the Browns will go with this increased use of the wildcat formation. Much of that will likely depend on how Mangini and Daboll view Cribbs’ crucial interception at the Pittsburgh 19-yard line. Still in a game where there weren’t many highlights for the Browns, it was something at least interesting to watch.

With still another loss to the Steelers and another potential one looming later in the season, it’s time to stop calling this series a rivalry. Simply playing a team twice a year doesn’t constitute a rivalry. In this case, it’s more like a semi-annual beatdown. If it’s a rivalry that this team needs, then there’s only one answer: Bring back the Bills.

Lingering Items--Bills Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:25:00 +0000

The Cleveland Browns only attempted 17 passes last week in Buffalo in what is now being called “fierce” winds. First they were strong, but as the pumping up of quarterback Derek Anderson’s fragile ego continues, the winds are now being upgraded in order to explain what can only be termed a pitiful performance, but more on that in a minute.

The Browns weren’t passing not only because Anderson couldn’t hit the side of a barn from 5 feet away, but because they were insistent, stubbornly so, on running the ball. That’s not a bad thing.

Running the ball in the NFL is one of the least glamorous activities that take place within a game unless a team has a breakaway back like Adrian Peterson. Then, every carry holds the promise of something big. But as a regular diet, a team’s running game still is mostly made up of 3 yards and a cloud of dust. It’s been that way since the days of Woody Hayes and even with all the fancy gidgets and gadgets that come and go, it’s still true today.

Consider, for example, that almost half of the NFL teams at the moment average less than 4 yards per carry, including, for example, the Browns’ opponent this weekend, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
There are plenty of ways to slice and dice the statistics, of course, but the larger message in it is that committing to the running game isn’t usually pretty.

The Browns, on a per carry average, are in the middle of the pack at 3.8 yards. On a yards per game basis, they again are in the middle of the pack at 106 yards. But in terms of the number of rushing attempts per game, the Browns are a top 10 team with 138. In terms of rushing attempts per game, the Browns are basically a top 10 team there as well.

What’s becoming clear as this season continues is that for one of the first times in recent memory, the Browns under head coach Eric Mangini aren’t just a team that talks about committing to the run, they are actually doing it. Right now, the Browns are averaging two more rushing attempts per game than last season, which doesn’t sound like much until you extrapolate that over a whole season. Doing that equates to an extra 32 attempts for a season which is another game’s worth of attempts or, on the current pace, another 106 rushing yards for the season.

The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger gets a lot of good press because of a handful of comebacks he’s led but the secret to the Steelers’ sustained success on offense is their ability to run, year after year. New England’s Tom Brady may be the greatest quarterback to ever play the game but Belichick has always made sure that there was a credible running game to balance him out. It’s no coincidence that these two teams annually appear near the top in rushing attempts.

Every offensive coordinator the Browns have ever had has pretty much said the same thing, “we’re going to establish the run.” But then one thing leads to another, the directions get all fouled up, and the next thing you know the final stats showed that out of the 48 plays run that day only 15 were runs.

The Browns this time seem to be incredibly serious about establishing the run. The fact that both Jerome Harrison and Jamal Lewis had 100-yard runs on consecutive weeks is a tribute to the fact that the Browns deliberately pounded at the run. Harrison had 29 carries against Cincinnati and Lewis had 31. It’s not always pretty when teams try to establish a running game but it looks exactly like what the Browns looked like the last two weeks.

This also tends to explain offensive coordinator Brian Daboll’s rather odd response on Friday to the question about whether there is a rift between he and Quinn over, among other things, Quinn’s checking off to passes. “We have check with me's every week. It's just a matter of whether we get them called or whether we think that's the best thing to do. In a couple of those, we got into a throwing-fest there a little bit when we were down.” Translated, because you need it, Daboll didn’t really care that the team was down and needed to score to get back in the game. When he wants to run he wants to run and that’s it.

Daboll has a point is you consider that this team really isn’t playing to win as much as they are playing to re-establish themselves as a NFL franchise. A credible running attack is a good start.

**

The Browns’ commitment to the run and Daboll’s view of it and Quinn’s use of check downs should also be viewed in the context of Mangini’s almost purposeful but subtle trashing of Quinn. On Thursday at his press conference Mangini’s discussed in some detail how the offense has gotten better on third downs in the last few games. This, of course, is just a continuation of Mangini’s whisper campaign to justify what the statistics cannot, choosing Anderson over Quinn.

Fans have their favorite players but from my perspective the starting quarterback should be whoever gets the job done. If Anderson is the best player for the job, then the fact that Quinn was a number one draft choice is irrelevant. Once a player makes a team his draft status is pretty irrelevant. Josh Cribbs was an undrafted free agent and Braylon Edwards was a first round pick. Which player was better for the Browns?

Thus Quinn doesn’t get extra points simply because he was a first round pick and Anderson was barely drafted. But from a pure performance standpoint over the last two seasons, Anderson hasn’t outperformed his counterpart, at least in any meaningful way and surely not enough to justify what appears to be Quinn’s banishment to the back of the bus.

Mangini’s discussion of third down success since Anderson greatly illustrates the point. In truth, the Browns are awful on third downs, irrespective of who’s at quarterback. In fact, they are 30th in the league, converting just 30% of their third downs. They were awful last season as well, converting just 33%. If you break last season down between Quinn and Anderson, there isn’t any meaningful difference. The same holds true this season.

In Quinn’s first two games, the Browns converted 25% and 21%, respectively, of their third downs. Against Baltimore, it was 25%. Against Cincinnati, with Anderson at quarterback, the number ticked up to 31% but then dropped back to just 25% against Buffalo. If you want to slice this even a little thinner, the teams the Browns faced in their first two games, Minnesota and Denver, have defenses that are 7th and 4th, respectively, in stopping teams on 3rd down. The teams Anderson faced, Cincinnati and Buffalo, are 11th and 21st, respectively.

All of this is another way of saying that Quinn faced two tougher teams than Anderson and yet the success rate on 3rd down with Anderson hasn’t ticked up meaningfully. It just adds to the mystery surrounding Mangini’s decision not to give Quinn more than 10 quarters against two difficult teams before essentially yanking him for good.

If Mangini is going to trot out the supposedly minor progress on 3rd down success rate with Anderson in, then he should be willing to talk about the bigger picture as well.

If you’re in to discerning trends, then the Bills game was clearly a step backward, particularly for Anderson. The Browns did continue to pound the ball on the ground, but Anderson was awful. Those looking to make excuses for him have trotted out the windy conditions without acknowledging that Anderson has thrown well in the wind before (e.g. last season’s Sunday night game against the Steelers. On that freakish weather night, the winds reportedly were 50 MPH and Anderson was 18-32 for 166 yards) and the supposedly large number of dropped passes.

In Daboll’s press conference Friday, he wouldn’t specify how many dropped passes there were by his count but didn’t dispute a media apologist who claimed there were 8. I’ve gone back through the tape and can’t find 8 dropped passes. There were 2, maybe 3 if you want to be really generous, passes that were thrown well that weren’t caught. The other 5 or 6 were mid-range passes that the receivers were able to get a hand on but were balls either thrown behind them or at their knees. These don’t qualify as dropped passes. If they did, Braylon Edwards would have had about 90 last season.

What’s even more disturbing is that Anderson did this against one of the weakest teams in the whole league.

It’s nice of Mangini to try and bolster the confidence of his quarterback, but doing so at the expense of your other quarterback on the most flimsy of evidence isn’t going to serve Mangini well in the long run. Like Mangini, the players can only go by what they see as well.

**

Continuing on that theme for another rmoment, the mystery surrounding why Mangini has tossed aside Quinn may never be known, at least publicly, but before anyone gets too comfortable with Anderson, all signs seem to point to Mangini not being sold on Anderson as the long-term solution, either. Given all that is known about Anderson, how could he be?

The picture that is starting to emerge though is one that explains exactly how Mangini is going about rebuilding this franchise. Essentially he’s fixing the most basic of things that can and should be fixed before moving on to more sophisticated projects, such as who the real answer is at quarterback.

For example, the Browns, one of the most penalized teams last season, are now one of the least, proving that some things can be corrected just by paying attention. There has been a re-emphasis on the defense. It’s nowhere near where it should be but Mangini isn’t wrong when he notes that it’s making progress.

As another example, the defense is getting better at getting off the field. They aren’t in danger of becoming the Baltimore Ravens any time soon, but progress is progress. As Mangini said during his Thursday press conference, defensively the team has improved its ability to shut down opposing teams on 3rd down by 16% in the last two games. That’s far more meaningful than the difference between Anderson’s and Quinn’s success on 3rd down.

Fans might find it hard to believe but the Browns are in the middle of the pack on that statistic, which seems hard to believe given its overall ranking on defense, which is near the bottom of the league. The defense is still allowing opposing teams to convert 39% of their third downs, which is far too high, but getting off the field more quickly is ultimately the goal and this is one of the more positive steps the team has taken this season.

When you total up all these little things, including the re-emphasis on running, it’s clear that Mangini is teaching a team that’s been lying on its belly arms flailing the past few seasons to crawl. This also tends to explain why Mangini didn’t go for Mark Sanchez in this year’s draft. He obviously didn’t project Sanchez as a long-term answer either, which is hard to argue against given the rather spotty entrance that Matt Leinhart, another USC quarterback has made into the league. (Before you email, I recognize Carson Palmer also is a USC quarterback and was establishing himself before his injury. I also know that Matt Cassel is a USC quarterback and given his play at the moment he may become this season’s Scott Mitchell.)

What Mangini probably did envision, though, is that the Browns would have another high draft pick in 2010 at exactly the same time another good quarterback class is emerging. In no particular order, Sam Bradford, Colt McCoy and Tim Tebow all will be in next year’s draft. It’s likely, too, that Jimmy Clausen will be there. Mangini will have some options any one of which must have looked better to him last spring than Sanchez, particularly when you throw in the extra draft picks he acquired by trading so furiously.

Whether any of this will work will take a few years to discern. And there will be probably 158 other things that happen in the interim that will throw this plan into disarray. But at least there’s a plan. Whether Mangini will be around to see it through is a different discussion for another day.

**
Mangini told the assembled press on Friday that he has no interest in trading Josh Cribbs. No kidding. Cribbs is the kind of player any head coach covets. He plays hard every play. It may have something to do with the way he got into the league, as an undrafted free agent. It may have something to do with sheer ability that couldn’t be properly showcased in the context of Kent State Football.

Whatever it is, Cribbs is a valuable player and one of the two or three players on this team for whom a real premium could be gotten in a trade.

While Cribbs isn’t really a threat to holdout midseason because of his contract situation, this is a matter that Mangini has to address. Cribbs signed a very club-friendly contract two years ago. Sure, he got $1 million up front, which is pretty sweet, actually, it also was a 6-year contract at relatively minimal salaries. The length of the contract allowed the Browns to prorate the bonus over 6 years meaning that Cribbs’ contract is exceptionally cap-friendly. Let’s see, good player, cap-friendly contract, how long before Bill Belichick is on the other end of the phone?

It’s understandable why Cribbs’ agent is rattling the cages for his client, bemoaning the supposedly unfair contract that another agent negotiated. This is just an agent being an agent. But no matter how loud that rattling gets, the Browns probably won’t do anything with Cribbs’ contract until after this season. The lingering showdown with the players’ union over the impending uncapped year looms large in terms of a team’s long-term planning. There will be a new labor contract at some point but it may take a strike to get there.

The Browns’ probably won’t wait until then to address Cribbs’ contract, but they will wait until there’s more clarity to the situation. This may be a game but there is a business to run.

**

Given the dichotomy of the Browns’ last two games, this week’s question to ponder: Why is there such a thing as a good loss but not a bad win?

Coming Full Circle

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:10:00 +0000

This is exactly what it looks like when the worst thing that can happen to you is that you get what you want.

Brady Quinn always dreamed of playing quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. He got his wish and now there is a death watch lingering over a tenure that appears doomed before it ever really got started. It has to be excruciating to both Quinn and his family.

But this is how the demonization works. First you appear as fortunate circumstance. Then you become the best alternative. Finally you become the person from whom the team has to move on from. For Quinn, a handful of professional games under his belt, he’s gone full circle in Cleveland without ever having had a legitimate chance. Now he hangs on to the team’s roster by a thread.

The Plain Dealer posited the question formally on Tuesday, ESPN chimed in with the by-now cliché that the house is up for sale later in the day and now it’s a question that’s been on most everyone’s mind since last Tuesday when the Browns traded serial malcontent Braylon Edwards: is Quinn next? Probably. It’s just a matter of when.

That isn’t equivocation for equivocation’s sake, either. Head coach Eric Mangini is still a pretty unknown commodity in these parts and while his thought processes aren’t necessarily random they are nevertheless hard to predict. I suspect he likes it that way. Mangini will pull this trigger when he feels the timing is right. If only Quinn would punch one of Shaq’s buddies outside a Cleveland nightclub, that would make it easier to pull the trigger now.

The case for and against Quinn is difficult to make for much the same reason. As a NFL quarterback, Quinn still is mostly unknown.

Before his injury last season, he looked pretty comfortable in charge after taking over for Derek Anderson, who was so awful so often that he made it difficult to remember his 2007 Pro Bowl season. During former head coach Romeo Crennel’s waning days he named Quinn the starter for this season. In that context, Quinn had every reason to feel like it was his team to run even knowing that a new head coach was on the way.

But then he got thrust into another quarterback competition that was billed as fair but only if you’re judging by standards usually applied to carnival games. It was a test he again passed only to find out that he really failed. Given 10 quarters to prove himself against what’s turning out to be two of the best defenses in the league, Quinn suddenly got passive. He wasn’t exactly awful in those 10 quarters, but he was overly mechanical. Like Terrelle Pryor at Ohio State right now, Quinn looked like a player trying to hit every box on a mental checklist each time he dropped back to pass.

Making matters more difficult for Quinn was the fact that the offensive coordinator, Brian Daboll, was brand new and very inexperienced, all three running backs were banged up and the teams Quinn had to face are among the best in the league at the moment.

But on the bench Quinn nonetheless now finds himself again, mainly because Mangini seems oddly infatuated with Anderson’s big arm, just as Bill Belichick was in a different era with Vinnie Testaverde. For all the indirect nitpicking that Mangini did about Quinn he’s been incredibly steadfast in his support for Anderson despite the fact that Anderson has been statistically worse than Quinn thus far.

Consider also that since Anderson has been in, he’s had two running backs healthy, both of whom have gone over 100 yards in the games he’s started and he’s been playing against defenses that aren’t among the league’s tops. Still, he’s struggled and for all the reasons he struggled last season. He has no short-range touch. He also uses a quick release and a lack of scrambling skills as an excuse to hurry a play when sometimes prudence cautions that he let it develop a little bit.

Anderson isn’t an awful quarterback and there actually may be a big upside to his further development. Surely no team would throw in the towel on him at this stage, but that still doesn’t explain what can only be termed a mystifying reluctance to do the same with Quinn. He must be missing some sort of quality that Mangini believes is key to a quarterback’s success but to this point Mangini hasn’t stated what that might be, at least publicly.

And this is where the cycle becomes complete. Quinn’s freefall in the draft is well known. But as the whisper campaign about him takes on new life, that freefall itself is becoming fodder, as in “maybe all those teams really did know something.”

Maybe they did, but sometimes the obvious gets overlooked in order to arrive at an answer to the narrative someone’s trying to create in the first place. The story at that time, I think, is still the right story. Outside of Oakland and Miami, quarterback didn’t seem to be the most pressing need of any other team at that time. Oakland picked JaMarcus Russell first and don’t you think they’d like to have that one back? Miami is the team that really threw the curve ball by drafting Ted Ginn, Jr. instead of, say, Quinn. Once Miami took a pass, Quinn was bound to fall further. Former general manager Phil Savage saw that as an opportunity to grab Quinn late in the first round and, to my recollection, everyone thought it was a stroke of semi-genius.

Quinn falling into Cleveland’s arms seemed like harmonic convergence, the kind of things that happen to teams from other cities. What was far more unanticipated was the startling way that Savage would implode as a general manager. It’s made all his decisions suspect even though not every one was a clunker. The drafting of Quinn is now being viewed, at least by Mangini, through those Savage-colored glasses.

And that’s where Quinn finds himself at the moment, somebody else’s guy. Mangini feels no loyalty to him. Why should he? Mangini’s marching orders are to rebuild this franchise and with a team this bad no position should be safe. Teams are always desperate for quarterbacks and when you see that St. Louis, for example, was starting Kyle Boller, you just know that Quinn will be a significant upgrade to some. The question is how desperate are those teams to part with a decent array of draft picks, particularly on a player whose current team seems to be purposely devaluing him. That’s a problem that Mangini and his assistant boss, general manager George Kokinis will have to solve. The key issue is timing.

But whatever happens with Quinn or even Anderson, the Browns’ season isn’t going to suddenly turn around. This isn’t a team in transition. It’s a team attempting to reinvent itself.

When Mangini outlined his offensive priorities before the season, he said he wanted his team to be able to run the ball. Well, every coach says pretty much the same thing. For all the changes over the years in the game there are still some universal truths and one of them is that teams need to be able to run to be successful in the long term. The Browns are deeply entrenched in this philosophy at the moment, which is actually a refreshing change.

That’s what makes all this talk about trading Quinn even more puzzling. At best all Mangini and Daboll want is for the quarterback to manage the game. That would seem to play into Quinn’s strengths more than Anderson’s but it ultimately doesn’t matter. Mangini seems to have his mind made up and that’s to build a team with Anderson at quarterback.

It won’t be the most popular decision Mangini’s ever made but then again on the list of complaints people have about him at the moment, this falls somewhere in the middle.

So whatever demonization that is now taking place regarding Quinn, it will never approach the far more deserved buildup that Edwards got. Unlike Edwards, all Quinn did was try his best. Apparently it just wasn’t good enough.

Running Counter to Theory

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:19:00 +0000

Entering Sunday’s game, the Cleveland Browns and the Buffalo Bills were the football equivalents of Patty and Cathy Lane, one pair of matching bookends, but hardly different as night and day. Statistical twins in all but record entering the game, they exited it with that flaw corrected as the Browns beat the Bills 6-3, in a game that set football back to at least the time when The Patty Duke Show was a primetime staple.

History will show that the Browns won it on an 18-yard field Billy Cundiff field goal with just 26 seconds remaining in the game. How they got there was the story of the entire game.

With the game tied 3-3 and just over 7 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, the Browns Dave Zastudil had his 7th punt of the day downed by defensive back Mike Adams at the Bills’ 4-yard line. It was Zastudil’s 3rd punt of the day downed inside the 5-yard line. The Browns’ defense looked to have forced a punt three plays later but defensive lineman Corey Williams was flagged on a very iffy roughing call on Bills’ quarterback Trent Edwards. That gave the Bills an automatic first down.

The Bills were eventually forced to punt but were no longer backed up. Brian Moorman’s punt sailed into the end zone and the Browns took over at their own 20. Three plays later Zastudil was punting again. But the break of the day came when returner Roscoe Parrish tried to field the ball as he was backing up. He fumbled, just as the Bills had done all day, and Blake Costanzo jumped on it at the Bills’ 16-yard line with three minutes left.

With the Bills out of timeouts, the Browns were content to milk the clock, getting the ball down to the Bills’ 1-yard line before the Cundiff game winning kick.

All the missteps and misadventures of that sequence was a microcosm of what was truly a miserable game.

Going in, the Browns figured to run given that their receiving corps was in great flux, the Jamal Lewis was returning to the starting lineup, and the Bills have a very suspect defensive line. It’s exactly what they did, repeatedly running Lewis into the line series after series.

What it didn’t yield in points it did at least yield in yards for Lewis. He had 31 carries for 117 yards, the second straight week a Browns’ running back went over the 100-yard mark. Jerome Harrison retreated into his previous role as change-of-pack back and had 8 carries for 21 yards.

But the Browns, counter to theory all year, couldn’t use the run to set up the pass. Derek Anderson had about as bad a game as a quarterback can have and probably sent head coach Eric Mangini into the film room immediately after the game trying to figure out whether to start Brett Ratliff next week.

When Anderson wasn’t overthrowing his receivers, he was under throwing them. On the few occasions where he got the ball where it was supposed to be the receivers dropped it. Beneath the wreckage read a line that was as ugly as a last second prom date: 2-17, 23 yards and 1 interception and a rating of 15.074.

On the Bills side of the ball, sporting much the same game plan for much the same reasons, almost nothing went right. They didn’t run particularly well and when forced to pass quarterback Edwards didn’t do that very well, either. Marshawn Lynch had 17 carries for 69 yards and Freddie Jackson added 30 yards on 13 carries. Edwards was 16-31 for 136 yards, 1 interception and a rating of 49.933. It was hardly enough to make Browns’ defensive coordinator Rob Ryan eat his words.

Though each team had some success on the ground, that was hardly the story of the game. From almost the opening kick to the final play, the game featured enough pratfalls and missteps to make another ‘60s staple, Lucy Ricardo, proud.

The Browns’ first drive was illustrative of most of the game. Lewis ran up the middle on the first four plays. On 3rd and 5, in a 4 wide receiver set, Anderson went, where else, but to his tight end, Robert Royal. The pass was low and the Browns punted.

It was a pattern that was repeated, often.

The Bills, playing Cathy Lane in this sitcom, did much the same thing. On their first drive they too came out running up the middle with Lynch. But a procedure penalty, a sack and a short pass on 3rd and 14 by quarterback Edwards came up short. Throw in a personal foul on center Geoff Hangartner after the play was over and the Bills punted. And that’s pretty much how it went, at least until the Parrish fumble that cost the Bills the game.

It would be too haughty to suggest that a game this insignificant was a chess match. With offensive ineptitude the order of the day, Mangini and his counterpart, Dick Jauron, played the field position game like two old timers playing a strategic game of checkers outside of Floyd’s barbershop.

On this count, the Browns were the first to advance across the board and get their queen, in the form of a 24-yard Cundiff field goal in the first half. The back story to this field goal unfolded like the 7,683rd repeat of that Lucy episode with the conveyor belt.

After a mind-numbing array of punt exchanges, Adams downed a Zastudil punt at the Bills’ 1-yard line. The Bills’ offense went into immediate false start mode, their third of the half and costing them all of 6 inches. This led to an Edwards’ quarterback sneak on first down, thus leading to speculation that Brian Daboll, the Browns’ offensive coordinator, was calling plays for both teams. A short run on second and a short pass to the tight end on third forced the Bills to punt again and this time the Browns really did have good field position, or so it would seem.

With Moorman punting from deep in his own end zone, Cribbs was able to field the ball at the Bills’ 42-yard line. But a holding penalty pushed the ball back on the Cleveland side of the field. The comedy of errors and ineptitude continued unabated.

The Browns would have blown the field position if not for an untimely offside penalty by the Bills defense on a third down sack of Anderson. It gave the Browns another chance and Cribbs took the handoff from Anderson and sprinted down the left sideline 31 yards. But two short runs and another missed pass forced a 24-yard Cundiff field goal giving Cleveland a 3-0 lead.

The Bills then took over and put together their best drive. It still wasn’t good enough. After driving down to the Cleveland 11-yard line the Bills had two penalties and a loss on a run, pushing them back to the Cleveland 31-yard line. On 4th and 24, Edwards was flushed out of the pocket and through deep toward Owens and into at least double coverage. The ball was batted down by Brodney Pool and Cleveland held on to its 3-0 lead as the half ended.

The Bills finally got on the scoreboard with a field goal of their own, a 36-yarder by Rian Lindell, to open the second half. But true to the Bills’ roots, it was a drive of one distraction after another getting there. Beyond the obligatory false start penalty, their 833rd of the day, the drive almost died until Lynch took a short pass on 3rd and 9 and turned it into a 35-yard gain aided greatly by some very poor tackling. The drive eventually did die, as expected, a few plays later forcing the Lindell field goal attempt.

With the score tied 3-3, it looked to be a return of the infamous Snow Bowl, except it was a bright, sunny day in Buffalo and the game was being played by two teams with rosters full of players that will be out of the league before either team makes the playoffs again.

The Browns did their part in acting like it was the elements, yea the elements, by continuing to mostly run Lewis. On Anderson’s best pass of the day, he had tight end Royal down the left side with a step on the defender but the ball clanged off the gloves Royal apparently was willed by Braylon Edwards before he left town. Steve Heiden was then called for an illegal crack back block Anderson threw poorly to Harrison who, had he caught it, would have been well short of the first down anyway.

About the only other excitement of the second half came on the Browns’ next possession, when Anderson, already just 2-12 for 23 yards, threw his perfunctory interception. Looking for Massaquoi running deep, Anderson misfired and safety Jarius Byrd laid out for the interception. He would have been down right there except that Massaquoi, the nearest Browns player, was busy complaining about something. Byrd got up and ran it back 14 yards.

No matter as Edwards bailed his counterpart out a few plays later. Edwards, scrambling as he was most of the day, looked for Owens down the left side line but found Eric Wright instead. But three run plays later and now officially fearful that Anderson would throw another interception, the Browns opted for the punt. Fielding the ball at the Bills 40 yard line, Parrish proceeded to run 15 yards backwards. It was the game’s signature play.

The Bills then went about making matters worse. On 3rd and 3, Edwards threw what could charitably be described as a screen of sorts to Lynch who was tackled immediately and short of the first down. Lynch, crashing into the Browns’ sidelines, got up and gesticulated furiously. The referees apparently didn’t know what to make of it all and flagged Lynch for unnecessary roughness. It was their 11th penalty of the day. The subsequent punt by Moorman, into the wind, gave the Browns the ball at their own 47-yard line.

Yes, it was early in the 4th quarter, but this had the feel of the Browns’ best chance to break the tie and keep this game from inflicting further pain on its patrons by going into overtime. It wasn’t and but for the Parrish fumble a few minutes later the game might still be going on.

There was nothing about the Browns’ performance, outside of Zastudil, that signaled anything other than it was a week full of upheaval and distraction. But again running counter to theory, all of the ineptitude and retreat resulted in Mangini’s first win as head coach of the Browns. Go figure. He’ll probably celebrate, but just barely.

As for the Bills, it’s hard to know what excuse they’ll use. Outside of an inability to block on offense, tackle on defense, line-up onside or listen to a snap count, they were a study in discipline and precision. If Jauron survives the season, then there ought to be a Congressional investigation.

With the win, the Browns now head to Pittsburgh. The Steelers are struggling a bit out of the gate this season but, unlike the Bills, they’ll know how to pile on the points if the Browns and Anderson have another day like they had on Sunday.

Lingering Items--Bengals Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:18:00 +0000

For a team that’s been serially awful for so long, the Cleveland Browns sure don’t act like it, or maybe they do. Each week, miserable loss by miserable loss notwithstanding, this team puts its fans through their paces. Fans emerge each week, tired and beaten down, as if they’d just finished another final exam in advanced chemistry.

After the game against the Baltimore Ravens, all the talk was about whether or not head coach Eric Mangini would survive to see another week. It was exhausting. Now, after the Bengals game, fans have had the chance to bat around the implications of Braylon Edwards’ tough-guy act outside a Cleveland bar only to then have those implications realized by his subsequent trade to the New York Jets. It’s been exhausting.

The only one that didn’t see wide receiver Braylon Edwards getting traded was probably Edwards himself, although it’s also not beyond the realm that Edwards orchestrated his exit by purposely not conforming to the “Mangini way.”

But however this exit ultimately was accomplished it was an act more than any other thus far that serves as Mangini’s signature moment. The trading of Kellen Winslow, Jr. happened in the off-season when people were still under the reflected glory of a magical Cavaliers seasons and dreaming of great moments that were not to come with the Indians. The cutting of Shaun Smith early in camp raised an eyebrow but not much else. No one liked him much, anyway, including, apparently, the Detroit Lions.

Thus for now and for the near future anyway jettisoning Edwards will serve as the official stake in the ground for Mangini’s tenure and from the sounds of things anyway, this one act bought him more goodwill than even he probably anticipated.

In the last few days, I’ve received more emails than I could have imagined not only supporting the move but praising, yes praising, Mangini for having that uniquely New York trait of chutzpah for pulling it off. I can see their point although it’s not exactly unheard of for the new guy in town to take on the biggest mouth first in order to snap the others back in line. It’s Arthur Fonzarelli 101.

And in Edwards Mangini certainly was taking on the biggest mouth. That is, the biggest mouth after Smith was cut. Cutting Edwards off at the knees is something that had no chance of going unnoticed.

I always believed that Edwards’ exit, whenever it would come, would be addition by subtraction. The Browns may be short on veteran talent at receiver, but don’t think for a moment that a new day hasn’t dawned with the troops.

Don’t take my word for it, read the quotes yourself and make sure to read between the lines. Start with Mike Furrey. Talking to the media on Thursday about the impact of Edwards being gone, as reported in the Plain Dealer, Furrey said: “We don’t have maybe the superstar that everybody’s looking for, but we have quality guys that are out there who want to play and make plays and are looking forward to start gelling.” Hmm.

But there was more from Furrey: “You saw New England [win without a star receiver] for a long time. Guys just go out there do what they’re supposed to do and keep their mouth shut and make plays and win games.” It’s such a great quote both for what it says and what it doesn’t say.

Indeed that’s the vibe out of Berea and even among a lot of fans, a circumstance that that didn’t seem likely just a week ago. Edwards and his attitude toward all things non-Edwards was like a steady stream of air inflating a balloon ever closer to its breaking point. Mangini sensed that too and acted before the balloon did break. Extricating Edwards provided just the release valve both the franchise and the fans needed in the wake of the million other things that have gone wrong this season.

The argument for keeping Edwards seems based mostly on theory. Edwards may possess the requisite talent but he’s in the last year of a five year contract and his one Pro Bowl season essentially puts him in the Zagar and Evans category, a one-hit wonder.

Maybe Edwards will strike it big in New York and the hits will start coming again. Truthfully, that’s up to him. He has the talent. He lacks the heart. But even if he New York becomes his Oz this tin man will never be the Browns’ equivalent to CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Manny Ramirez or Jim Thome. Edwards never wanted to be here and had he stayed would have been on the first plane out the day the season ended. Those former Indians at least had sustained success here and acted as if they wanted to stick around.

If the players now feel like they have something to look forward to with Edwards gone then it seems appropriate for the fans to share that same sentiment, at least a little.

**

It’s hard to know what to make of the fact that with the trade of Edwards the Browns now have essentially become the Jets, one season removed. The 10 former Jets now on the team represent 20% of the active roster. Remind me again, what was the Jets’ record last season? Why was Mangini fired?

In some ways this must have been what the Denver Broncos fans felt like in 2005 when virtually the entire defensive line plus backups found their way to Denver. The Broncos had virtually no defensive line to speak of and hired former Browns defensive line coach Andre Patterson to perform the makeover.

Revamp he did by bringing in Courtney Brown (free agent), Gerard Warren (4th round draft pick), Ebenezer Ekuban and Mike Myers (trade for Rueben Droughns). It didn’t help the Broncos all that much and while they did get decent contributions from Ekuban and Myers for a bit, none are active in the NFL at the moment. Ok, that’s not technically correct. Warren plays for Oakland, but given both the initiative he’s shown over his career and the team that currently pays his salary, can anyone really claim that makes him active? The gamble ended up costing Patterson his job as well.

The parallels with the current Jets aren’t exact. The Browns need players at nearly every position. The former Jets were brought in to not only fill a slot but more so to seed the locker room and school it in the Mangini way. If/when they fail, no one will much notice anyway and Mangini certainly won’t lose his job because of it.

The addition of Chansi Stuckey and Jason Trusnik are a bit different. Both are relatively young players and both appear to have far longer prospects with the team than players like Abe Elam, for example. They will always be judged in the context of the Edwards trade, along with the two draft picks that the Browns ultimately receive.

Historically, the addition of a bunch of players that the new head coach is comfortable with is commonplace. It’s like bringing a few trinkets from your mom’s house when you finally move into your own place. Eventually this trend will run its course and new things get bought just as here when Mangini begins to build the club through the next several drafts, assuming he gets that far.

**

At his various press conferences during the week, Mangini can be as dull as dirt in discussing everything from what happened to what will happen next. The same goes for offensive coordinator Brian Daboll’s weekly Friday press conference. Daboll has been an excellent student in the Mangini move-your-lips-but-say-nothing school of public relations that it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the two. Then there is Rob Ryan.

The Browns’ defensive coordinator is at least entertaining. He may not be as outspoken as his twin brother and Jets head coach Rex Ryan, but maybe that’s because the Browns’ Ryan only gets to speak to the media once a week. Here’s a vote that he becomes the Browns’ official spokesman.

This week Ryan had two gems that have gone viral on the internets. First was his contention, unprompted, that he thought that Bengals’ kicker Shayne Graham missed the game-winning field goal last Sunday. I had exactly the same thought at the same time. It did look wide right.

The problem is the placement of the camera at the time of the kick. While it was in the center, both its height and its depth makes it nearly impossible to tell if the kick passed through the uprights. But the fact that two referees were positioned under the cross bar and both signaled it was good, without hesitation, might seem like pretty good evidence that perhaps the camera in this case did not provide the best visible evidence.

Not to give Ryan a hard time, but maybe, just maybe he brought it up as a way of deflecting any questions about why his defense couldn’t hold the Bengals on that crucial 4th down play in overtime that led to the Graham field goal. In that case the camera provided more than adequate visible evidence of the miles this defense needs to travel before it escapes the bottom of the rankings.

It also is probably worth mentioning that the reason a kick that looked a little iffy wasn’t reviewed stems from the fact that it is not reviewable. According to the NFL’s rule book, only kicks that may or may not have gotten over the crossbar are reviewable. That certainly wasn’t the case with Graham’s kick. It was far above the uprights, which is why it was so difficult to judge.

Recall that Phil Dawson’s field goal against the Baltimore Ravens two seasons ago was reviewed because the issue was whether or not it went over or under the cross bar. The officials got that ruling correct, eventually. But in the case of Graham’s field goal, it wasn’t a question of whether it went above the crossbar, only through the uprights.

NFL officials have discussed in the past extending the uprights to make it easier on officials and that would certainly help. But it’s not as if this issue comes up much, unless you count the Rich Karliss kick against the Browns n “the Drive” playoff game against Denver, but why dredge up that old thing?

**

Back to Ryan. His other gem had to do with Bills quarterback Trent Edwards. Again, unsolicited, Ryan seemed to violate one of the key tenets of coachspeak, saying something controversial about an opponent.

Basically, Ryan said that the Browns aren’t exactly facing either Brett Favre or Carson Palmer this week in Edwards, which is as obvious as it is true. But then Ryan added: “This guy [Edwards] always seems to have a lot to say, so I'm going to say the same thing. Let's go. Let's get it on, see what he's all about this week.”

Now calling out Edwards for having a big mouth is a fascinating juxtaposition given that it was Ryan doing all the loud talking. It also seemed a little odd because Edwards isn’t Favre either when it comes to talking to the media. What apparently has been grinding at Ryan is that Edwards did lead the Bills to a game winning drive against Ryan’s Oakland Raiders last season and then had the temerity to suggest, merely suggest, that maybe Ryan’s team was a little tired on that last drive.

My guess is that Ryan’s team was a little tired on that last drive. Heck, Ryan’s team was a little tired in the second half of the Browns’ first game this season against the Vikings so conditioning may be an issue. But putting all that aside, is that really something to get into a verbal slap fight about?

Again, not to give Ryan too hard a time or else Mangini may suddenly make him unavailable on Fridays each week, but I’d much rather he fix the Browns defense before putting additional pressure on it to back up his words.

In terms of rankings, the Browns are pretty much where you’d figure a 0-4 team would be, at or near the bottom on everything that counts. As bad as the offense is, ranked 29th overall, the defense is actually worse. It is ranked dead last in overall defense, 31st in run defense and 27th in pass defense. Maybe that’s because those statistics are based on total yards surrendered that the defense looks so bad. The Browns’ offense hasn’t exactly helped the defense in staying off the field but then you could argue why the Browns’ defense is so adept at keeping opposing offenses on the field.

Everyone knows the Browns are bad in every way a team can be bad. That’s what makes Ryan’s words so fun. He has to know he’s setting himself up for these kinds of comments and forges ahead anyway. If Mangini really wants to deflect the focus on all things wrong, he shouldn’t just trot Ryan out once a week, he should give the guy his own reality show.

**

Running long this week, but blame it on the vast amount of news a team this bad can still manage to generate. Quickly, then, this week’s question to ponder: What’s the over/under in weeks before Ryan is suddenly unavailable to speak to the media?

Don't Let the Door...

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:36:00 +0000

The news broke that the Cleveland Browns traded disgruntled (and I mean really disgruntled) receiver Braylon Edwards to the New York Jets and even before I knew who and what the Browns received in return I couldn’t help think about Lenny Dykstra’s quote when the Philadelphia Phillies traded Von Hayes to the Indians years ago, “great trade, who’d we get?”

And that’s the point, isn’t it? Does it really matter who the Browns get in return for Edwards? Isn’t this the ultimate addition by subtraction trade?

There was an entry on the message boards at The Cleveland Fan that saw this trade as somehow being engineered by Cavaliers general manager Danny Ferry as his way of ensuring that LeBron James won’t end up in New York. Good thought.

As it turns out the Browns received linebacker Jason Trusnik, a 4th year player out of Nordonia High and Ohio Northern who came into the league as an undrafted free agent, wide receiver Chansi Stuckey, a 7th round pick of the Jets in 2007 out of Clemson, and two draft picks. That makes a good trade even better. The Browns actually received real live players and Mangini’s favorite currency, draft picks, in return, although the level of the picks hasn’t been disclosed.

Trusnik is mostly a special teams player and Stuckey is the Jets’ number two receiver on a team with very average wide receivers. For his career, Stuckey has 43 catches for 479 yards and 4 touchdowns. He missed all of 2007 with a foot injury. He’ll bring some experience but an undistinguished resume. No matter. If he can just catch the ball more than he drops it then he’ll be an immediate contributor. More importantly, this trade should at least put a permanent end to second round pick Brian Robiskie’s days as an inactive bystander on game day.

What makes this trade important from a Browns’ perspective is not what the Browns received in return but the statement that it makes to the rest of the players. To put it charitably, Edwards was a problem, not just for head coach Eric Mangini but for Romeo Crennel before that. Edwards was the center of his own universe and playing for a coach who only wants the planets revolving around him and no one else. Edwards always had his own agenda and while he tried on occasion to talk a good game his actions spoke volumes about where he placed himself in the team dynamic.

Edwards was a rock that was headed for Mangini’s windshield during the offseason. It’s not secret that Mangini tried to trade him in the run up to the draft but couldn’t quite work out a deal with the New York Giants. This time Mangini found a fit and a sigh of relief is being breathed city-wide.

Certainly Edwards’ latest problem, the near brawl he allegedly started early Monday morning, was the precipitating factor in his sudden departure. But this was a move that was coming sooner or later. The Browns could have retained Edwards by making him a franchise player at the end of the season, thus effectively keeping him from signing elsewhere. Practically no one thought that was a likely scenario.

What was always far more likely was a trade such as this that keeps the Browns from facing the difficult decision of having to either sign Edwards or let him go for nothing. Argue all you want (as I would) that letting Edwards go for nothing is still a plus for this franchise, but take it on a leap of faith if you must that other teams would have thought the Browns were crazy had they let that scenario play out.

Indeed, the fact that Mangini and general manager George Kokinis were able to get two active players and two draft picks for Edwards tells you that others in the league still have the outsider’s view that Edwards has value. It’s what’s called the greater fool theory in business. No matter how deep you may have stepped into it there’s always a bigger fool out there willing to bail you out. Count this is just the latest mess made by the former regime that Mangini is extricating the team from.

If you want a baseball comparison, think Milton Bradley. Teams like Oakland and the Chicago Cubs thought that they had the secret recipe for keeping Bradley, a talented malcontent, motivated and engaged and so they showered him with millions. The Cubs sent Bradley home before this season ended because he’s such a disruptive source and they are surely regretting the multi-millions they guaranteed him before this past season started. Someone will take Bradley off their hands, though he may be running out of chances.

Edwards is Bradley a few years removed, with the Jets proving the point. The Jets, like the Browns, are very thin at wide receiver and wouldn’t a former Pro Bowler look just great? Despite their good start, they don’t look to go anywhere fast with such a weak unit even as strong-armed rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez lights up Broadway.

Undoubtedly the Jets see Edwards as the 2007 Pro Bowl receiver and already have more than rationalized away the faults that dominate Edwards’ profile in Cleveland. You don’t have to attend the Jets’ press conference to know that they will attribute Edwards’ troubles in Cleveland to the unsettled nature of the franchise, the constant changing of the quarterbacks, and his having 4 different offensive coordinators in 5 years. But how does any of that explain why Edwards dropped a ball that was right in his hands on Sunday?

There will be those on the Cleveland side that will be disheartened by the Edwards trade because he represented one of the few potential playmakers on this team. But just as the team as a whole won’t progress until it can consistently perform, Edwards is in the last year of a 5 year contract under which he rarely was as consistent of a performer as his talent might suggest. Fans who wanted to keep Edwards around are in a distinct minority.

As for what this signals for the Browns going forward, if there were any doubts that Mangini or owner Randy Lerner were taking a long term view toward rebuilding this franchise this trade quashed them. With a very young and very unproven receiver corps before the trade, Mangini has further depleted the limited potential this team has to score. A high draft pick next spring is a certainty.

Still, that’s probably not a bad thing. This team needs more of nearly everything and whatever contributions Trusnik and Stuckey can make, particularly to the dynamic Mangini is trying to build, the team will be better off for it. As for the draft picks received, Browns’ fans have no expectations in that regard. Year after year of fruitless drafting will wear down even the most ardent optimists.

Now Edwards is New York’s problem. Surely he doesn’t see it that way. He’ll see it as the world’s biggest stage and maybe that’s what he needs. But whatever success he may end up having just know it would never have happened in Cleveland. Edwards’ couldn’t get over the fact that this is LeBron’s town and even if James doesn’t stay in Cleveland many will always be grateful that before he left it was he all along who was holding Edwards’ exit door.

Taking the Bad from the Good

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:45:00 +0000

It’s funny how the worm can turn in professional football. One day Cleveland Browns fans find themselves somewhat giddy despite their team’s fourth straight loss this season and 10th overall and the next day they find themselves having to scratch their heads over the misadventures of one of the most misguided players to ever wear a Browns’ uniform, Braylon Edwards.

On the first count, that little hop in the step following Sunday’s loss to the Cincinnati Bengals is viewed through the bending light of a prism called progress.

Is it justified? The answer is both yes and no. Against the Baltimore Ravens two weeks ago, the Browns were literally picked clean of what little meat laid on their bones. It was as ugly of a loss as a professional football team should ever have. More than that, though, it represented a significant step backwards for a team and a franchise that already was up against a brick wall. In that sense, then, yes Sunday’s loss was progress.

Sunday’s loss also was progress because of it offered a glimpse of what the future might hold in some regard and that the future may not be as dark as anticipated.

Mohamed Massaquoi clearly has serious ability. Jerome Harrison, assuming he’s done icing off all the bruises by this Sunday, showed he can be an every down running back. Josh Cribbs continues to get better and is making a case not only for a new contract but for the designation of best special teams player in the league. And Shaun Rogers? Let’s just say that his game on Sunday was a nice illustration of how a defensive lineman on a team this bad could still be a Pro Bowler.

But Sunday’s loss wasn’t all progress because it was, first and foremost, a loss and to a team that isn’t one of the NFL’s elites.

The Bengals may be 3-1 at the moment and they have a quality win against Pittsburgh, but when the dust settles on this season the Bengals aren’t likely to be one of the survivors. They are far too inconsistent on both sides of the ball at the moment to be serious contenders. The shear number of 3-and-outs they had against a very suspect Browns’ defense speaks volumes as does the fact that their defense gave up 20 points to a team that had one garbage touchdown on offense all season.

Still, on balance, Sunday’s loss was a beam of light in a very dark tunnel. But it will only represent that and nothing more until can be replicated on a regular basis. If Massaquoi disappears as quickly as he appeared, if Harrison can be an every down back but not an every week back, if teams stop kicking to Cribbs completely, then Sunday’s game will represent more anomaly than trend.

Sunday’s game, though, also was memorable for a few things that didn’t happen. Quarterback Derek Anderson kept his job but he didn’t quite establish permanent ownership over it. Indeed he had a rather typical roller coaster performance. His ability to throw quickly and long opened up the running game, thus proving you can use the pass to establish the run. But he was awful early and late and had a critical interception at the Bengals’ goal line that arguably cost the team the game.

The other quarterback, Brady Quinn, didn’t get to do anything more than assume the position that has defined his career to this point: yawning bystander. Anderson’s performance and the fact that he’s in the last year of his contract probably means that Quinn is worth keeping around. He’s three years into a career that hasn’t started and he’s been crippled by some bad luck and bad timing.

He fell precipitously in the first round of the draft due to a confluence of events and, in retrospect, some question about his ability. He also has a lousy agent who held him out of camp when he would have been far better off reporting early. The emergence of Anderson from afterthought to potential superstar wasn’t good for the Quinn psyche nor was former general manager Phil Savage’s decision to sign Anderson to a contract extension. When Quinn did get a chance to start he showed poise and promise but was hurt too quickly for any final judgments to be rendered. Then, when he gets his chance this season, his head coach puts him on a very short leash and surrounds him with a running back well past his prime and a second receiver who literally learning on the job. He never got the benefit that Anderson did of having a running back on the right side of his career or a legitimate receiver to complement Braylon Edwards. If it wasn’t for bad luck Quinn would have no luck at all.

And then there is Edwards. He not only didn’t catch a pass in a game he’s played in for the first time in his career, he didn’t do anything afterward to help burnish an image he so wrongly claims is unfair. The only person that didn’t see this coming was my buddy Ron and that’s only because he stopped following the NFL the last time they went on strike.

Frankly, writing about Edwards as misanthrope is getting rather repetitive. To paraphrase Edwards, it’s something fans have dealt with for five years now. They aren’t even worried about it anymore. He signed a five-year deal.

If Edwards taking out his frustration on a man about half his size ends up being his ticket out of Cleveland then at least something could came of it. For whatever good he does and for whatever statements he makes about being unselfish and a team player, Edwards has proven time and again that he cares only of himself and courting an image as a player, both on and off the field.

At the moment, he’s neither. He’s as sad and pathetic of an excuse for a player that the Browns have ever had. If he had no talent, he’d be an afterthought. But because he has some ability he is a never-ending source of frustration.

It’s hard to tell if there is just one reason Edwards’ bad-ass attitude spilled over early Monday morning into a fight outside of a Cleveland bar but the smart money says probably not. Maybe it was the balls that bounced off his hands Sunday. Maybe it was the emergence of another legitimate receiving threat in the form of Massaquoi. In that regard about the only thing that could have made that worse news for Edwards is if it had been former Buckeye Brian Robiskie instead. Maybe it was just that Edwards really is sick of all the love that this town gives LeBron James and, by extension, his friends at the expense of carpetbaggers like Edwards who somehow thinks he’s more Cleveland than James, for whatever that means. Maybe he just didn’t like the way his drinks were being mixed.

Whatever it was Edwards once again undid any good he thought he was doing by positioning himself earlier this season as all about the team and all about being unselfish.

Working out of classification by playing pop psychologist is always dangerous, but I’ll wade in those waters anyway. Edwards has a certain amount of demons but he isn’t alone in that regard. He’s always had an outsized sense of entitlement, but then again so do most professional athletes. He also seems to carry a chip on his shoulder because he feels he’s never been completely embraced. Some of the league’s best players carried similar chips.

But the real issue with Edwards is that he’s always been just a paycheck player. He has no heart and it shows week in and week out. It may be that things have always come too easy for him that he’s found it unnecessary to develop the humility a professional athlete needs to cope with the inevitable failures. You decide but simply put, Edwards is hardly worth the sum of his parts.

Edwards can practice catching balls on the sidelines all he wants but he’s always going to drop more than he should because he’s not playing the game for the right reasons. In college it was about getting to the pros. He wanted to be the flashy receiver and was because it got him noticed. But in that process teams like Cleveland had to ignore the simple fact that Edwards had trouble with the routine plays.

At the pro level it’s been much the same. Edwards has always seemed far more interested in demonstrating his flash appeal. Get to the Pro Bowl. Get the love on the big stage. Get the next big contract. But his penchant for not making the routine plays is something he’s becoming far more known for these days. The first ball that he dropped on Sunday was classic Edwards. Anderson hit Edwards between the numbers on a very routine route and Edwards couldn’t execute. Even if he has as good a head for football as any receiver in the game, his lack of heart will continue to hold him back.

You can point to the good deeds Edwards has done in the community and draw whatever conclusions you’d like but in context they come across as insincere efforts designed more to bolster his image than to further something Edwards deeply cares about. They also were probably a tax strategy.

And that is the crux of the problem. Edwards seems to only really care about Edwards. He comes across as someone who doesn’t care about this team or the game he plays. He doesn’t honor either through hard work and commitment and sullies both through lip service and indifference. By this point it may be too late for Edwards to find his inner child and the reason he put on that first pair of shoulder pads in a midget league game. I do know this, though. Until Edwards rediscovers that spark and embraces it, the riches he dreams about will always be in someone else’s wallet.

As for the lingering impact of this escapade, let’s just say that it’s going to further the gulf between Edwards and his teammates and vice versa. Mangini may handle it in house but he’s not going to turn a blind eye. And if there’s something that players hate more than being punished for their own picayune offenses it’s being punished for someone else’s.

What Could Have Been

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:53:00 +0000

The big adjustment is the one that got all the attention but it was the little one that made far more of a difference, just not enough. Mohamed Massaquoi, starting at receiver in place of Josh Cribbs, was a major difference maker of the unexpected kind but in the end the Cleveland Browns’ inability to finish and Cincinnati’s Carson Palmer’s abject resiliency gave the Bengals a 23-20 overtime victory against the winless Browns. It was the Browns’ 10th straight loss dating back to last season.

The Browns, clinging to a precarious 20—14 lead late in the game couldn’t find a way to finish off a reeling Bengals’ team even as they were seemingly stepping on their throats the entire second half. After slowing down the Bengals nearly the entire game, Palmer hit a wide open Chad Ochocinco in the end zone on a 4th and goal from the Cleveland 6-yard line with 1:44 left in the game to tie the score at 20-20. But Shaun Rogers blocked to go-ahead extra point, his second blocked kick of the day, giving the Browns one final chance in regulation.

Operating without any time outs, two had been blown needlessly and one was lost on head coach Eric Mangini’s second unsuccessful replay challenge of the game, quarterback Derek Anderson was not able to get the Browns into kicker Billy Cundiff’s field goal range. It sent the game into overtime and ultimately into the hands of the Bengals.

The overtime had the look and feel of the waning rounds of a heavyweight fight by two club pros. Despite winning the coin toss, the Bengals punches lacked any zing and they were forced to punt. The Browns’ counterpunch likewise lacked any sting as they were a quick 3-and-out. Two more changes of possession each set up the Bengals’ winning drive with 3:23 remaining.

Taking over at their own 20, Palmer and the Bengals put together an 11-play drive that ended with Graham’s 31-yard field goal and the Bengals pulling victory from the gaping jaws of a defeated but spirited Browns’ defense.

But oh what could have been.

Like a long putt that looks good until it doesn’t, the Browns looked like they were on the way to ending one of the worst losing streaks in franchise history, thanks in large part to Massaquoi, Rogers, Cribbs, Derek Anderson and Jerome Harrison, but not necessarily in that order.

While Massaquoi was in large measure the story of the game from the Browns’ perspective there were plenty of supporting characters. Anderson, for one, shook off a slow start and came on strong, repeatedly finding an open Massaquoi. Harrison, taking over for the injured Jamal Lewis, repeatedly helped his quarterback by being a credible threat on the ground, running for 121 yards on 29 carries. It was a nice turnaround for Harrison, whose fumble early in the second quarter led to a 78-yard Robert Geathers return and 14-0 Bengals lead. Rogers’ right hand alone was responsible for saving four points and ensuring the game got into overtime. He blocked Graham’s first field goal attempt and then blocked the critical extra point that sent the game into overtime. And then there was Cribbs. It was his long kick returns that repeatedly put the Browns’ offense in good position throughout the game.

The re-insertion of Anderson into the starting lineup certainly garnered all the attention in the run-up to Sunday’s game and it had the impact that Mangini likely expected. But it might have gone for naught if not for Mangini’s less-publicized by just as important decision to end the Cribbs-as-receiver experiment in favor of Massaquoi and now, perhaps, a new star is born. Massaquoi had 8 catches for 148 yards and gave the Browns another legitimate offensive weapon that opposing defenses will now have to worry about. To all this it’s worth wondering, what took so long?

Anderson, as is usually his wont, started off slow and at one point in the first half was 3-11 for 61 yards. But as is also his wont, Anderson got hot, repeatedly finding Massaquoi and moving the ball in a way that left fans scratching their heads asking where this all had been in the first three games of the season. In all, Anderson was 26-48 for 269 yards and two touchdowns, a 1-yarder to tight end Steve Heiden and a 1-yard run on 4th down that tied the score at 14 halfway through the third quarter.

Meanwhile, the Bengals, after two long opening drives, only one of which resulted in points, went into the kind of offensive and defensive funk that has defined head coach Marvin Lewis’ tenure with the team. But the Bengals are nothing if not opportunistic this season and despite being behind in the 4th quarter of every game this season, the Bengals find themselves on top of the AFC North with a 4-1 record, performing one miraculous escape after another.

At the outset, the game looked to be heading the way every Browns’ game has gone this season—over early. With the precision of every other opponent the Browns have faced this season, the Bengals took the opening kickoff and marched from their own 12-yard line to the Cleveland 5 before seeing their drive blow up via the Rogers’ block of what should have been a Graham chip-shot field goal.

Still the drive didn’t seem to portend well for the Browns as it chewed up over 7 minutes of the first quarter. Indeed, the trend continued on the Bengals next drive, coming as it did after a Browns 3-and-out, chewed up nearly 7 more minutes. In all, the Browns defense was on the field for nearly 14 minutes of the 1st quarter. That drive ended when Palmer found Ochocinco on a 5-yard fade pass that helped give the Bengals a 7-0 lead. Mangini unsuccessfully challenged the catch.

As the Bengals were dominating the time of possession, Anderson was busy making a case for Brett Ratliff. Anderson’s first pass was in the gut of receiver Braylon Edwards, which is the exact wrong place to throw to Edwards. It was dropped. His next pass, on 3rd and 7, was well off the mark to Massaquoi and the drive was over nearly as quickly as it started.

The Browns might have continued to founder somewhere deep in their own territory but for a nice return by Cribbs after the Bengals’ touchdown. Cribbs put together one of his trademark knifing returns through the opposition and scampered 58 yards to the Bengals’ 34-yard line. It didn’t end well, thanks to the Geathers fumble return that pushed the lead to a usually insurmountable 14-0.

This was the point that the game looked to be another death march on Lake Erie. But in what really did portend the future of this game at least the Browns showed a bit of life on their next drive, particularly when Anderson hit a 30-yard pass to Massaquoi for one first down and then rushed for another on a sneak before the usual offensive gremlins, dropped passes, passes knocked down at the line of scrimmage, forced another punt anyway.

The Browns then did do something on defense that they hadn’t done all season, and this time it was something good. Palmer, perhaps getting greedy, threw from his own end zone long only to see it intercepted by Brodney Pool at the Cleveland 43-yard line. But enthusiasm was quickly tempered when Anderson was sacked for 12 yards. Harrison ran for 4 yards and then Anderson had another ball knocked down at the line of scrimmage. Another Dave Zastudil punt followed. This was Anderson’s low point of the game.

After another Bengals’ punt and a Cribbs’ 39-yard return to the Cincinnati 38-yard line, the Browns had the opportunity with 3 minutes left in the first half to tighten a game that was surprisingly closer than it probably should have been. And faith, for once, was ultimately rewarded. Anderson lofted the ball to a streaking Massaquoi down the right side line for an apparent 30-yard touchdown that, on review, indicated that Massaquoi was down at the half-yard line. On the next play, Anderson rolled right and hit tight end Steve Heiden for the touchdown. The extra point by Billy Cundiff cut the Bengals lead to 14-7.

Two things about the sequence were worth noting. First, the replay reversal of the apparent Massaquoi touchdown actually helped the Browns. When Massaquoi made the catch there was nearly 2 minutes left in the half. By running another play the Browns were able to take another 20 or so seconds off the clock. The Bengals were never able to get much of a drive going thereafter. Second, the pass from Anderson to Heiden was just the kind of mid range pass that’s bedeviled Anderson his whole career. This one was on the mark.

It looked to be the turning point of the game. Opening the second half Anderson and the Browns were in the process of putting together their best drive of the season, featuring their best run of the season—a Harrison 21-yard burst—before another of Anderson’s gremlins, the interception, paid a visit at exactly the wrong moment. On 3rd and 8 from the Cincinnati 8-yard line, Anderson dropped back and tried to force a pass in the end zone to Heiden but it was picked off by cornerback Jonathan Joseph at the goal line and returned 32 yards.

Mangini burned his second replay challenge on the interception and was wrong again. That coupled with the timeout that Anderson needlessly burned on the half’s second play left the Browns with one time out for the remainder of the half. It came back to haunt them.

The turnover was not the dramatic momentum turn that if appeared it might be, at least for the Bengals. Struggling on offense after their first two drives, the Bengals were forced to punt when a third down pass slipped out of Palmer’s hands. The Browns, on the other hand, were full of fight.

Taking over at their own 23, the Browns put together a 10-play 77-yard drive, capped off by an Anderson 1-yard run on 4th down, that helped tie the score at 14-14. The drive featured a healthy dose of Anderson-Massaquoi with enough hard runs by Harrison to keep the Bengals’ defense off-balance.

The Bengals, reeling by this point, then turned the ball right back over after returner Andre Caldwell fumbled the kickoff and Blake Costanzo recovered, giving the Browns the ball at the Cincinnati 18-yard line. But the Browns couldn’t punch it in and head to settle for a 26-yard field goal by Cundiff that gave them the 17-14 lead just as the fourth quarter got underway.

As important as those four points would have been the Browns really had the chance to finish off the Bengals on their next drive after Cribbs returned a Kevin Huber punt 50 yards to the Cincinnati 14 with just under 9 minutes remaining. But Anderson lost 8 yards on a sack and the Browns had to settle for a 31-yard field goal that gave them the 20-14 lead. Those four lost points turned out to be the difference in the game.

The Bengals then rallied with the Palmer to Ochocinco touchdown pass that was set up by a key 16-yard pass from Palmer to Chris Henry on 3rd and 14. The Browns had one final chance in regulation but, operating without any time outs, couldn’t get into field goal range.

Unlike, really, any game this season this loss, coming as it did in last second fashion, at least gives the Browns something to build on for the rest of the season. Anderson was rusty, certainly, but showed more than enough to quell any further quarterback controversy for the time being. Harrison probably secured his role as a feature back and he did so in grand fashion. Massaquoi now gives the Browns another option that they didn’t have before this day. It will force teams to stop concentrating on Edwards, who was held without a reception while Massaquoi was having a career day.

For all the good, it just wasn’t enough. The game ended as most probably expected anyway but for the first time this season Browns fans at least have a legitimate reason to believe that the entire season will no longer be a complete bust.

Lingering Items--Ravens Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 09:18:00 +0000

Sometimes helps comes from the most unexpected places. Take this past Wednesday. Seemingly out of nowhere, in the middle of one of the worst weeks for Browns and their fans since Bill Belichick cut Bernie Kosar, Cleveland Indians general manager Mark Shapiro temporarily takes the focus of his beleaguered brother-in-law, Eric Mangini, by canning Eric Wedge and his entire coaching staff. It worked, for a moment anyway.

The Wedge firing doesn’t necessarily carry the same unbridled enthusiasm that the dismissal of Mangini might carry at the moment. Wedge’s shortcomings as a manager are well chronicled but at least he was approachable. He never carried himself to be the smartest guy in the room. He protected his players, sometimes to a fault, and was respectful, sometimes to a fault, of their struggles. Wedge will stay in baseball and has a real shot at managing again someday.

His firing was a bit of a surprise, at least in terms of timing. It turns out that Wedge asked Shapiro several days ago to know his fate before the team went to Boston for the final series. Shapiro accommodated Wedge, a nice move, and gave him the ubiquitous “going in a different direction” speech.

That Wedge stayed on to finish the season knowing he was done is an interesting but ultimately characteristically Wedge move. See it through to the end, no matter the outcome. Many of Wedge’s failures this season and for the last 7 seasons were every bit Shapiro’s failures and vice versa. But it really is time to actually go in that different direction. Here’s hoping that the Dolans and Shapiro are better at due diligence when it comes to hiring a manager than Randy Lerner was when it came to hiring a new head coach.

**

Back to the brother-in-law. It’s been a tough week for anything associated with the Cleveland Browns. The media buzzards are circling around Mangini as if he’s already have dead creating a sense among everyone else that perhaps Mangini’s firing is imminent. That is highly doubtful. He’ll make it through the season and probably well beyond.

For Lerner to actually pull the plug so quickly would require a whole lot of psychology to overcome. Making a move that quickly requires an impulsive personality, which is the exact opposite of Lerner’s disconnected approach. Lerner also has a lot personally invested in the decision. He made it solo which means he’s got his own reputation on the line and he’s going to need far more evidence than a little erratic decision making this early in the season to convince him that he was wrong.

Larry Elavasky, the self-appointed president of the Baltimore Browns Backers club, claims he wrote a letter to Lerner expressing his abject disappointment in the Browns and how it was making him sick to even watch the team. Elavasky claims that Lerner wrote him an email back and, among other things, expressed his faith in Mangini. (See letter and response here) In particular, Lerner said that when he got to the Browns “there was essentially no front office or core culture to define scouting, player evaluation or the draft let alone what is [sic] was to care about Cleveland and football….It is common knowledge of course that it took Tom Landry roughly seven seasons to build a winner in the 60s in Dallas. With the Steelers, it was probably 30 odd years from the time the team was acquired to when it stumbled on Chuck Knoll—and it has never turned back.”

The alleged email then went on to say that Lerner is heartbroken about the results so far as are his kids and concluded with “I do know that Eric Mangini knows his football and is a straight-shooter and a deeply decent man. To say the least, I believe he can get this thing right. Fingers crossed.”

I have no idea if the email is legitimate. Lerner doesn’t talk to anyone and it’s hard to believe in some sense that he would use email, the very vehicle that got Phil Savage in trouble with Lerner, as a coming out party of sorts. It’s also hard to believe that in an email he would throw his own Dad under the bus by saying what a mess the franchise was when he inherited it. Just call me skeptical.

On the other hand, the sentiment he expresses about Mangini is exactly where you’d think it would be. Lerner wouldn’t have hired Mangini if he didn’t think he knew football or if he didn’t think that Mangini was a decent sort. If it’s not a legitimate letter, kudos on the writer for getting this detail exactly right.

Irrespective of whether or not it’s real, it’s accurate. Getting this thing right isn’t a job that is either easily or quickly done. It did take that long in Dallas and Pittsburgh. Moreover, Lerner must feel Mangini is the right person to accomplish that task or it makes no sense to hire him in the first place. Speculate all you want but the most likely case it that we’ll all be here a year from now with the same complaints and the same speculation about Mangini’s future with the team.

**

There’s been plenty of talk in the last week about a number of players filing grievances against Mangini because of the imposition of fines. Mangini actually addressed the issue at his weekly press conference saying that grievances like these are common and that he’d be surprised if players didn’t file grievances, surmising that upwards of 90% of fines get grieved.

If only the Browns could play that good of defense.

As the head coach, Mangini is well within his rights under the collective bargaining agreement to set forth a list of infractions for which a player could be fined. Indeed, the agreement has a section dedicated to detailing the types of fines that may be levied and the upper limit on the amount of the fine. It even contains a yearly adjustment to that upper limit, a cost of living increase of sorts for fines. Players showing up late for meetings, reporting overweight and the like are very common fines in the NFL. Mangini’s schedule probably goes beyond what many other teams have in place but it’s hard to argue with his intent. Players should pay for their incidentals at hotels and they shouldn’t park in handicap spots, unless they play defense, I suppose.

In any evnet, when a player is fined his option is to pay it or grieve it. The grievance procedure in the collective bargaining agreement is two steps. First, the player files his complaint with club management. If he’s unsatisfied with the answer, which he undoubtedly will be, he can file it with the league office and have a neutral arbitrator hear the matter.

Not to get into a debate with Mangini and thus subject myself to a fine, but Mangini just isn’t correct when he says that grievances are filed over most of these matters. To the contrary, most fines don’t result in grievances. They get paid and the player moves on.

When they do get filed, it’s for one of two reasons. Either the player doesn’t think he committed the infraction or the player believes that the fine imposed was unfair relative to either the seriousness of the infraction or the fines levied to others similarly situated. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two, as in “I didn’t do it but if I did the fine is too much because Braylon only had to pay $250 for coming in late after the Michigan game.”

In either case, this narrows down the number of grievances that do get filed. Generally players know whether or not they committed the infraction and the amount imposed is usually according to a schedule so its relative fairness isn’t often an issue. Thus if upwards of 90% of the fines Mangini levies are indeed resulting in grievances, either here or when he was in New York, that’s a damning indictment on him. Again, though, it’s not really true. It’s just another Manginism.

As I said last week, the merits of the grievances files against Mangini aren’t the issue. Indeed, I assume that Mangini isn’t so random as to fine individuals without some basis. But the fact that a number of players already perceive unfairness and are willing to confront their head coach in an arbitration setting over it speaks volumes. Sure, Mangini or any head coach is prohibited from retaliating against a player because he filed a grievance but in a league where a player can get cut, without recourse, for performance reasons, determining retaliation is nearly impossible, particularly for fringe players. Consequences be damned, I ain’t paying no 50 cents for no coke.

This is exactly the kind of thing that undid Mangini in New York. Players perceived him as unfair for a variety of reasons. Whether he was or not was no longer the issue. Eventually ownership became convinced that Mangini lost the locker room and decided it was easier to fire one than to fire 53.

Mangini hasn’t lost the Browns’ locker room at this point. But manipulations with the quarterbacks and the iron fist when it comes to fines aren’t winning him many converts at the moment. For those already predisposed to feel that he’s unfair, based on reality or their own perception of reality, these things just tip the balance and become their leading exhibits for making their case to other players and to management.

This Browns team isn’t going to be competitive until Mangini can take away that kind of politicking in the locker room and get the players on the same page and focused on the next opponent only. That he hasn’t made much of a dent in that so far is a problem. That’s really job one. It may take a huge housecleaning to accomplish but he can’t get rid of everyone. When it comes down to it the biggest threat to Mangini’s tenure is if/when Lerner becomes convinced that it indeed is much easier to fire one than to fire 53.

**

At least reality hasn’t quite left town.

If you’re looking for some proof that not everything associated with the Browns at the moment is off its rails, consider this. At least some players understand that they are as much of a problem as anything else.

There was Braylon Edwards candidly admitting that the team has underachieved and that it may not even matter much who’s at quarterback. According to the Plain Dealer he said, "to be honest, we can't do any worse. It sounds, I don't know, maybe it's bad to say, but I don't think we can play any worse than we did.” It’s as honest as an assessment as you’re likely to read by someone on the inside.

One of the more telling quotes though came from Shaun Rogers. As reported in the Plain Dealer, Rogers labeled Sunday’s game with Cincinnati as “oh so, oh so important” and added this gem in discussing his team’s chances: “I would love to win, but I just want to see us compete this week, really.” From your lips to God’s ears, Shaun.

I like it when players demonstrate this level of unvarnished awareness publicly. Too often a player is so rote in saying “we just have to get better” that you wonder whether he has any sense that maybe he just isn’t good enough to get any better.. Edwards first and now Rogers at least understand that this team needs to be competitive before it can even think about winning. Recognition really is the first step on the road back from rock bottom. If this isn’t rock bottom, then that’s another column for another week.

**

Here’s hoping that Derek Anderson succeeds where Brady Quinn could not. But if he can’t then everyone associated with the Browns will be asking this week’s question to ponder: “What now?”

Busting Up the Concrete

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:42:00 +0000

The Cleveland Browns are a lot of things this season, but until this weekend no one would have considered them existentialists. Yet here they are offering up a variation of the classic existential question by essentially positing: can a team this bad have a controversy at any position?

So much is wrong with this team from the ownership to the leadership on the field that such transient thoughts about quarterback controversies or whether the Browns have effectively ruined the career of Quinn, or Anderson for that matter, seem rather trivial. Assuming Mangini replaces Quinn with Anderson will that really make any noise?

That doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be learned here. As usual, there is and it is about head coach Eric Mangini. He’s turned into bizarro Chris Palmer.

Remember when Ty Detmer was signed on to be Tim Couch’s mentor in the fateful first season back 11 years ago? The veteran lasted all of 8 quarters until Palmer pulled the plug, essentially telling the world that the team wasn’t going anywhere so it was time to give the first-round pick the experience he would need to carry him and the team into a better place a few seasons down the road.

At the time Palmer’s decision was controversial mostly because the NFL mindset then was that rookies can’t play quarterback; it stunts their long-term development because failure allegedly shatters their confidence. How quaint that notion appears today, except in Cleveland. Palmer’s decision didn’t work out but it wasn’t wrong. It didn’t work out because the Browns were so bad that any quarterback who stepped on the field risked career-threatening injury, which is basically what happened with Couch. It wasn’t wrong because the franchise was building and he at least was trying to establish some semblance of a foundation.

Flash forward to Sunday. Mangini, the bizarro Palmer, does almost the exact opposite. He pulled his first-round pick, albeit 3 years removed, after a mere 10 quarters to insert a more veteran (barely) quarterback who is more suited to backing up than starting.

Mangini’s decision, unlike Palmer’s, may turn out OK but it is wrong. Instead of admitting the scale of the rebuilding process underway, Mangini acts as if this is a minor fix that will make the structure that much more sound. Hardly. Mangini took over a franchise with no structure and the minute he puts something in place he acts like a bride furnishing her first apartment, moving the end table here and the chair there. The fans play the patient husband tolerating these little moves knowing full well that they hardly make a difference.

Getting the quarterback position settled is one of the more important elements to building a successful team in the NFL. When you consider all the reasons the Browns have been awful the last 10 years, the lack of a quarterback is among the root causes. Mangini seemed to understand that at the outset and sought to remedy it. He had the chance to draft Mark Sanchez but apparently felt that there was already enough to work with here for both the near and long term to allow him to fill what he felt were more pressing needs.

After supposedly conducting a thorough competition over the better part of two months in order to put the forms in the right place, Mangini took a jack hammer to the concrete before it was fully cured. He did this on the strength of scant evidence presented in 10 quarters of football played against three objectively better football teams. And if Mangini names Anderson the starter, as expected, it apparently will come down to one play, Anderson’s 16-yard completion on third down to Mike Furrey.

In essence, Mangini is reworking the forms and pouring a new foundation three games in, throwing away virtually everything that had accumulated to that point in favor of one meaningless first down in a game in which his team had already been vivisected by a Ravens defense that had grown bored with the ease of their conquest.

When Palmer dumped Detmer in favor of Couch, most thought it signaled panic. As much as anything else it helped grease the skids for Palmer’s firing. If Palmer had made that decision today, most would probably praise the move because, well, the NFL mindset on rookie quarterbacks has changed. In some ways, Palmer was just ahead of that curve.

The opposite, however, is not true. Mangini, allegedly a veteran head coach, is the one panicking. More than just panicking he’s also signaling that he can’t be trusted. As ludicrous as the so-called quarterback competition in preseason was, it was important for Mangini to name as starter the one who emerged or else lose whatever credibility he was trying to build with his new team. When Mangini named Quinn as starter, it seemed like the right decision. The results of the competition were somewhat inconclusive but of the two participants most agreed that Quinn played less bad.

But those results are now apparently irrelevant in favor of 10 quarters of Quinn’s work against one meaningless pass completed by Anderson. If Mangini is so easily swayed, was the so-called competition ever anything more than window dressing anyway? In actuality, what this really says is that Mangini is completely indifferent to how random he appears. In his mind he probably thinks it adds to his aura.

The players always will put as good a face on all of this as they can because, really, they have no other choice. Existing under a petty dictatorship where every raised eyebrow and misspoken word may lighten their wallet, why on earth would they bother to have an opinion, at least publicly? Besides, for all the talk about “team” professional athletes within the same franchise are just a loosely affiliated federation of competitors. Thrown together mostly by chance they know that at any given moment they could be sitting in someone else’s locker room or at home in their Lay-Z-Boy waiting for a call from their agent on where they’re headed next. One player’s misery may be another’s opportunity.

Mangini, of course, is as free to take advantage of this built-in mindset as he is to reshuffle the deck as much as he wants. It comes with the job. Just like Randy Lerner shouldn’t hamstring this franchise by adhering to decisions that were wrong just for the sake of continuity (hint, hint) Mangini shouldn’t be so constrained either.

But why is it that Quinn is being castigated by Mangini in favor of a quarterback who has far more sins on his resume? Why is Mangini giving Anderson a pass for the three interceptions he threw on Sunday and crucifying Quinn for his one? Anderson came into a difficult situation during Sunday’s game only if you accept the premise that the Browns had a shot to win the game in the first place. They didn’t. Quinn was hamstrung with the same constraints—no running game, limited receiving corps and playing against one of the best defenses in the league—that Anderson had. The fact that Anderson entered the game with the team down 20-0 at the half hardly changed that equation.

All this talk about the quarterbacks also begs a larger question. What is Mangini doing about the overall approach to the offense? Stated differently, how safe is Brian Daboll’s job? During the first week of September three teams fired their offensive coordinators: Buffalo, Tampa Bay and Kansas City. Those seemed like panic moves at the time and in truth they were.

But we’re three games into the actual season and no one seems to be asking the rather obvious question as to how Daboll’s performance could escape the scrutiny that Quinn’s has gotten. If it’s possible Daboll has even less qualifications to be an offensive coordinator than Mangini has to be a head coach, but maybe that’s his attraction. Mangini, always the underdog, appreciates a compatriot.

Daboll never played the game as a professional and was a safety for the University of Rochester. His coaching career is likewise undistinguished. He started as a restricted volunteer at the College of William and Mary, went on to become a graduate assistant at Michigan State and then somehow landed in New England with the Patriots as a defensive assistant, whatever that means. Ultimately he spent 4 years as a receivers coach with the Patriots and 2 years as a quarterback coach with the New York Jets. In context to Mangini’s very similar resume, Daboll’s ascension by Mangini to full blown NFL offensive coordinator makes perfect sense.

What’s fascinating to consider in all of this is that both Mangini and Daboll were given ample opportunities that they probably didn’t deserve to move up the ladder while Quinn is being left to rot for having the audacity to play poorly for 10 quarters with a team as pointless and directionless as the Browns.

It may turn out that neither Quinn nor Anderson is a NFL caliber starting quarterback. But that’s a question that will get answered when either or both find themselves with another team and a better chance. Given the panicked and random way this regime makes decision, that’s really their only hope.

This isn’t to defend or protect either Quinn or Anderson so much as it is to underscore the problems with the puppeteer pulling the strings. Ample evidence exists and it’s growing daily that the puppeteer doesn’t know what he’s doing. Lucky for him, the one pulling his strings checked out about 5 minutes after his hiring was announced.

Where Down is the New Up

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:16:00 +0000

Somewhere between Romeo Crennel and Eric Mangini is the right head coach for the Cleveland Browns. If you’re out there and available at the moment just raise your hand, and do so high enough so that it can be seen somewhere in England where owner Randy Lerner surely is hiding.

On any other team under these same circumstances, Mangini might be in line to hold the record for the quickest hook of a newly-hired coach. But as it is, he’ll be given due time to snuff out the last sign of life in this franchise by Lerner, as disaffected of an owner as exists in professional sports. If it’s three years, so be it. Lerner has more than demonstrated by deed if not word that he couldn't care less.

That the Browns would be bad this season isn’t a surprise to anyone. That they are this bad at this moment surely is. But more to the point, Mangini has his troops playing as if they are purposely trying to get him fired.

Just about everything associated with this team is in disarray. The locker room is a circus. You have veterans with maturity issues playing juvenile pranks on rookies. You have immature rookies lashing out because they were doused with water. In each case, preparing for the next opponent seems like an after thought. Then there is also the matter of a mini-players revolt as a number of them, already irritated with Mangini’s petty ways and even pettier fines, are filing grievances with the league in what might be record fashion.

Whether these grievances have any merit is largely irrelevant. The fact that they have been filed so quickly into Mangini’s tenure is strong evidence that there is a deep and abiding distrust of the man in charge and an even deeper and more abiding lack of respect for him.

Sure there are players that will stand by his side, but these are mostly the former Jets that he breathed new life into by giving them a job here in Cleveland. There were also a few non-former Jets defending their head coach, but that’s suspect in the present environment. Does a fine await them if they don’t? If the polling was anonymous you’d have trouble finding anyone else in the locker room willing to put their own reputation on the line to stand up for him.

It isn’t just the pettiness, it’s the dispirited way Mangini goes about putting together the team. As the new man in town he decided to open up a quarterback competition rather than evaluate the evidence at hand. Fair enough. But then he went about constructing it in a way that made so little sense not even the main participants, Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson, had any idea where they stood until a few days before the Vikings game.

Stop and contemplate the implications of that and you can begin to understand why this team has had one touchdown in three games. If both Quinn and Anderson were being kept in the dark, how clueless must the other 25 or so players on offense have been? Mangini kept them wondering who would be their leader and as a result they built allegiance to no one. The results speak for themselves.

But it goes further than that. Trying to gain a competitive advantage at the expense of teaching a team that didn’t score a touchdown in its last 6 games last season how to score again, Mangini ran a vanilla preseason instead. Consequently, what little time Quinn and Anderson had to work in those games added little to their regular season preparation. The Browns threw about 152 screen passes in the preseason. In three games they’ve thrown, perhaps, three and no one on the Minnesota, Denver or Baltimore defense was fooled for a minute.

But it goes even further than that. The Browns’ receiving corps was thin going into the preseason. When you’re number one receiver is Braylon Edwards, known more for running his mouth and dropping the ball, that’s the first warning sign. But then Mangini traded Kellen Winslow without a viable back-up. There still isn’t one.

Mangini appeared to address the shortcoming by drafting two, count’em, two receivers in the second round. Keep in mind that in Brian Robiskie, he was the 7th receiver drafted and by all measures other than Mangini’s, was the most polished receiver in the draft. He can’t even get himself activated for game day because Mangini, always the thinker, just had to find a space for that third string defensive back on special teams. Robiskie isn’t probably the only one in the locker room scratching his head over that one. The other second rounder, Mohammed Massaquoi might as well be inactive. He sees time late in the game, if at all, so busy is Mangini trying to shoehorn Joshua Cribbs into a role he’s not quite suited for.

Layered on all of this is a first time offensive coordinator, Brian Daboll, the first branch I suppose off the Mangini tree. It’s been three games and I defy anyone to present a cogent explanation for what exactly the team is trying to accomplish under his direction. The runs are perfunctory, the passing game unimaginative.

Argue all you want that the running game is lousy because the running backs are lousy, but as you’re doing that remember to lay the blame for that at Mangini’s feet. He’s the one that left the team so thin at the position. As for the passing game, it may be that Quinn doesn’t like to look downfield, but as I watch things unfold, it doesn’t look like there are many plays designed to go downfield. Edwards is double covered on virtually every play. Cribbs is a neophyte at the position and can’t get open. Michael Furrey is a specialist at going underneath, never past the first down markers. The Browns under Daboll are content to dump and dink because that’s all they can think to do.

It’s impossible to believe that the Browns are this bad. The offensive line features a Pro Bowler, a well thought of high-priced guard and a decorated rookie at center. They aren’t the second coming of the 1973 Buffalo Bills, but they also aren’t the second coming of the 1999 Cleveland Browns either. There is some talent. Why, then, can’t it open holes or protect a quarterback?

There is probably any number of theories but the one I keep landing on is coaching. Simply put, Mangini and the coaching team he assembled are in over their collective heads. They are not putting any of these players in a position to be successful. Nothing is done to slow down the rush, less is done to open up the running game. Quinn is confused because he’s in a confusing system with no purpose.

On defense, Bob Ryan is doing nothing to make anyone feel like the New York Jets pegged the wrong Ryan brother as their successor to Mangini. Ryan gets a bit of a pass, though, because outside of perhaps Shaun Rogers there isn’t a player on this defense that could start for any other team.

Watching Brandon McDonald, for example, flail away against Baltimore only confirms that this was another personnel assessment that former general manager Phil Savage got exactly wrong. Watching “highlights” of the Denver/Oakland game reminded me of how Savage touted JaMarcus Russell as the next great quarterback. It’s too bad, really, that Savage wasn’t able to snag Russell. He’d fit in perfect here.

Mangini isn’t to blame for players like McDonald but he is to blame for the current product on the field. It’s not an issue of this taking time to turn around. There is nothing to turn around. Mangini has taken a team that was run aground under the last regime and instead of trying to redefine it he’s busy poking enough gaping holes in it to make it impossible to float again.

If Lerner thought that Mangini would be a steadying force, then just chalk that up as another in a series of bad decisions Lerner’s made since he reluctantly inherited the team. When Mangini yanked Quinn in the third quarter of a game that didn’t have a chance of winning before it started, it only confirmed Mangini’s unsteady hand.

What’s fascinating to contemplate is why exactly Mangini would take a situation already desperate and deliberately make it worse by inserting Anderson ostensibly to add a spark. He had to know that it wouldn’t work and if he didn’t know it that only makes it that much worse. It confirms to the players, on both sides of the ball, that their head coach has hit the panic button. If you think they aren’t playing for him now, just wait. When it comes to things like this, players aren’t as dumb as Mangini would like to believe. If he wanted a spark with Anderson then why did he wait until the team was back on the field to start the second half? It was a panic move by a head coach not worthy of the title.

Whether Quinn starts next week or Anderson or even Brett Ratliff or the ghost of Bruce Gradkowski, just know that the ensuing turmoil was self-inflicted by what is quickly becoming the worst off-season move in the history of the NFL, Lerner’s hiring of Mangini.

All of which gets me back to my original point. On any other team under these circumstances, Mangini would be searching for a realtor. In Cleveland, where down is the new up, Lerner is probably trying to figure out how to give Mangini and even greater role in the organization.

Chasing Their Tails

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:22:00 +0000

It’s time to stop judging the Cleveland Browns by such conventional standards as wins or losses. The watchword for these Browns is simply “progress” as in was there any noticeable progress from the previous week’s disaster? Adjusting expectations according, the Browns were more Denver bad than Minnesota bad as they were blasted by the Ravens, 34-3.

Like a bad movie being played on a continuous loop, head coach Eric Mangini decided to revisit the relative salad days of preseason by reintroducing a quarterback controversy for the coming week. Here’s what we know. The limits of Mangini’s patience is 10 quarters. That’s how long he gave his preseason quarterback derby winner Brady Quinn before pulling the plug by inserting Derek Anderson in the game to start the second half. It didn’t pay immediate dividends. In fact it didn’t pay any dividends, unless you consider that it made a dark and dank situation even more muddled. Anderson moved the team once but threw 3 interceptions in his limited time. You figure out what that means, I’ve lost the will.

If there’s a controversy next week regarding the quarterback slot, it will probably be over who has to start. Being forced to start at quarterback for this team, a team without a running or receiving game, is like being forced to clean the bathroom with a toothbrush after a frat party.

While 3 interceptions in such a short period of time are impressive by even Cleveland standards, Anderson had a few nice moments. Playing in garbage time that seems to be arriving earlier each week, Anderson at least put his team in relative to position to score by driving them down to the Ravens 8-yard line on his second drive.

The drive featured a number of “good Anderson” plays where he avoids the rush and throws down the field followed by a number of “bad Anderson” plays where he inexplicably trips over his feet and misses a mid-range pass. Still, for a moment it was good enough to give fans hope that someday soon a real touchdown might be scored.

Just not on this day. Down 27-0 and apparently deciding that in some sense progress is measured in points, Mangini eschewed 4th and goal from the 12 (yea, they were 1st and goal from the 8) and instead sent out newly-signed kicker Billy Cundiff for a 30-yard field goal. How very Romeo Crennel of Mangini.

As for the rest of the game, at least it fell apart early, dispelling any notion at the outset that it might be competitive and giving fans enough time to get some chores completed.

Taking the opening kick off and moving the ball for a brief moment on their first series, it blew up 5 plays into it when quarterback Brady Quinn was intercepted by cornerback Dominique Foxworth at the Baltimore 37-yard line. Foxworth then lateraled to Ray Lewis who got the ball to the Cleveland 31 yard line. From there, after a perfunctory toying with the Browns’ defense on 4th down, Willis McGahee essentially walked into the end zone so unmolested that he could have Twittered his status on the way and just like that the Ravens had a 7-0 lead.

Meanwhile, back on the Ravens side of the ball, offensive coordinator Cam Cameron used the team’s second drive to demonstrate not just to the Browns but to the rest of the league that this is a team in full.

Like Artie Lange at a Vegas buffet line, the Ravens marched through the Browns with ease for the drive’s first 77 yards but a timely sack of quarterback Joe Flacco forced the Ravens to settle for a 37-yard field goal by Steven Hauschka. The drive was greatly aided by the Browns’ defense’s inability to put pressure on Flacco for most of it and a late hit penalty that will have Mangini poking out his eyeballs when he looks at it on film Monday, but those are just details. The Ravens made it look effortless. The Browns, on the other hand, looked to be using less effort.

Here’s a question to ponder so early in the week: on the Browns’ next drive, Jerome Harrison had the team’s longest run of the season, 17 yards. On first down Quinn quick snapped a quarterback sneak. The question is why? Did he think that Harrison was a yard short of the first down on his run? Was he trying to catch the Ravens napping? Was Maurice Carthon subbing for Brian Daboll as offensive coordinator? The answer isn’t all that important except that it is. It was a wasted play against that feasts on wasted plays. Two plays later, the Browns were punting.

But this being about progress and not results, the Harrison run did change field position. Dave Zastudil’s punt was downed at the Baltimore 9-yard line. An illegal block penalty put it at the Baltimore 3-yard line. This is the spot in which it would be nice to write that the Browns defense, emboldened by having the Ravens buried deep, tightened and held, forcing the Ravens to punt from their own end zone and giving Cleveland the ball at the Baltimore 45-yard line.

Actually, it was nice to write that, though it would have been nicer if it were true. Instead the Ravens put together another long drive, 92-yards to be exact, before being stopped at the Cleveland 5-yard line. Hauschka hit the 33-yard field goal (which would have been a 23-yarder but for a holding penalty on his first kick) and pushed the score to an even more insurmountable 13-0.

Again, though, this is about progress and from a progress standpoint the Browns defense may have given up two incredibly long drives, 77 yards and 92 yards, back-to-back, but at least they didn’t let the Ravens in the end zone. Kudos, I guess, to Rob Ryan.

Where, then, to fit in the Ravens next touchdown, the one that helped make it 20-0 at half? The answer, of course, is somewhere between the 77-yarder and 95-yarder. This one was precisely 80 yards. For those bothering to do the math, that’s 4 drives in the first half covering a total of 271 yards. For perspective, that’s more yardage than the Browns had in either of the first two games.

The Browns, as usual, didn’t find the end zone in the first half. They didn’t even come close. Not a whiff. But since this is about progress, call it a draw. They haven’t scored a touchdown in the first half of either of their first two games, either.

It’s probably best not to get into too much detail about what took place in the second half. The overarching story was Mangini pulling the plug on Quinn and Anderson doing his best to punch his own ticket elsewhere. For the rest of it, let’s just put a positive spin on it and acknowledge that not as much progress was made as Mangini had hoped. Here were the highlights:

• Opening kickoff, Browns were offside. Mangini, I think, swallowed his tongue.

• Browns defense holds Ravens, forcing their first punt at 12:47 of the third quarter, thus marking this the first halftime adjustment that’s worked for the Browns this season.

• When Anderson entered the game it wasn’t a surprise. I remember thinking at the moment Quinn threw the interception on the Browns’ first drive that his days as the starting quarterback were dwindling quickly. Apparently Mangini had the same thought at the same time. Scary, huh?

• Anderson shows exactly what a backup can do when given the same empty toolbox as the starter. He, too, throws an interception on his first drive, thus keeping it at “1” the number of halftime adjustments this season that have been effective.

• McGahee goes where Adrian Peterson and Correll Buckhalter have gone before. He rumbles 34 yards down to the Cleveland 19-yard line, treating Brandon McDonald as if he were his little brother by pushing him out of the way twice.

• Ray Rice completes what McGahee started by running the final 9 yards, giving the Ravens a 27-0 lead. In England, it’s 6 hours later and owner Randy Lerner is just sitting down for dinner. Good show, mate.

• As Anderson began his second drive, the media drones from Sector 2 readied the next wave of quarterback questions for Mangini while the Ravens defense contemplated whether or not to stay interested enough to try and pitch a shut out. Ah, the game within the game. The Browns win this little battle when they foil the shut out with the Cundiff field goal.

• For apparently no reason, Shaun Rogers throws Ravens guard Ben Grubbs to the ground and gets an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Oddly, this seemed to rattle the Ravens enough that McGahee fumbles on the next play, deep in Browns’ territory, and the Browns recover. The Ravens didn’t stay rattled for long as the Browns were forced to punt a few plays later.

• In what may be one of his final drives as a Cleveland Brown, Anderson throws long and downfield in the direction of Edwards. Dawann Landry, wearing Ravens purple, sees it land in his gut for the interception.

• With a 27-3 lead, Ravens head coach John Harbaugh gets word from the press box that tiebreaker points might be needed. Flacco throws long to Derrick Mason, who makes a great catch and move on an outclassed McDonald and turns it into a 34-3 game. McDonald must be worried that he is soon to receive the Martin Rucker treatment. It’s barely 3:30 p.m. EDT, there’s still over 7 minutes remaining and yet it seems like the game already has lasted 4 hours.

• Anderson throws his third interception and somewhere on the Browns’ bench Quinn is probably muttering under his breath, “told ya.”

• Troy Smith enters the game and for two series the Browns hold. Smith deserved better.

Sorting through the wreckage, the final stats tell the story in one sense but not in another. The Ravens had 479 yards in offense, the Browns 186. Flacco was 25-35 for 342 yards, Quinn and Anderson were a combined 17-27 for 115 yards. Baltimore had 142 yards on the ground and the Browns had exactly half of that. It would be hard to find a game more lopsided out of the Texas-UTEP game.

As bad as things were last season, the sting of this season is far worse actually. Promised a new direction and a new attitude, most fans didn’t even begin to contemplate that that meant backwards and worse. There is no spark or passion on this team as it takes its cue from the emotionally inept Mangini. The players know that theirs is a boat that is drifting listlessly and that Mangini is responsible for the lack of rudder. He put the team in this position offensively by not committing to one quarterback early in preseason and he took an ax to whatever continuity was being built (admittedly not much) by throwing Anderson in when things got tough.

If the Browns really want to fix this mess then they have to set a course and learn to live with it, for all the ups and down that may come. Instead they change direction on a whim and with their third straight blowout loss, find themselves once again going in circles. Apropos to nothing, the New York Jets are 3-0.

Lingering Items--Broncos Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:16:00 +0000

The news that the Cleveland Browns waived tight end Martin Rucker was greeted by most with a mere yawn or at best a knowing smirk. Either way it’s below the radar when there are far bigger issues to deal with. But, really, in some sense isn’t the cutting of Rucker a marker for the biggest issue facing this team, a deep and abiding lack of talent?

Rucker was one of former general manager Phil Savage’s classic picks. Thinking, as he usually did, that he was once again outsmarting the rest of the league, he traded a 2009 third round pick to Dallas for another fourth round pick in 2008, which turned into Rucker.

If Savage were still around, the fact that he wasted a third round pick on another bust would be a dischargeable offense. Hopefully it will probably keep him further unemployed. As the Plain Dealer reported, Savage was well aware that Rucker couldn’t block, which is something most teams want from tight ends, dismissing his complete lack of skills by challenging the reporter to name a tight end that could block. Since Rucker wasn’t drafted to fill the role of a traditional tight end, he basically was competing for the position of slow receiver. In that context his being waived was inevitable. The Browns already have plenty of those.

The larger issue though is what Savage did to this franchise in the process of making such a bone-headed move. Essentially, the Browns had no 2008 draft. It was mortgaged for three defensive linemen, a quarterback and a linebacker in the persons of, Shaun Rogers, Corey Williams, Ahtyba Rubin, Brady Quinn, and Alex Hall, respectively.

Of that group, the only one to contribute meaningfully so far has been Rogers. The level of his contribution though is hard to gauge. He was chosen for the Pro Bowl on the strength of a season in which he anchored a defensive line that was one of the worst in the league. Evidently it would have been far worse without Rogers but even with him the team went 4-12. Maybe they go 3-13 or 2-14 without him, as if that would really would have mattered.

Corey Williams hasn’t been a bust but neither has he been much of a contributor, mainly due to injuries. Rubin looks like a decent prospect but again this season the defensive line can’t stop the run so it’s unclear how much of a difference he, Rogers or Williams, singularly or collectively, are making anyway. Quinn is the team’s starting quarterback on an offense without a credible running game or a credible complement of receivers to catch the ball. He looks bad but there isn’t a whole lot of ways to look good, either. As for Hall, whatever his contributions might be, the Browns linebacking corps is one of the worst in the league. Do the math on that yourself.

No team can essentially give away draft after draft after draft after draft and expect to be competitive. The Indians’ season is a testament to exactly what eventually happens when draft neglect has been committed in serial fashion. The Browns of this season and last are making a case of overtaking the Indians as the Wikipedia entry for that point.

That gets head coach Eric Mangini off the hook except that it really doesn’t. To this point his 2009 draft isn’t looking so smart, either. All the manipulating and cleverness that he tried to exhibit on draft day cost him Mark Sanchez and instead brought the team a rookie center and two receivers who apparently can’t even beat out a converted college quarterback and kick returner, even if he is one of the best kick returners in the league. There also are a couple of linebackers that haven’t contributed despite the gaping need the team has at that position and a defensive back that plays on special teams because, again, he can’t crack an incredibly weak starting defensive backfield. Finally, there’s a running back who shows promise but hasn’t contributed much in two games despite, wait for it, a gaping need at that position as well.

That’s not to pass judgment on the Browns 2009 draft class. It has plenty of time to get better and one preseason and two games in is just far too early to judge it to conclusion. But it is fair to suggest that it ought to contributing more considering the alternatives that are playing in their places. In any case, last year’s class is kaput. Rucker is now gone and forgotten. But what won’t be is what he stands for; another failed draft. If 2009 turns into another failed draft, just add another few years before the team can even hope to be competitive.

**

Does the fact that Coye Francies tried to take on the entire Browns’ locker room after being the victim of some sort of prank mean the wheels are starting to fall off the team so soon? Probably not. But of all the comments made about it, the most intriguing was that made by receiver Braylon Edwards when he told reporters, according to the Plain Dealer, “welcome to the Browns’ locker room.”

In that comment Edwards was clearly telling the collected media, in front of whom the skirmish broke out, that this kind of chaos is de rigueur for the team. Small wonder Mangini doesn’t want the media around.

It might be fair to ask why any Browns are playing a prank on any player, no matter how juvenile, instead of concentrating on not suffering their third straight beat down. But that would just be poking at the obvious. What is clear is that despite all the discipline he promised to bring, Mangini is no more in charge of the locker room than his predecessor.

Under former head coach Romeo Crennel, Brady Quinn was the victim of a prank that he was none too happy about, the shaving of his Sampson-like locks last year. Then there was that little tête-à-tête (that’s two French phrases in one item, take that Gladys McCoy) Quinn had with Shaun Smith. That all probably meant that Quinn doesn’t have much of a sense of humor or it might mean that neither incident was particularly funny. But it also meant that Crennel was busy sitting in his office while the players were doing anything but trying to win the next game.

There is a “boys will be boys” element to every team and in sports, the pranks are particularly amateurish, usually involving humiliation. But right now the Browns are being laughed at nationally because their play on the field is a joke. Now they’re also being laughed at nationally because their players can’t take a joke.

**

The muted response by Browns’ fans to last week’s loss in Denver can only mean that a large portion of them are already in either stage 4 or 5 of the grieving process. That means some are still depressed by most are in the acceptance phase, which is healthy.

Occasionally I get a random email from someone still in the bargaining stage, as in “if Jamal Lewis can just….and if Quinn can find Edwards…and if Eric Wright becomes the Pro Bowl corner he should be…then this team can make the playoffs” or something like that. But those are far less than they used to be.

The Browns as a franchise died when Art Modell moved them to Baltimore. The new Browns arrived terminally ill, clinging to a ventilator. The plug was effectively pulled when Randy Lerner took over as owner. The best way to look at it these days is to simply think of Mangini’s hire as the equivalent to the team starting over from scratch. It’s a refreshing state of mind, actually. It makes you realize that it’s no longer about trying to keep grandpa alive but about watching a newborn grow. Whether it has the right parents is open to much debate. But this truly is a franchise at the moment that is learning to crawl—forward.

**

As a bit of a follow-up to an item last week, it is noted that Green Bay New York Jets Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre has apologized, sort of, for getting his former team, the Jets, and his former coach, Mangini, in trouble with the league. Poor Brett is just apoplectic about having cost them $150,000 in fines, but not apoplectic enough to reimburse either of them.

Mangini, as usual, has put the whole matter behind him though he never addressed it either. I mention this because it’s a fascinating counterpoint to the rather impassioned justification Mangini gave for fining Abram Elam $1700 for not paying for a $3 bottle of water at a hotel. Mangini said there is a code of conduct that everyone in every walk of life lives by and his football players should be no different. In that, of course, Mangini’s views are above reproach.

But Mangini is also rather convenient when it comes to the more squishy issues of league rules as they apply to him. Mangini knew full well that he wasn’t properly reporting Favre’s injury last year but continued to do it anyway. He wouldn’t have been caught but for Favre’s big mouth. If you’re keeping score, that means that Elam’s offense wasn’t walking out without paying for the water, it was getting caught.

To this point Mangini hasn’t substantively spoken about the $25,000 fine he received from the league. In basically sweeping it away, he creates the impression that he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong but there’s no use fighting big brother. Maybe he actually feels that way, maybe he doesn’t. But either way, Mangini missed a teaching opportunity with his troops that, more than empty words about his players’ place in proper society, would have demonstrated exactly why it was proper to fine Elam fine and any other player similarly situated. Mangini could have done this by the simple act of publicly declaring that his actions last year with respect to Favre were wrong, a violation of the rules for which he was rightly fined and then giving his word that it will never happen again.

Mangini couldn’t do that because he lacks that gene. If he did, it wouldn’t be Saturday before Browns fans found out that the starting kicker has a serious enough injury that the team was auditioning emergency kickers.

The truth is that Mangini plays the outer boundaries of any rules he simply doesn’t like. League rules require that he provide the media reasonable access to the team and he complies with the letter but hardly the spirit. He pressured rookies into taking a 10-hour bus ride, a ride Mangini himself was unwilling to make, skirting again the spirit if not the letter of the collective bargaining agreement. In both cases he’s left a bus-load of pissed off people in his wake.

It’s a disturbing pattern, actually. There’s no problem with Mangini holding his players accountable for not acting like jerks in public. There is a problem when Mangini is only willing to live by that same code when it’s convenient. Ethics and integrity aren’t about what you do when someone’s looking. They’re about what you do when no one is.

**

If a team can possibly be a “soft” 2-0 then the Denver Broncos have met that charge. After opening against the Bengals and then the Browns, the Broncos have gotten off to a the kind of start Browns fans can only dream about and, in the process, have given their fans a reason to believe that Pat Bowlen’s firing of Mike Shanahan was the right move at the right moment.

It won’t last.

Denver’s cause will be helped this year by the division they play in, but it won’t be helped enough. As long as the Broncos continue to start Kyle Orton as their quarterback, and what choice do they have really, they and their fans will eventually face reality. You can drink all night and not feel like you’re drunk, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have a headache when you wake up in the morning.

The Broncos, frankly, are a borderline pathetic franchise at the moment. They beat the Browns last week because that’s what they, like the Steelers, always do. But there are bills coming due. Head coach Josh McDaniel’s decision to trade quarterbacks with the Bears was not just plain dumb, it will become a millstone around his neck when his offense can’t keep pace with the better defensive teams in the league. When they play the Steelers or the Ravens, take either and give the points.

The Broncos defense may have been able to stifle the Browns offense, but then again I think Ohio State’s defense could hold the Browns to under 10 points at the moment. When the Broncos begin facing teams with a legitimate offense, their defense will struggle. The seeds of that struggle were evident even against the Browns.

**

The San Francisco 49ers haven’t yet signed receiver Michael Crabtree. If the 49ers are smart, they’ll let him dangle some more. The 49ers have made an offer befitting Crabtree’s place in the draft but Crabtree wants an offer befitting where he believes he should have gone in the draft. Eventually he’ll sign. Sitting out the year will result in money he’ll never recoup. All this is a very long set up for this week’s question to ponder: When the 2009 season concludes, who will have more receptions, Crabtree or Brian Robiskie and Mohamed Massaquoi?

More Puzzle Than Pieces

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Benz) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:08:00 +0000

Rarely is it a good time to be a Cleveland sports fan but some times are better than others. This is one of the others.

Browns fans seemed particularly despondent over the team’s dismal performance at Denver on Sunday. It wasn’t so much that they expected the team to win. They just didn’t expect them to lose that bad. As the game played out in its mind-numbing slowness, it’s glacial pace gave fans plenty of time to contemplate just how long it might be until this team, this franchise, is competitive again. From the looks of things at the moment, it will be years.

That the Browns season is effectively over two games in is just another helping of bad news on a town that thought that this past NBA season would bring the championship this town believes it deserves. An inability to match-up with an otherwise inferior opponent carried an aura of inevitability of the defeat that surely came.

Then, of course, the meltdown by the Cleveland Indians followed, carrying with it all earmarks of a business model that’s built around developing players that can later be traded. The Indians are a franchise without the financial wherewithal to develop and retain core players and fans just know at this point that any World Series title depends mostly on the harmonic convergence of young players exceeding expectations before they can be free agents.

With the Indians season now a distant memory despite a handful of games remaining and the Cavs still a several days away from camp (and sorting out what the heck Delonte West was thinking), focus is on the Browns. It’s not quite a team in disarray in the Romeo Crennel sense, but it’s a team with limited purpose.

Trying to get a bead on head coach Eric Mangini is proving more elusive as each day passes. Quarterback Brady Quinn, a rookie quarterback in every way but name, is saddled with a somewhat suspect offensive line, a non-existent running back led by a back several years past his prime, and a receiving corps with a college quarterback and kick returner extraordinaire acting as its second best option.

Then there’s the defense. It features a secondary that can’t cover a slot receiver or tackle a running back. The last time the linebackers put pressure on an opposing quarterback on a regular basis, Clay Matthews, Sr. was only known as Clay Matthews. And the defensive line? In two games opposing teams have averaged more than 200 yards on the ground and the nose tackle is a Pro Bowler.

Where does that leave the team now and, more importantly, where is the direction that Mangini wants to take it? At the moment there’s no way of telling because the next time that Mangini provides a substantive answer on anything will be the first time. He’s no more going to offer a credible explanation on why he’s trying to mold Josh Cribbs into a big-time receiver at the expense of two potential big-time receivers that he just drafted in the second round then he is on why, despite the fact that Jamal Lewis is done as a running back, he left the team so thin in that department.

Fans are always about instant gratification but the sense of dread is not over immediate results. No one is calling for Mangini to be fired and most fans know, intellectually if not emotionally, that it’s going to take far more than one off –season and a few games to fix this mess. But on the other hand they’d at least like to think that entering their 11th season, this version of the Browns has more of a chance to win a few games than the expansion version did. It is on this notion that Mangini will be judged.

Assessing Mangini in this context thus far is difficult. The team has a serious deficit in talent and while Mangini made all the calls on which personnel would be retained and which would be jettisoned, it’s not like he could fire everyone and start over, either. What he has done so far, though, begs a few questions that he’ll never answer.

Among the most puzzling is why Brian Robiskie was inactive for the Denver game and why Mohamad Massaquoi basically didn’t play until garbage time. Is it really the case that Cribbs is well ahead of both of them or more the case of trying to figure out right now the full limits of Cribbs’ potential?

It’s no knock on Cribbs to say that his usefulness as a receiver is limited. He can run reverses just fine but lacks the polish and skill to run crisp routes and get open consistently at the moment. That may change down the road by why is it being done at the expense of two receivers with far bigger upsides?

One theory is that the more Cribbs is out there with the first team offense, the more effective the so-called wildcat offense will become. That probably holds some merit but until Cribbs starts throwing from that formation, NFL defenses will know what’s coming and respond accordingly. The Vikings only needed to see it once to stop it the second time.

Mangini hinted at an answer with respect to Robiskie, offering the rather odd excuse that Robiskie was inactive because Mangini needed to get newly-acquired Patriots castoff defensive back Ray Ventrone in the mix on special teams. Hard to tell if that was a slam at Robiskie or a slam at the special teams, but either way the Browns have essentially relegated one of their second round picks behind an unsigned free agent begging for a gig until Mangini through him a lifeline.

Another puzzle is the defense. Sure, it lacks credible defensive ends, linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties, but why are they so out of shape? Or is it my imagination that they can’t sustain either their stamina or their interest for a full 60 minutes?

You can argue somewhat correctly that if the offense would sustain a few more drives maybe the defense wouldn’t get so tired. But what of the notion that this is only the second game of the season and the players should be less banged up and in enough shape to sustain their energy irrespective of how long they’ve been on the field in a particular game? They do this for a living, the least they can do is be in shape.

The challenge for Mangini, just two games in though it feels like 22, is not only stifling the losing culture but keeping it from further metastasizing. Show me a team that is losing like this and I’ll show you a team that is falling apart at the seams. Want proof? Look at the spectacularly dismal way Eric Wedge is bringing his limp horse of a team back to the barn. It is exactly the same feeling that fans had at the end of the Browns season last year, more bored than pissed looking on at injured and indifferent players acting as if a rectal exam would be more welcome.

It may be far too soon to say the players on this team are just mailing in their performance each week, but it isn’t too soon to conclude that they go into each week expecting to lose. It’s the inevitable result when the elements of an indifferent owner, bad hires, bad drafts and bad karma meet. Maybe Mangini can become the change agent to actually alter the recipe of this toxic soup, but given the way his team and his draft picks have played thus far, the list of things that need to get fixed isn’t any shorter.