The Art of Modell

The news came across in rather pedestrian, almost unobtrusive fashion. Art Modell, former owner of the Baltimore Ravens, former owner of the Cleveland Browns, died of natural causes in his adopted city of Baltimore. He was 87 years old.

Somehow I always imagined that the news would come across with a far bigger impact, at least in Cleveland. But maybe it’s because the fans, like me, never figured that Modell would actually die.

By all accounts, Modell had been on his death bed since the early ‘80s. He had heart attacks and all manner of maladies and yet hung in there to live another day. He was Hyman Roth, perpetually dying but always sticking around as a thorn in someone’s side. Even Modell saw the humor in his supposedly poor health, often joking about how he continuously cheated death. It wasn’t the only thing he cheated.

So his actual death caught me a bit flat footed. I had started to write his obituary several times over the years but gave up because I became convinced sometime about 10 years ago that Modell wasn’t human but an apparition, a vampire perhaps, that would roam the world forevermore and scrapped the project. It doesn’t matter. His story is burned into my brain.

The Baltimore Sun had a fawning tribute to Modell and why not? Modell returned football to the city of Baltimore after it had been screwed over by Bob Irsay. I felt sorry for Baltimore when that happened and then cheered when Homeland Security added them to the foreign enemies list after they conspired with Modell to steal the Browns.

Modell didn’t pack up his team and move it in the middle of the night like Irsay did, but he might as well have. The effect was the same, but just on a different city. And because of it, Modell forever changed his legacy and how he was perceived in both life and now death.

Thankfully Cleveland, with substantial assistance from the NFL, stopped the cycle of abuse by simply creating a team from scratch. And despite all the problems with Browns 2.0, it remains a point of pride that the city didn’t have to steal someone else’s team to get football back. Our crappy team is our own.

But back to Modell, although, truthfully, even today nearly everything about the Browns has a relationship to him. I’ve always thought, for example, that the way it all went down, with Al Lerner helping lure Modell to Baltimore and then Lerner landing as the new owner of the Browns was a masterstroke of sleight-of-hand perpetuated by Lerner. Certainly Modell saw it that way as shortly after the move, Modell and Lerner had a falling out. And where would Browns 2.0 be without the abiding influence of Al and Randy Lerner? They were better owners than Modell in the sense that they had more money. But they were not any more technically proficient.

Meanwhile, Modell was a hero in the minds of the citizens of Baltimore and when the Ravens, the re-constituted re-named Browns, won the Super Bowl years later, Modell become an icon. As he did in Cleveland, Modell became an active philanthropist and social gadfly. It endeared him to the non-profit community in Baltimore just as it had in Cleveland. On that score, but only on that score, Modell had a life well lived.

Death has a tendency to cause people to reconsider and as a society we find it distasteful to speak ill of the dead. But the act of dying doesn’t absolve Modell. The facts remain the facts even though Modell spent most of the last 16 years trying desperately to change the narrative. Almost from the moment that he stuck a knife in the collective backs of Browns fans, Modell began trying to reshape the story so that he became the victim and not the perpetrator. As Modell was fond of saying, “I had no choice” but to move the Browns.

Modell had a choice. He always had a choice. He just didn’t choose to exercise the right one. And that was the problem with Modell. He had a unique knack for making the exact wrong decision. The bigger the decision the more likely he was to get it wrong.

The real legacy of Modell, at least in his professional life, can be boiled down to one sentence. He was the only owner in NFL history to go broke. Imagine that. NFL ownership is essentially a license to print money. Jimmy Haslam III just paid a billion dollars to gain controlling interest of the Browns and thinks he got a great deal. He probably did.

While other owners couldn’t find enough pockets to stuff all their cash into, Modell seemed to walk around like the Monopoly character—slumped shouldered, empty pockets turned out, frowning. Ultimately, he was forced to sell his franchise in order to make ends meet.

There are plenty who will claim that Modell was a visionary and perhaps he was. He’s often credited with creating Monday Night Football but that, too, is a fallacy. Pete Rozelle was always the visionary and the driving force behind that franchise. Roone Arledge and Chet Forte at ABC created what MNF eventually became. Modell pushed to have the Browns play in that first game, certainly, but that’s a far cry from being the”Father of Monday Night Football” as some of his sycophants have suggested.

Modell’s life was always far more fantasy than reality, anyway. It was a consistent theme which isn’t a surprise considering his background as a former Madison Avenue advertising executive. But in that he was more in the vein of Roger Sterling then Don Draper. What Modell was good at, like Roger, was schmoozing. It gave Modell a reputation as a player. But what Modell wasn’t good at, like Roger, was doing. True he was able to put together a group and buy the Browns but for most of his career and to those in the know, Modell was someone they had to manage around.

Modell was known as a generous soul and in some sense he certainly was. But he also was ruthless and inept. He blew every penny he ever got. He installed his idiot son David as CEO of the Ravens and all David did from that point forward (and, truthfully, in all years previously as well) was embarrass himself and the family. That’s just for starters.

Modell lost a breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit filed by Bob Gries, the former Browns minority owner, over losses actually incurred by Modell’s Stadium Corp. that he tried instead to saddle instead on to the books of the Browns. He’d been sued by the Andrews Trust, the successor to a business adviser that helped Modell originally buy the Browns. Under the terms of a 1963 agreement, Modell was to pay a $30 million finders fee to the Andrews Trust upon his sale of the team. To counteract that claim, Modell kept a small piece of the Raven franchise so that he could argue that because he didn’t sell all of the team, money still wasn’t owed.

But ultimately none of it mattered. He died not as an NFL owner but as a kind of forlorn has been surrounded by the adopted sons he coddled.

Modell’s passing will surely open up the wounds of Browns fans for a day or two but a new season is starting and he’ll soon be mostly forgotten. Fans here are 13+ years into a new team and have much more parochial concerns. But as the history of the NFL continues to be written, Modell will forever be remembered not for his philanthropy or his love of family but merely as the guy who moved the Browns and screwed the fans.

Creeping Stability

The Cleveland Browns are finishing up their organized team activities, which aren’t mandatory, so that they can start their mini-camp, which is mandatory. In the meantime the steadying hand of team president Mike Holmgren is ever present and what a difference it’s made.

To say that head coach Eric Mangini got off to a slow start in his new job would be an understatement on the level of the Cavs are having merely an interesting off season. Mangini came in with a huge chip on his shoulder and an uber confidence that belied his modest accomplishments to that point. He couldn’t have picked a worse strategic plan if he had merely thrown a dart on a board instead.

When he wasn’t alienating established veterans, he was pissing off rookies and their agents by having them volunteer for a 10-hour bus ride to help out at his youth camp in Connecticut in the same way that Rich Rodriguez has his players volunteer for extra practice in the summer.

Then came perhaps the worst run training camp in the history of organized football that provided a springboard for a season that made Bill Belichick’s tenure in Cleveland seem like a Tony Robbins seminar by comparison. In between there were firings, trades, a fan revolt and a near mutiny from within.

Maybe it was all just part of a vaunted process and the natural outgrowth of a change agent meeting resistance from enemies of progress, but when the dust settled owner Randy Lerner was frustrated to the point of declaring that he needed a credible person in charge of his organization, a tacit acknowledgement that neither he nor Mangini qualified for that spot.

In rode Holgrem and suddenly it’s the Browns that look positively functional while the Cavs are solidly out of sorts. The Indians, hopeless.

The biggest controversy at the moment for the Browns has to do with the relatively high number of restricted free agents who won’t sign the one-year contracts tendered to them. If this had been a year ago, this would have been chalked up to another misstep by Mangini, as if a team that is 4-12 can’t get by without D’Qwell Jackson, Jerome Harrison, Matt Roth, Abe Elam and Lawrence Vickers.

Instead, under the new regime this is general manager Tom Heckert’s problem and virtually no one is raising much of an issue over it. That’s the kind of implied confidence the average fan has in both Holmgren and Heckert that it will get resolved quietly and professionally. No drama, no tears, just mature human beings confronting the daily grind of problems in their business.

Beyond this little free agent issue everything else is perfectly sanguine. That’s what makes me nervous.

In the last 10 years the Browns really haven’t had a season in which there wasn’t any controversy. Under the ownership of first Al Lerner and now his son Randy, the Browns have been a the Old Faithfuls of dysfunction. You could set a watch by the eruptions, they were that predictable.

Even as the losses piled up like autumn leaves in the backyard, this team has never lacked for another story to tell. Whether it was Chris Palmer and his runaway train, Butch Davis and another lecture about guts or Romeo Crennel and his magic coin flip to pick a starting quarterback, the Browns have been more entertaining off the field than on.

But now the Browns are making the sound of one hand clapping. It’s really the sound of a creeping stability, the sense that maybe Lerner finally got something right.

The Browns still don’t have enough quality players to make a serious run at the playoffs. Right now the fans would be satisfied with a serious run at 8-8. But the barge, seemingly pointed permanently in the direction of a black hole, has actually begun the slow turn toward respectability.

It’s not one thing really but a series of small things that provide the clues. There’s little if any grousing by anyone inside or outside of Berea. Draft picks showed up and are working out. Even the restricted free agents are trickling in and those that aren’t are fairly quiet.

This is what it really means to have a serious, credible leader in charge. It’s one thing to push around a guy like Mangini, he really hasn’t accomplished anything in the NFL. Holmgren’s resume is far more impressive. He’s either seen it or done it and that’s something he has on everyone else in the organization at the moment.

It helps, too, that Holmgren speaks his mind and when he does he speaks plainly. He keeps spin to a bare minimum and the rest of the organization as begun to takes its cues from him that the quickest exit out of panic mode is to actually stop panicking.

Mangini is the biggest beneficiary. Right now no one’s giving him a hard time even as his natural tendencies creep in from time to time. There was little bit of “there he goes again” when Mangini hinted a few times over the last few weeks that he sees using Seneca Wallace at quarterback along with Jake Delhomme.

Is this Mangini trying to play mind games with his quarterbacks? Probably. He operates from the management school which motivates through infliction of insecurity and some habits die hard. He’s also probably trying to keep the competition guessing as to his plans, as if they’re even paying attention at the moment. Other habits die hard as well.

But beyond these kinds of quirks and tics, Mangini is mostly acting far less like the paranoid control freak he came across as last year. He still doesn’t answer questions directly and probably never will for fear that he may give away some sort of state secret, but he’s also far more relaxed about how he goes about it.

He also seems far more welcoming to his players as if he’s come to some sort of realization that being a prick isn’t generally the best approach to managing the troops.

All of this means, of course, that there is likely going to be far less opportunities to kick around Mangini this season. And that’s a good thing. When the team’s lousy, a ready punching bag is all that can keep a fan’s interest. It’s kind of fun I suppose to write about things like Phil Savage telling a fan via email to essentially “step off,” just as it’s kind of fun to write about players getting suspended for talking to the media about staph infections. But in truth it’s most fun to write about what most fans want to focus on, the games themselves.

Unfortunately, in Cleveland there’s been precious little to write about when it comes to games that doesn’t begin with “another day, another loss.” and that isn’t confined to just the Browns. But, as implausible as it seemed just a few short months ago, it looks like it will be the Browns, under Holmgren, that will be the first Cleveland team to put the focus back where it belongs. I wonder, for once, if the Cavs are paying attention.

The Progress Report

If the Cleveland Browns were anything but a professional sports franchise, it likely would have been shut down by now. Most companies couldn’t stay in business by repeatedly selling defective products and no performer could ever stay in that line of work without at least a few successes.

As the team enters its 11th season since its return from the Art Modell-imposed purgatory, the Browns have had less success than any of the acts managed by Woody Allen’s character in “Broadway Danny Rose.” As it is, expectations surrounding it still remain nearly as humble as they did when the team took the field in 1999. Fans aren’t so much clamoring for wins as they are praying that the team can just eliminate the number of delay-of-game penalties it gets assessed after coming out of a time out.

Ten years is a fair amount of time to measure anyone’s progress. Bruce Springsteen released “Born to Run” in 1975 and 10 years later released “Born in the USA.” That’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment and he’s just one guy. If you want to contrast it further with the Browns, consider that in 1995 Springsteen released “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and 10 years after that released “Devils and Dust.” Over a 30-year period, his growth as a songwriter and a performer is astounding, from characters that started out as wide-eyed innocents to become family men with responsibilities, beaten down by every day reality but still finding a little bit of hope in their daily lives.

Can you imagine if the Browns could just have made the leap that Springsteen made from “Born to Run” to “Born in the USA” in their last 10 years? No one would be talking about television blackouts and fans wouldn’t be so keenly focused on such trivial matters as who the starting quarterback is going to be on Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings. But focused they are because, frankly, this team and this franchise has given back so little that we’ll take our debates and concerns from wherever they arise.

It didn’t have to be this way. The NFL didn’t do the Browns any favors in helping them get out of the gate in 1999, but so much has happened since then as to render those problems meaningless today. The constant here has been the ownership of the Lerner family. It has had more than enough time to put together an organization with executives that are not only classy but are good at their jobs. Instead they’ve repeatedly put their trust in the wrong people for the wrong reasons. For good measure, Randy Lerner now and Al Lerner then have been the least accountable owners in this history of Cleveland sports.

Ted Stepien may have been the biggest buffoon to ever own a team but he at least was accountable. He was front and center leading the parade for the 3-ring circus over which he presided. When it all fell apart, which it was bound to, he was forced out. No such luck with the Lerners. One gets the sense that Randy Lerner is going to hold on to this franchise almost out of spite and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it, not Roger Goodell, not his fellow owners and certainly not the fans.

Thus we’re left with where we are at today. The Browns are an 11-year old franchise with virtually nothing to show for it. A team that couldn’t really decide on a quarterback in 1999 is still a team that can’t decide on a quarterback today. Its chances of making the playoffs this year are only incrementally better than they were back then. It’s a franchise on its fourth makeover already and still hasn’t realized that its most fundamental problem is that it lacks any sort of foundation.

Eric Mangini takes over and becomes just the latest Mr. Fix-It. He sports a personal resume that shows dramatic upward mobility but no great successes. It’s the perfect complement, really, to that of the owner that hired him and the perfect metaphor for what passes for progress in this town.

It’s hard to even remember, now, whether anyone really thought that Chris Palmer, for example, was a good hire or just the one most available. Palmer was a successful quarterbacks coach but why anyone thought he could take the next step is as ridiculous of a notion now as the thought that another lifelong assistant, in the form of Romeo Crennel, could do likewise.

Butch Davis had the chance to be a transformative figure, but he was completely mismanaged by Al Lerner. Davis is and always will be a head coach. He has a better sense of its rhythms. And I still think Davis could have been a good coach here, but he needed a support system from Lerner. Instead he got a cheerleader. Davis hadn’t earned the power he was given and it isn’t really a surprise that he eventually squandered it. A better judge of talent might have still picked Davis but would have paired him with a capable general manager. Davis was in over his head from day one and neither he nor Lerner seemed to notice until it was too late.

Crennel, on the other hand, had virtually no chance of being successful. Not every lieutenant can make the jump to general and not every assistant coach can be a head coach. How neither Lerner nor Phil Savage saw that is more mystifying than the fact that Savage drafted Beau Bell.

If Mangini can really fix this franchise and actually point it in the right direction, then most of what’s taken place before it will be forgotten if not forgiven. But Mangini’s got a tall order not just because of the institutional problems that came with the job but also because he’s carrying more than enough baggage of his own.

Circling back to the little quarterback debate (because, after all, that’s what we must do), Mangini’s little cat-and-mouse game with the fans, the media and the rest of the league is silly mostly for the reason that it is just the kind of self-inflicted pressure this team doesn’t need.

In many ways, Mangini’s decision to supposedly keep his choice a secret until kickoff is similar to the kind of pressure that’s created whenever a player or a coach guarantees a victory. Rather than the actual match-up with the opponent, the “guarantee” or, as here, the “choice,” has become this game’s focal point. And to what end? Why does Mangini want his players constantly answering questions about who is starting at quarterback? Exactly how does that make his team better prepared?

The other thing that makes this whole “who will start?” debate so ridiculous is that Mangini acts as if it matters. The differences between Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson are hardly on the same level as the differences between, say, Vince Young and Kerry Collins. Maybe if a team knows that Anderson isn’t starting they won’t have to worry about covering mid-range passes since he can’t complete them anyway, but that’s about it. The Browns aren’t going to change their offense dramatically for either player and any team, especially with one that has the legitimate aspirations of the Vikings, know that.

If it works out it, and there’s no way to really ever know if it will, then Mangini will probably do the same thing every week. If it doesn’t, and there’s no way to really ever know if it didn’t, then it just becomes another thing over which to poke fun.

In the larger sense, though, what worries is not the transient concern over who is behind center on Sunday. It’s the fact that the current caretaker is so obsessed with it as fostering some sort of self-concocted advantage . It’s one thing to be detail-oriented. It’s another thing to be obsessive-compulsive. Right now it’s hard to see exactly where Mangini is trending on that scale but I know where I think it’s going.

And that, actually, is why there’s still a pit in my stomach about this franchise. It never does anything exactly right. It never makes exactly the right hire or drafts exactly the right player. Every decision has a “yea, but” attached to it. The only way this franchise is ever going to progress is by reducing the “yea buts” to an acceptable minimum. Unfortunately, Mangini has just added to them at the moment.