Free Agent Follies--Browns Town Edition

   So ESPN’s Adam Schefter is mocking the Cleveland Browns because they lost four players almost as soon as the bell rung to start the free agent season?  

Welcome to the party, Adam.  Just know you’re a late arrival and all the good slams have long since been taken.

That the Browns lost 4 players to free agency doesn’t much qualify as news let alone as an indictment of the worst franchise in football and likely in all of professional sports.  The Browns already have so many indictments hanging over their heads that adding one to the mix doesn’t even move the needle, not even a little, not even at all.

For this to even be a concern someone, including Schefter, would have to tell me why losing any four players on this team could possibly be impactful to the Browns.  With these players the team has kept its yearly win average at around 4, an average that’s been as rock solid as anything can be when it comes to sports.  Are fans worried this team will actually take a step back?  I’ve got news for Schefter and the others who agree with him.  There are no steps back to take.  The Browns are at the very bottom, whether judged by culture or results.  There’s no place to which to sink and the loss of any 4 players isn’t going to change that one iota.

I guess the best argument one could must is that these four—Alex Mack, Mitchell Swartz, Travis Benjamin, Tashaun Gipson—are in some sense building blocks, players good enough to help the team take a meaningful step forward when surrounded by similar blocks.  A couple have been to the Pro Bowl, a couple are still relatively young.  All true, but so what?

Losing them does create new holes at a time when the latest regime is busy trying to plug the gaping ones that already existed nearly everywhere else on the team.  Nothing new in that, and besides, what’s a few more holes anyway?  Even with the latest escapees this team wasn’t going to be significantly, and perhaps not even modestly, better next year anyway.

Let’s try just once not to get overly involved in that grand Cleveland tradition of overvaluing the players on our perennially losing team.  At the price they played for last year the team was still awful.  It’s hard to imagine how giving them even more money will suddenly make the team better.

No one, including the teams these four signed with, are building teams around any of these free agents.  They’re nice haves, not have to haves.  Eating up cap space by overpaying your own free agents when there are probably cheaper alternatives with similar production is a better way to build a team in the long run anyway.  It’s just that in Cleveland fans have been so beaten down by institutional incompetence that they knee jerk their way to thinking that this team can’t sustain the loss of Mitchell Schwartz. Or Tashaun Gipson. Or Travis Benjamin. Or Alex Mack. 

Meanwhile had this happened in, say, New England, no one would be questioning Bill Belicheck’s wisdom.  And for what it’s worth, it’s pretty telling that none of these four signed with New England, to use but one example.

I’m still waiting for the argument that the Browns need to overpay average talent in order to prove themselves to their fans.  This organization needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up and if every player who donned a Browns uniform had been cut, I wouldn’t argue against that either.  At some point this team will get the total scrub down it really deserves and that doesn’t happen by holding on to the few flickers of talent it had, particularly at inflated prices.

It’s not that these aren’t nice players, but the league is filled with nice players.  Among the list of stupid things this franchise has done in the last 5 years alone, this doesn’t even make the top 20.

What’s of more interest is that the new regime absolutely added to the team and its culture through the subtraction of Johnny Manziel from this franchise.  Plenty of words have been written about this train wreck and I’ve written many of those myself commencing with the decision to draft him.  But never has a player in the history so deserved the fate that’s befallen him.

I have some empathy for Manziel because he’s an addict.  His ability to think often isn’t rational.  He got help last year and ultimately it wasn’t successful.  That’s not unusual.  Many addicts need multiple stints in rehab.  At this point though Manziel is his own worst enemy as he remains in complete denial about his problems, even as he spins further and further out of control.

To blame the Browns for not dumping Manziel as soon as the new league season started is odd.  At least they dumped him.  Professional sports, like most businesses, operates on the greater fool theory.  No matter how dumb a deal you’ve done there’s often a greater fool out there willing to bail you out of your problems.  When it came to Manziel, the Browns had to at least see if there was a greater fool willing to part with a draft choice, even one loaded with conditions.  That wasn’t to be.  Now they await to see if there’s a greater fool wiling to at least claim Manziel off waivers in order to get some cap relief on all the money they owe him.  That isn’t likely to be, either and Manziel will be left to scramble for a foolish team to take a chance on a player to this point who’s been poison.  That will happen.  Teams are always looking to catch lightning in a bottle, even if it’s a bottle of champagne being wielded by Manziel as he floats through a nightclub lagoon on a plastic swan.

Ultimately, real, sustainable improvement for the Browns is years away and that’s assuming the latest group of geniuses running the franchise can actually live up to that description.  That improvement is not going to come by over emphasizing the marginal value of newly expensive players, none of whom would be nearly as productive as they are right now by the time this team is really ready to compete.  And likewise it won’t happen by holding on to sociopaths like Manziel.  The Browns were neither good nor bad this past week.  In Cleveland that actually counts as improvement. 

Another December To Not Remember

The last time a Cleveland Browns head coach went 0 for December, he was fired.  The December before that was essentially the same thing.  Given owner Jimmy Haslam’s brief but clear history, both head coach Mike Pettine and general manager Ray Farmer had to be wondering their fates as the Browns closed the season in that most familiar way.

Haslam quickly removed any uncertainty about two of his three direct reports by stating after the loss to the Baltimore Ravens that Pettine and Farmer would be back.  Now if Haslam could find a way to remove all of the other uncertainty surrounding this franchise then maybe he’d really be on to something.

Keeping Pettine and Farmer is a way to build continuity, which is something this franchise hasn’t tried in years so why not give it a try?

On the one hand, arguably the hand that matters most, the Browns ended the season with 7 wins, not great, but the most this team has had in the last 8 years.  It’s a bottom line business so in that sense the Browns have taken a pretty big step forward from where they ended last season.   

But yet someone has to be accountable for some pretty big issues pressing against the windows of Berea, to wit:

1.       The team completely unraveled offensively once Alex Mack went out for the season.

2.       First round draft pick Justin Gilbert was a complete bust who demonstrated little work ethic and virtually no feel for playing the position for which he was so highly touted.

3.       Ditto for first round draft pick Johnny Manziel whose lack of work ethic and discipline fully exposed Pettine to ridicule when he marched him out to start in place of struggling Brian Hoyer with the playoffs still technically in the picture.

4.       Josh Gordon still not entirely getting with the program despite spending most of the year away from it.

This is some pretty high level dysfunction, even for a franchise that has been so lost and confused it makes the New York Jets look like the New England Patriots.

Figuring out how to solve these and a myriad of other minor matters is further complicated by the way the organization is structured, with Haslam not just as its titular head but the one with the knife wielding power and little experience in how to use it except recklessly.

When Haslam took out Joe Banner and his Sicilian messenger boy, Mike Lombardi, last season, he didn’t quite elevate Ray Farmer to Banner’s former role.  He gave Farmer the title of general manager and control over the personnel but not of the coach.  Instead Pettine likewise reports to Haslam, putting Haslam in the unenviable position of arbitrating the question over whether Farmer’s lack of research on Gilbert and increasingly larger reach on Manziel and the inability to find an even faintly credible replacement for Mack is what doomed the team or it was Pettine’s abject inexperience at running a team on a day to day basis?

I know this, for all his square-jawed clear-eyed talk to the media, Pettine obviously wasn’t able to reach either Manziel or Gilbert in a way that resonated. Same with Gordon, though Pettine hardly had the chance.  I also know that offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan, who reports to Pettine, couldn’t figure out how to overcome the loss of a decent center but certainly not Jim Otto in his prime.  Once Mack went down, the running game fell apart and opposing defenses exploited all the reasons Hoyer was a backup in the first place.

What’s difficult to figure in that truth though is where exactly does all the responsibility lie.  Pettine and Shanahan can make a rather forceful claim that they didn’t populate the team with two rookie running backs, including another work-ethic challenged player in Terrence West, and a free agent, Ben Tate, who wasn’t worth even a third of what they paid him.  Of course, Farmer could argue that in the context of hindsight perhaps Tate was just another player, like Manziel, like Gilbert, like Gordon, that Pettine couldn’t reach.

That all could be true and a big part of the problem, but then Farmer can’t so easily explain away the rest of the receiving corps.  This wasn’t a failure of schemes, but of talent.  Outside of Jordan Cameron, who was injured most of the season anyway, there wasn’t a credible receiver on the field until Gordon returned from his suspension.  Farmer claimed early on that the receivers he did sign (when he could have drafted some but stubbornly didn’t) were good, just unknown.  At season’s end, they’re still just unknowns.  Farmer also signed Miles Austin, as he did Tate, and it ended up being just more wasted money. 

The case for Farmer doesn’t get any better when you look on the defensive side of the ball.  Gilbert showed no work ethic from day one and carried it with him until season’s end, which ended not on Sunday but Saturday when he failed for the eleventymillionth time to make a meeting on time.  That’s a failure of research.  Somewhere in the 6 or 7 notebooks the team compiled on potential first round picks had to be a mention that Gilbert was a lazy, entitled n’er do well with no work ethic.  But maybe Farmer missed all that as he maneuvered around the draft, securing picks for 2015 while doing every other general manager in the league a favor by taking on Manziel.

Speaking of Manziel, his failures from an organizational standpoint are shared.  From a personal standpoint they’re his own.  Farmer knew Manziel was a high risk.  So did Pettine and yet all Pettine did from the first day of the offseason when Manziel eschewed any work in favor of every party was coddle Manziel in a way that even the casual fan knew wouldn’t end up well.  He constantly made excuses for why Manziel wasn’t working when he should have been and more or less gave him a public pass for being a public douche, with Manziel’s only fine known publicly is the one just issued for being late to treatment Saturday morning because of his hard partying Friday night, a party that kept many of his co-workers from being on time on Saturday as well.  This must be the new Johnny that Manziel spoke about earlier in the week.

Unless Haslam publicly admits that he ordered Pettine to start Manziel late in the season, the decision to do that is all Pettine’s and, again in the context of hindsight, was perhaps the single dumbest decision any head coach at any level has made.

It looked at the time, and I wrote at the time, that the decision made itself given Hoyer’s play.  That remains true.  But the wild card in all that is that only Pettine truly knew if Manziel was ready, or at least ready enough, to get behind center in an actual game.  We can only assume Pettine believed Manziel was ready and in the end that was such a colossal misjudgment that most coaches never get a second chance to make it.

It’s not just that Manziel was overwhelmed by the task.  That can come from a simple lack of appreciation of the gravity of the moment.  Manziel wasn’t even just overmatched.  That can be a talent gap.  Manziel couldn’t have looked any more lost than if Pettine had simply plucked a fan from the crowd and positioned him in the shotgun.  For an earlier generation, starting Manziel looked to be the equivalent of the literary joke that writer George Plimpton tried to play on the rest of the world when he suited up as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions in a preseason game for the book Paper Lion.

When Manziel scanned the defensive coverage he had the same looks of abject confusion and fear as does a father when he takes his teenage daughters to buy undergarments at Victoria’s Secret.  When the ball was snapped, Manziel acted as if he didn’t know where to look first or next.  And when he ran it was in the same way a scared Alfalfa ran in that Little Rascals episode where Alfalfa claimed to be a football hero he was not.

Whether Pettine couldn’t or didn’t see any of that coming is irrelevant.  He’s accountable either way.  Maybe because Pettine understands defense more he could see all of Gilbert’s shortcomings more clearly and benched him earlier.  Pettine should have seen the same thing with Manziel but didn’t and that is pretty damning when it comes to defending his cause.

So as another miserable season at the Factory of Sadness closes, the Browns look to be in pretty much the same place they started and not really any closer to being a credible playoff threat.  The owner remains impetuous and inexperienced, the head coach overmatched, the general manager isn’t as good as he thinks he is and there is almost no skill at any of the skill positions.   But rather than dwell on just those pesky negatives let’s just pause and take pity at least on the one true professional in the entire organization, Joe Thomas.  As good a player at his position as there’s ever been and yet destined to never play a meaningful game in December.

The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Settling In Edition

If the Cleveland Browns are finally settling in as a franchise, it’s sure hard to tell at the moment.

In the last week or so, three different reports would suggest that the Browns’ front office is about as finely tuned as the ’86 Buick LeSabre that’s been sitting in your neighbor’s side yard for the last 10 years even as the team lurches ever closer to one of the more important college drafts in franchise history.

First came a column by Dr. David Chao, writing last Monday for the National Football Post web site, criticizing the Browns for not having a lead physician at the NFL Scouting Combine earlier in the month.  Dr. Chao wrote that in his 19 years of working at the combine he has never seen a team attend without a lead physician.

What’s the significance?  As Dr. Chao writes, with some bias perhaps, “medical has been referred to as the most important element at the Combine.”  That sounds a little over the top, but that doesn’t necessarily lessen the significance.  The value all NFL teams place on the draft cannot be overstated.  Ensuring that a player, particularly the early round types that perform at the Combine, is sound medically is a key factor in determining whether to invest millions into that player.

It’s not that the Browns didn’t have physicians at the Combine.  They did.  But the team was without a lead because for reasons that are undoubtedly purely financial, the team ended its decades long partnership with the Cleveland Clinic in favor of an exclusive partnership with University Hospitals and in doing so hasn’t yet settled on the final composition of its medical team.

This bit of dysfunction is exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Browns.  Seeking to monetize everything that is and isn’t nailed down, the Browns got caught in the transition between ending its sponsorship with one medical provider in favor of another.  All it did was impact their presence at the Combine but that surely isn’t nearly as important as making sure the check clears from University Hospitals and the signage is adjusted in the media room in Berea.

Not surprisingly, the Browns downplayed this bit of disarray in their usual way, by changing the narrative and not addressing the criticisms directly.  The other thing the Browns didn’t address was another key point made by Dr. Chao, that no one on the Browns’ medical staff has yet been admitted to the NFL Physicians Society.  As a result, no doctor at the Combine on behalf of the Browns was able to participate in all Combine-related activities.

In the grand scheme of all the loose threads that make up the fraying fabric of the Browns, this isn’t the most prominent.  But in a franchise barely hanging on, it’s just further evidence that the results on the field are not accidental but the consequence of a million other missteps well before each Football Sunday. 

On the heels of this report came two additional ones related to the pro days conducted by potential first rounders Teddy Bridgewater and Brian Bortles.  The Browns, a team in desperate need of a quarterback and possessing the first round juice to grab either one of these players, decided not to send their head coach, their quarterbacks coach or their general manager to either player’s workout.  The Browns’ P.R. machine, already buzzing at warp speed and on the brink of collapse itself, just decided to ignore the issue entirely.

So we don’t know exactly what message the Browns were sending by not sending key personnel to the workouts.  If this were a clever franchise, the more likely speculation would be that these pro days are as meaningless as Combine workouts, maybe more so, and by ignoring them the Browns avoid giving clues to other teams about their draft plans.  That’s if this was a clever franchise.

Far more likely, in the context of everything else, is a simpler explanation.  The same dysfunction on the business side that led to the inability of the Browns to field a full medical team at the Combine exists on the football side as well.  The Browns are still a mess in the front office owing to a poorly conducted head coaching search that took weeks, resulted in grabbing a guy no one else was even interviewing, and revealed the fissures within the organization that resulted in an overhaul of the front office.

Lending credence to this was an article in Crain’s Cleveland Business that indicated that the Browns’ front office under Joe Banner was organized in a manner unlike any other team in the NFL.  Instead of being split into distinct football and business operations whose leaders reported to the owner, the Browns had everything reporting directly to Joe Banner.  This worked to keep Haslam both insulated and unaware of what was taking place.  Indeed had Banner not decided to precipitously dump Rod Chudzinski, Haslam may never have noticed the source of the stench in Berea and Banner likely could have kept his fiefdom in place.

Taken together, what remains clear even to this date is that the Browns’ franchise is still highly dysfunctional to the point that they can’t even get their top people to the workouts of two quarterbacks that have to be high on their draft board.

And as if all of this wasn’t enough came still another report, this time from ProFootballTalk.com that restricted free agent center Alex Mack and his agents are busily trying to entice entire teams into crafting an offer that the Browns can’t match.  So far though, it isn’t working.

Now some of this is agents just being agents.  Still the more salient point is that instead of just trying to maximize his earnings, irrespective of the team, Mack and his agents are trying desperately to move Mack to another team.  Gee, I wonder why?  Could it be the revolving door in the owner’s office, the revolving door in the head coach’s office, the revolving door in the offensive coordinator’s office, the revolving door in the general manager’s office or the revolving door of blown draft picks coming and going that have him seeking greener pastures?

But I must confess one thing.  This is one area though where the Browns’ systemic dysfunction isn’t likely to have particularly ill effects.  Sometimes a team gets lucky that way.

Mack isn’t going anywhere and even if he is, does it much matter?  The Browns weren’t exactly a stellar offensive line with him so the drop off without him could hardly be noticed.

And if you think that’s a harsh assessment of a guy whose chief attribute to this point has been an ability to stay healthy, then listen to the market.  The sound that the lack of interest in Mack is deafening.  According to those same reports, Mack’s agents are having trouble drumming up any interest in him.  The $10 million salary he’s promised next season is a pretty tall barrier to get over and that’s just the value of the transition tag placed on him by the Browns.  To secure Mack in a way that the Browns, awash in cash they have to spend under league rules, won’t match will take an even greater investment than that. 

Virtually every other team in the league not named Oakland Raiders is smarter than the Browns so it’s not likely that anyone would invest that much in Mack. The reason?  Simply, there are plenty of centers to be had that could anchor this line and achieve similar results for less than $10 million a season.  The Browns will likely have the opportunity to draft one.  Remember, a team that’s won 4 to 5 games a year for going on a decade has no untouchable players.  Even if there are one or two, Mack isn’t them.

Still I’m sympathetic to Mack’s desire and not just because I’m a capitalist.  Mack has had to endure the business end of a whole lot of what’s ailed the Browns over the years and he like so many of his teammates is obviously worn down by it.  He’s probably thinking how nice it might be to go to a franchise where they’ve had a coach in place for more than a season and a quarterback who’s actually accomplished something in the league.

All of these reports highlight the inevitable outcomes of a franchise poorly run.  I know the Browns believe they have things fixed this time.  They’ll have to appreciate though that virtually anyone hearing them say that has heard the same thing before with the same predictable results. 

Still Searching for a Theme

To those who think the Cleveland Browns overreached by picking University of California center Alex Mack with their first pick on Saturday, you’re right. To those who think that for once the Browns were deliberately conservative, focused on actually rebuilding their crumbling franchise by loading up on quantity, you’re right, too. And for those who think that the NLF draft is more flash than substance and that there is no way to judge the wisdom of what any team did this weekend, you’re also right.

While there may be some basic truths about the draft, with some teams seemingly always drafting better than others, there is far less science involved in the process than anyone officially associated with the NFL would care to admit. Teams prepare reams of data on player after player and yet still make far more hiring mistakes than the shift manager of a local McDonald’s. You would think with the stakes so high teams would set their own bars higher. As it is they seem thrilled when their batting average on draftees is north of Asdrubal Cabrera even if south of Victor Martinez.

That makes it a bit dangerous to jump into this abyss without a life preserver. Still, there is a consensus emerging about the Browns’ draft in the way that a consensus emerges anytime you get like thinking people together in the same room. Everyone just confirms for each other what they were thinking all along. And what were they thinking? That’s pretty obvious. The Browns would be wise to load up on draft picks. Give the Browns draft a “B.” Why? Why not?

What isn’t being asked enough, though, is exactly what the Browns really set out to do in the draft. Without a clear understanding of the underlying game plan, it’s hard to judge whether or not there was success. When this draft was all over, I still don’t know what this team or the new Browns regime stands for. That problem has plagued this franchise since it re-emerged 10 years ago and plagues it to this day.

There is no theme. There are no core beliefs. If you want to know what this draft was about, your guess is as good as anyone else’s. It may be, for example, that the Browns really did want to load up on draft picks, even at the expense of some veteran players if necessary. It also may be that the deal with the Jets, as well as the other two first round deals, fell into their laps at the last minute and pushed them to go in an altogether different direction.

If you think either general manager George Kokinis or head coach Eric Mangini is going to reveal what they were thinking, then you just aren’t paying attention to either’s latent paranoia. The only people they trust less than the media is everyone else.

Right now they are constructing this franchise like a new owner rehabs a vacant store. They’ve put brown paper over the windows and every so often an occasional tear appears allowing you to look inside and see that something’s going on even if you’re not quite sure what.

It’s entirely conceivable, as the Plain Dealer’s Tony Grossi essentially theorizes, that the Browns floated out the trial balloons on both Braylon Edwards and Brady Quinn to in order to gauge fan reaction. If that’s the case, how exactly did the fans react to those rumors?

For some, it caused a reassessment of Edwards that focused on his possibilities while downplaying his performance. Others simply want him off the team. Quinn was a bit easier. Most fans figure the Browns owe it to themselves, at the very least, to understand his upside before pouring more resources into still another rookie quarterback. I’d be surprised, however, if any of this made any difference to either Kokinis or Mangini. They don’t strike me as the kind of guys that would run a franchise by fan acclimation.

What’s far more likely, though again we’ll never know for sure, is that Kokinis and Mangini took the measure of the team they inherited and weighed it against the draft and decided, “hey, this team needs better players.” If that’s the case then that’s the place to begin your analysis of this draft. Still, it’s only a guess.

Assuming quantity with a dash of quality was the game plan, the Browns’ draft was clearly a rip-roaring success. They picked up two potential veteran starters in Kenyon Coleman and Abram Elam, a likely starter on the offensive line in the form of Mack, and probably two starting receivers in Brian Robiski and Mohamed Massaquoi. Even defensive end/lineman David Veikune is likely to start.

The real challenge will be to turn what appear to be some temporarily-applied band-aids into more permanent repairs. Maybe Mangini knows something about both Coleman and Elam that the rest of the league currently is missing or else he got suckered into a three-card monte game with the Jets by taking them. Time will certainly tell. But in the interim, if Coleman and Elam end up being only slight upgrades then the defensive line and secondary are still awaiting the long term fixes both need.

If, on the other hand, you are more in the camp of wanting to see quality first, then the Browns are right up there (or right down there, depending on your perspective) with the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders keep drafting players as if they are picking names out of hat while virtually every other team at least appears to be trying something a little more fact-based. With all the draft picks the Browns acquired the manner in which they went about turning those picks into players is bound to strike more than a few of us as a little Raidersesque.

If you’re taking a completely unvarnished look at this team, then you just know that it has more holes than Firestone Country Club. The roster Mangini inherited from Savage is far more reflective of the team that won 4 games last year than the team that won 11 the season before. This is a team that needs players at almost every position which means that drafting for need should have been secondary, except in a few instances, such as quarterback.

Frankly, that’s the best context in which to even begin the analysis of the Browns’ draft. That’s not to knock Mack or any of the players the Browns drafted. But it is more than just a suggestion that the Browns could have and should have done better.

In the first instance, the Jets today are rightly crowing about the fact that they were able to move up 12 spots in the first round without having to surrender next year’s first round pick. All it really cost them were three players that they viewed as relatively expendable anyway. That’s a steal in anyone’s book. The only thing that makes that trade seem less ridiculous is the fact that the Browns saved huge money by moving so far down in the draft. It’s money they can waste elsewhere. It’s the same rationale Bill Belichick utilized when he traded Matt Cassel to Kansas City for “only” a second round pick and then through in Mike Vrabel for kicks and giggles. In some sense, the Browns got taken in that trade, even if it turned into more picks in later rounds.

More important than all of that is the simple fact that Kokinis and Mangini seemed to eschew any pretense of drafting the best player available. Make whatever arguments you want, but at the end of it all can anyone be convinced that Mack was the best player available at number 17 in the draft? Similarly, given the holes on the team, was there any reason not to draft the best player available regardless of position?

If you assume that picking up Coleman, the defensive end and Elam, a safety, allowed the Browns to temporarily check off those boxes on areas of need, then with all that still lay before them, was Mack really the best choice? There were receivers and linebackers galore available as well as a certain running back from Ohio State, any one of which had to be more highly rated than Mack and any one of which also would have conveniently filled an area of need on this team. Does anyone honestly believe that a lineman who wasn’t even projected by most as a first rounder was the best available player? Good luck selling that to the fan base.

Fans will never get the straight story on this draft. Instead, they’ll be left to sort through it over the next few years as they watch several of the players the Browns bypassed to get Mack go on to accomplish great things. Maybe we’ll eventually learn that the Browns were best served by going safe. The real question is what more will transpire in the interim?

If this draft ends up being even a short-term disaster, the fans will become rightfully impatient and owner Randy Lerner may end up finding still another regime in whom to vest his unquestionable trust. At that point this draft will be essentially rendered irrelevant except as a jumping off point to figure out what direction in which Brian Schottenheimer or whoever is running this franchise next will go.