Lingering Items--Giants Preseason Edition

Lingering Items—Giants Preseason Edition

By Gary Benz

It was nice to see the Cleveland Browns head coach Romeo Crennel took responsibility for not having his team prepared for Monday night’s preseason game against the New York Giants. By my count, that’s about the eleventy hundredth time Crennel has fallen on that sword. Maybe one of these days he’ll really mean it.

I’m not one to get al apoplectic about a preseason game. Just the same, there is no question that the Giants’ starters were sending a message to the Browns’ starters in that first quarter. The message was simple: chirp all you want about playoff aspirations. Just win something first. The question worth asking is whether that message was actually received.

In fairness to Crennel, his first priority is to get his team ready for the regular season. Preseason really is about evaluation. I’ve watched young head coaches place way too much emphasis on the preseason only to get their comeuppance once the regular season starts. My bigger concern here is that the Browns walked onto that field Monday night with a strut that wasn’t earned. While they weren’t being deliberately disrespectful (save for cornerback Eric Wright’s high step into the end zone after an interception of Anthony Wright!), the vibe was clear. Just as clear was the slap down they suffered as a result.

In essence, the Browns acted as if they have bought into the hype being perpetuated by a mostly no-nothing national media instead of actually working hard to fulfill the expectations placed upon them. They aren’t a good team until they actually prove they are a good team.

Crennel had the best perspective after last season when he downplayed the 10-win season by pointing out that all the team has proven is that it can win 10 games and not make the playoffs. Unfortunately, Crennel’s ability to articulate the appropriate approach and then make it resonate with his charges is two totally different matters. If he’s going to be successful as a head coach, that simply can’t be the case.

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In just two preseason games, the Browns rather mediocre defensive backfield has been burned four times for long touchdown passes. And for the second straight week, general manager Phil Savage has brought in a reinforcement, this time in the person of Travis Daniels, formerly of the Miami Dolphins. Unlike last week’s Travis, former Minnesota Vikings defensive back Travis Key, this week’s Travis comes via a trade, the value of which is not yet known.

Daniels has played mostly as a nickel back to this point, so any immediate upgrade in the defensive backfield isn’t likely to be realized. In fact, much more likely is that Savage will keep parading in mostly interchangeable names in an attempt to shore up what is looking to be the kind of weakness that could keep this team out of the hunt.

Still, it’s hard to lay any blame on Savage, though many are doing just that. Leading is always about priorities and Savage rightly surmised that if a defense has to have a weakness, far better for it to be in the backfield then at the line.

Unquestionably, the Browns had one of the worst defensive lines in football last year. It was imperative that it be addressed in a bold way. It cost the Browns a second round pick in the trade for Corey Williams and it cost them depth in the backfield in the trade for Shaun Rogers. In the NFL, like any other league, you can’t get something for nothing. Rogers may have overstayed his welcome in Detroit, but that doesn’t mean he’s not without ability. Indeed, his absence was noticeable on Monday night.

Leigh Bodden did nothing to hasten his exit from Cleveland, save perhaps that “do you know who I am” moment at Hopkins Airport, but sacrificing him was the price to be paid. As many will recall, the Cincinnati Bengals were trying to cut their own deal to obtain Rogers. But because they are, well, the Bengals, they couldn’t make it happen. Nonetheless, under any circumstances Rogers, like Williams, was going to cost the Browns more than the “undisclosed future considerations” that they paid Miami for Daniels.

Even if the trade for either Williams or Rogers doesn’t work out, never fault the effort. Indians’ fans have been constantly subjected to a general manager more comfortable with talking himself out of deals than in making the final move or two to put the team over the top. Mark Shapiro seems so enamored with the talent he’s assembled he acts as if making the something-for-something trade is akin to trading his first born. Thus, he relegates himself to picking at the discarded scraps of others. It’s a method, just not a particularly successful one.

Savage has done his fair share of that, certainly, including his attempt to fill the gaping holes in the defensive backfield. But he’s also been incredibly proactive on both the free agent and trade fronts. Disagree all you want with the judgments he’s made, but at least recognize that he’s not leaving many stones unturned in actually trying to improve this franchise.

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Something that seems to have changed drastically in pro football is punt coverage. A perfect example was the Giants’ punt with about two minutes left in the first quarter on Monday. Brandon McDonald, subbing for Josh Cribbs, called for a fair catch and then fielded Jeff Feagles’ 47-yard punt at the Browns’ own eight yard line.

There was a time not all that long ago where a returner would have been criticized for fielding a ball inside the 10-yard line. In fact, a returner’s only job in that situation was to try and distract the kicking team by faking a catch. It worked about as often as a team trying to draw a defense offside on a fourth and short play.

But because punters have gotten so good at putting air under every punt and because players can get downfield so much faster, returners are now forced to actually field a ball inside the 10. If they don’t, the likely outcome will be a kick downed inside the two yard line. The NFL game is mostly a chess match that is won or lost based on field position. The ability to consistently pin a team well inside its own 10-yard line often spells success n the box score.

Thus where McDonald’s fielding of the Feagles punt may have drawn much criticism in the past, now it’s considered a good play. That extra six yards, as the Browns proved later in the game, is very meaningful. If nothing else, it means the difference between punting the ball away from the goal line vs. punting it from the back of the end zone.

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Here’s a question to ponder as the Browns head into Detroit on Saturday night: If Leigh Bodden intercepts Brady Quinn, what’s the over and under on the number of minutes it will take for someone to post a message board entry criticizing Savage for the Rogers trade? Personally, I think it’s 45 seconds. That’s probably conservative.

Rarified Air

t’s one thing for the local fans to have high hopes for a Cleveland sports team. They always do, even as they are expecting the worst. But when the expectations extend beyond state borders, the team is entering truly rarified air.

On the strength, I suppose, of a 10-win season that could have either been better or worse, depending on the prism in which you tend to view life, the Cleveland Browns will be entering into a season where, frankly, the only thing they can do is disappoint. Win and make the playoffs, that’s expected. Lose and/or miss the playoffs again, fans will be looking for some throats to choke.

Certainly, the NFL and its various broadcast partners expect this team to be a contender. On Monday night, the Browns face the New York Giants in a nationally-broadcast preseason game on ESPN. Meaningless preseason games in which the starters play but a series or two is apparently what passes as counterprogramming to the Olympics for the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports. Still, ESPN could have opted for, say the Detroit-Cincinnati yawnfest, so it’s something.

But beyond preseason, the Browns are nationally featured in each of their first three games covering each of the three major networks. That’s some serious credibility for a franchise that’s been down a few quarts of it for most of the last 10 years. Having lived through a mostly impotent resurrection of a once proud franchise, Browns fans can be excused for being highly skeptical of late-coming outsiders with an endless supply of irrational exuberance even as they engage in their own brand of exuberance.

If the Browns are to prove at all worthy of their national darling status, they’ll have to avoid injuries first and foremost. In the NFL, as in pretty much any sport, injuries more than anything else tend to determine the outcome of the season. The NFL is by far the most violent domestic sport, though it may not have much on Australian rules football or Irish hurling. Still, world class athletes playing at high speeds in bodies not particularly designed to bend they way they are often bent causes a whole variety of problems, the best efforts of the medical staff notwithstanding. If you need proof, Gary Baxter blew out two knees on a play that was noteworthy only because of its ordinariness. He’ll probably never play again.

There is no question that general manager Phil Savage has upgraded the talent on the Browns in several areas, particularly over the last two years. Still, despite his best efforts, it is a team not nearly deep enough overall to sustain a spate of injuries. Arguably, no team in the league really can. The way that teams manage the cap causes them to fill out the bottom thirds of their rosters with young and/or fringe players who aren’t usually in a position to step right in without a drop off in production. When everything shakes out, close to a third of the Browns’ active roster will be made up of players with three or less years of experience.

The teams that can minimize the number of games missed by its starters will be the teams likely to be there at the end of the season with a chance to win it all. On that score, the Browns have as good a chance as any, even with this defensive backfield. It will all depend, again, on injuries. That’s where the trade of Leigh Bodden will linger most.

In strengthening its defensive line, the Browns got thinner in the defensive backfield. That’s not necessarily a bad tradeoff, assuming tradeoffs like that have to be made, but the situation became almost dire when Daven Holley went out for the year with a knee injury suffered in off-season drills. Safeties Sean Jones and Brodney Pool are credible fairly established players, but it’s hard to yet be sold on Eric Wright or Brandon McDonald at cornerback. Put it this way, when a nearly ancient Terry Cousin is fighting Mike Adams to be the nickel back, depth is a problem.

Beyond Davis and Cousin are players of even lesser stature, if that’s possible. Nick Sorenson? A.J. Davis? Mil’von James? Brandon Mitchell? Travis Key? Just in case any in that group are getting significant playing time this season, fans better pull out the rosary beads now and pray for the sustained health of Shaun Rogers (who already may have some sort of knee problem) and Corey Williams. Don’t forget a few hosannas for Kamerion Wimbley either.

In short, when you consider how quickly things could deteriorate this season with a just a few injuries, it’s clear that beyond the simple on the field performance of the various players the real keys to this season lie with the performance of both head coach Romeo Crennel and new defensive coordinator Mel Tucker.

Crennel is a very likeable sort. He’s straightforward and commands respect. He’s not a phony. He’s old school in the right way. That doesn’t necessarily make him the right fit as a head coach. Despite his best intentions, time and again his Browns’ teams make far too many mental mistakes. It’s a nagging trend that must stop. The line between success and failure is so microscopic that mental mistakes and not talent often decide most games.

Crennel’s also not the best judge of talent. If Crennel had it his way, Maurice Carthon would probably still be offensive coordinator. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, Crennel stood by Carthon far beyond his expiration code. It took Savage stepping to bring that farce to its inevitable conclusion. It also took Savage forcing Rob Chudzinski on Crennel before the offensive got a legitimate coordinator.

On the defensive side, where Crennel has had much more of a free hand given his background, the results have been mixed. Savage is in charge of talent acquisition and arguably has failed Crennel in that regard in the past. But Crennel didn’t do himself much good either by selecting Todd Grantham as defensive coordinator or by forcing a defensive scheme on a team without the talent to implement it. Crennel, by all accounts, made the move to oust Grantham and put in Mel Tucker as the defensive coordinator. Second only to the acquisition of both Rogers and Williams, it’s the off-season decision that may have the most impact on whether this team fulfills its expectations.

Tucker has worked with the defensive backfield and, above anyone else, knows its limitations. The performance of his defense will depend mightily on his ability to devise schemes to cover up those shortcomings. The guess is that Tucker will take some chances with this defensive and try plenty of blitzes in order to hurry the quarterback and disrupt the rhythm, something that the Pittsburgh Steelers always do so well. That seems to be his only choice. If the Browns’ defense is forced to play teams straight up, they are going to have trouble getting off the field—again.

At this juncture, the Browns have enough starting talent to be competitive with any team in the league. But if you want to give your expectations a real reality check, ask yourself the far harder question of whether the Browns have the depth and the coaching talent to sustain that competiveness. As the season wears on, the answer to that question will reveal itself and be the far more important determiner of whether or not this team is playing meaningful football come Christmas.

A Gambler in Nerd's Clothing

A consensus seems to be emerging that the flurry of activity at Cleveland Browns Central initiated by ringmaster/general manager Phil Savage last week is a bold initiative to win now. Maybe, but one thing that is indisputable is that Savage’s moves are the biggest gamble of his career, by a large margin.

In two very distinct ways, Savage has sacrificed the immediate future. He has essentially set ablaze three early round draft picks in the 2008 draft and the various benefits that tend to inure from them if you draft well while at the same time creating potential salary cap hell a few years down the road. That isn’t a criticism, just an observation and a reminder that in football, like most other enterprises, there is no potential for growth without some risk.

But whether Savage’s maneuvering turns into a growth opportunity or a short-term stroke with long-term pain is far from clear. There are various schools of thought on this, but the conventional wisdom is that you build teams through the draft, not free agency. Paying and often overpaying for someone else’s rejects is supposed to be more of a supplement, the final piece or two of a team on the precipice of going deep in the playoffs. Rarely do you see a team, particularly a successful team, part with draft picks.

Where the Browns fit into that matrix is uncertain. They accelerated their growth last year via both the draft and free agency so they aren’t exactly in a total rebuild mode. But with one of the worst defenses in the entire league, the Browns don’t exactly meet the definition of a successful team quite yet, let alone a Super Bowl contender. That’s why most in the league aren’t quite sure of what to make of Savage and the Browns at this point.

Perhaps to blunt this inevitable criticism, Browns head coach Romeo Crennel told the media on Monday, if it helps, just think of quarterback Brady Quinn as this year’s number one pick, defensive lineman Corey Williams as this year’s second round pick and defensive tackle Shaun Rogers as this year’s third round pick. Dangling that observation in front of someone with a computer and an outlet is like dangling a bottle of hooch in front of Mischa Barton.

See, the problem with such goofy analogies by a head coach who has enough trouble keeping track of time outs is that they are, well, goofy. (The Browns would have drafted a quarterback of Quinn’s caliber in the first round given the re-signing of Derek Anderson?) But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not fair to debate his real point: whether the Browns are as well positioned with their recent acquisitions as they would be had they instead held on to their draft picks.

The real benefit of the two trades, even at the expense of the second and third round picks, is that it let the Browns obtain players with an established NFL resume. Draft picks, even early round ones, are still a crapshoot and will always be until some fail-safe mechanism for evaluating the inherent ambiguities of young athletes is invented.

But that same benefit of swapping draft picks for existing players is also its downside. Williams, for example, illustrates both sides. A former sixth round pick, he's nonetheless been an effective defensive tackle for the Packers, certainly more effective than anyone the Browns had on the defensive line last season. Likely he'll have a better 2008 than anyone the Browns could have obtained with their second round pick. But that still doesn't answer the question of whether, in four years or less, that mythical second round pick they now don’t have could surpass Williams in production.

Rogers is even more of a conundrum. To be charitable, the word out of Detroit is hardly encouraging. Rogers has a history of accomplishment with an equal amount of attitude and defiance. He’s overweight and almost seemed to balloon up purposely to make some sort of bizarre point with the Lions management last season. But these were hardly unknowns. Indeed, Crennel admitted as much saying that he felt that that there would be enough stabilizing influences inside the Browns locker room to keep Rogers on track. Certainly that can happen, as was the case when both Corey Dillon and Randy Moss went to New England. But Gerard Warren in Denver didn’t work out too well, so it isn’t always the case that the players can police their own.

Even if both Rogers and Williams have more upside than comparable 2008 draft picks, Savage’s actions on Friday have to be considered as a whole and not piecemeal.

This is where the salary cap implications kick in.

Assuming that the NFL and the players ultimately solve their differences with respect to the collective bargaining agreement and a similar salary cap stays in place for the foreseeable future, the signings of Anderson, Williams, Rogers, and Donte' Stallworth have the potential to linger far longer than any 2008 contributions. While the full details of the contracts of each haven’t been disclosed yet, what has been reported with respect to guaranteed money is quite instructive and not just because it will require owner Randy Lerner to dip a bit further into his fortune.

Williams is slated for at least $16 million in guaranteed money on his six-year contract. Stallworth has about $10 million in guaranteed money on a seven-year contract, and Rogers has $18 million guaranteed on a six-year contract. Anderson has somewhere between $14.5 and 15.5 million in guaranteed money on his three-year contract. Since salaries are rarely guaranteed, these dollars likely represent a combination of signing and roster bonuses, perhaps easily achievable performance bonuses as well.

If each played out the term of his contract, the bonus would hit the salary cap on a prorated basis. In the case of Williams, for example, his bonus is worth $2.66 million of salary cap space each year, based on the length of his current contract. The problem comes if one or more of them don’t stick around.

Like most long-term contracts, the salary piece probably ramps up in later years since the guaranteed money is usually paid up front. Thus, when the salary to be paid in later years -- coupled with the cap hit for the bonus in that year -- begins to exceed the player’s value to the team, he’ll be cut. Think Orpheus Roye. Heck, think Donte’ Stallworth.

When that occurs, not if, the remaining prorated share of the bonuses is then accelerated into the year the player is cut. Thus, the team ends up with less salary cap to work with even though the player is otherwise gone. It’s exactly why former Browns head coach Butch Davis essentially purged the Browns only playoff team several years ago.

These may be problems for another day and another season, but they most certainly are on the horizon. Much can happen between now and then, but the Browns can’t be successful each and every year playing this kind of shell game with free agents at the expense of draft choices. At some point, the lack of draft choices this year will become more noticeable in much the same way as if the Browns had squandered the choices with poor decisions. It’s what put the Browns in the hole Savage is trying to dig them out of now.

The gamble Savage took may be the final jump the Browns need to become a force in the league, but if Savage wants to keep it that way, there is much more juggling he has to do. If he isn’t successful, then another rebuilding program isn’t too far in the future for this franchise and Savage can go back to doing what he loves best, scouting.

Only it will most certainly be with another team.