Lingering Items--VIP Edition

There was a story a few weeks ago about a high school that had decided to set up a VIP room at its prom.  Students who wanted to pay a little extra in order to be treated like a little big shot could.  It was as much inevitable as it was another sign of a coming apocalypse.  It won’t be long before preschools offer a premium recess area with newer, better toys for children of parents willing to pay an additional tuition surcharge.

Yet, in the larger sense it’s hard to blame these enterprising high schoolers or their idiotic administrators for turning the prom into an even more realistic version of life itself.  Our sporting events have so embraced the concept of premium seats for big spenders that it’s probably never occurred to them that in doing so they are actually working at cross purposes.

As detailed in the latest Crain’s Cleveland Business, the Indians recently sent out a survey to premium ticket buyers asking their opinions on still another potential premium lounge at Progressive Field.  If it came to pass, and at this point the Indians claim they are just exploring options, the team would convert about 8 suites on the first or third base side into a premium lounge that would allow dining and a view of the ball park.

This new premium lounge would be on top of the lounge that’s available only to fans in the club suite, the social media suite that the Indians condescendingly make available to the nerds infatuated with that whole internet fad, the fan cave which is another group of converted suites and includes such baseball viewing staples as billiard tables, and the Champions Suite, which is a super suite carved out of a series of other suites.

I can understand Mark Shapiro’s quixotic journey toward realizing greater margins that won’t be used to increase payroll, but at some point this push to make watching a baseball game some sort of country club experience seems awfully counterproductive.

The Indians are bitching and moaning about the lack of attendance but act as if their attempts to make attending even more of an exclusionary process aren’t somehow related.  They are.

It’s hardly a secret at this point that a strong corporate commitment is needed in almost every city for professional sports to work.  The cost of running a professional sports franchise gets more expensive each year.  Player payroll is the most visible operating expense but hardly the only one.  There’s the usual stuff like maintenance, utilities and insurance.  There’s also debt service, front office expenses, and in sports like baseball, the whole range of minor league expenses.

One of the reasons a team like Cleveland constantly squeezes payroll is because it represents such a huge part of the overall budget.  The revenue streams from such things as television and radio tend to be fixed for years at a time.  There may be escalators in those contracts that keep pace in some measure with the economy generally but on a year to year basis there is nothing much a team can do to increase those particular revenue streams.

The more variable revenue streams are things like souvenirs, concessions and the biggest one of all, ticket sales.  Projections are easily made for budgeting purposes but if those revenue streams end up lagging it does directly and perhaps significantly impact a team’s yearly bottom line.

It’s in this context that the push for even more secure lines of revenue is being pursued.  The Indians aren’t necessarily lacking for corporate support but the economy since 2008 has taken a huge hit on local companies and hence their budgets for entertainment.  It’s the reason that there are so many loges available for conversion into something else.  When a company doesn’t renew a loge lease and there’s no one waiting in line for it, it’s a dead asset.  And right now and for the foreseeable future, the Indians have a lot of dead assets.  So do the Browns.

But is the answer to all of this more premium seats?  Is that really the right market to pursue?  Maybe not.

Premium seats are purchased by premium buyers, meaning corporations predominately.  Even as those seats might be available for individual purchase, I can all but guarantee that unless the vast majority of them are purchased by corporate buyers then they’ll mostly go empty night after night, like now.

And while these premium seats may be too expensive for the individual taste, they are still cheaper, often much less so, then suite tickets.  A suite comes with a preset number of tickets that must be bought, usually at least 10 per game.  Then there is a minimum food spend per game.  All in it’s an expensive way to see a game, any game.

But buying, say, a couple of club seats for the season and a few more in one of the other premium lounges ends up being a significantly cheaper proposition for a corporation.  So much so, in fact, that it provides an increasingly more attractive option then purchasing a suite for a season.

In other words, the more of these lounges that are created, the less the demand is for suites.  There isn’t a broader untapped market out there just clamoring for the right kind of suite.  It’s the same market looking for a different and sometimes cheaper option.  As the Indians create more specialty suites and lounges it’s done at the expense of those who would otherwise spend their dollars on the traditional suites.  In short, the Indians will end up just cannibalizing the same market but otherwise not making progress.  Arguably they could end up further behind.

**

Do you think the Browns are sensitive about the criticism they’ve been receiving for the lack of attention to the receiving corps?  Have you noticed how many stories you’ve read recently about Mohamed Massaquoi or Greg Little and how both are supposedly poised for a breakout season?  If you answered yes to the second question, then you have the answer to the first.

The Browns’ public relations department has attacked the criticism by doing what a public relations department is paid to do, manipulate the story.  Using the local beat reporters who tend to like their stories spoon fed, fans are getting a steady diet of stories that would tend to make you think that the team’s biggest weakness is actually a strength.

First there were the stories about Greg Little and his suddenly leaner frame that will put him in position to have a breakout year.  For the last few days the focus has been the undersized Massaquoi and how he’s over all of the various injuries that have plagued him in his first three years making him ready for a breakout year.  I hope there are enough footballs to go around.

Give credit to the Browns’ p.r. department for the onslaught while reading the stories in the local papers with a grain of salt.  No matter how it’s spun, the Browns receiving corps as presently constituted is one of the worst in the league.  With no meaningful off season acquisition, it’s the same group that was one of the worst in the league last season, just older.

There is some benefit to experience making it reasonable to expect Little to be better.  But his better isn’t ever going to turn him into a legitimate number one receiver.  He simply doesn’t have that kind of speed.  He’s a power forward that’s being forced to play center because management thinks it doesn’t need a legitimate center.

Massaquoi is a different story.  He’s injury prone which is related to his lack of size.  But more than that are the injuries he’s suffered—concussions.  With each day that passes, players are becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of concussions and their long term impacts.  Massaquoi has suffered two concussions already.  Even club president Mike Holmgren acknowledges that the concussions have taken a toll on Massaquoi and have changed his game.  Translated, Massaquoi is playing more cautiously, which is understandable.

So even if Massaquoi is technically healthy right now, there’s nothing about his performance that suggests he’ll have any sort of breakout season, particularly as he approaches his job with even more caution.  And even if he did have a breakout season what exactly does that mean for a passion receiver?  Like Little, Massaquoi isn’t blessed with great speed and isn’t the kind of game changing receiver that teams have to worry about irrespective of how healthy he is.

The Browns are slowly, surely starting to fill the many holes on this team.  The receiving corps remains a big hole still and no matter how hard the Browns p.r. department spins it and no matter how compliant the local media is in that scheme, the underlying facts won’t change until the Browns actually change them with better players.

**

It looked like the Twitter universe got a bit overheated on Thursday with “news” that the Browns were supposedly for sale.  The source of that rumor was a no nothing blowhard who got his one day in the sun by essentially making something up.

Maybe that’s unfair.  If you assume everything has a price, then the Browns, like any other team in any other sport, are for sale.  I’m sure that Randy Lerner, if you could find him and then wake him, would say he has a price.  It may be outrageous and unrealistic, but he probably has a price.

But the Browns thought enough of the essentially non-rumor to flat out deny it, which likely will only fan the flames further.  Remember, in sports when a player says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.  When a general manager gives the manager or head coach a vote of confidence it’s the first step toward firing him.  And when an owner says his team isn’t for sale, it’s usually for sale.

Browns fans shouldn’t fret either way.  The Browns aren’t going anywhere even if they are sold.  The league is not going to let the Browns escape from Cleveland ever again.  Anyone buying the team will have to keep it in Cleveland.  Set that in stone.

If you accept that as a given, then fans should welcome a sale.  Lerner has been a disaster of an owner by any way you to want to measure.  It is literally a case where a new owner couldn’t possibly do any worse.

Don’t get your hopes up, though.  Lerner is a contrarian.  The more compelling the case for a sale, the likelier he’ll get further entrenched. 

**

It looks like whatever supposed quarterback competition there was going to be between Brandon Weeden and Colt McCoy won’t survive mini-camp.  Head coach Pat Shurmur has all but anointed Weeden the starter.  Maybe it was the anecdote Shurmur told about his time with Sam Bradford in St. Louis.  Maybe it was the passive aggressive way he punctuates every question about the offense with the comment “it all starts with the quarterback.”  Or maybe, just maybe, it is the fact that he is giving Weeden most of the reps with the first team.  Yea, that must be it.

McCoy fans, let’s face it.  Barring injury, it’s Weeden’s job if for no other reason then Weeden is Shurmur’s guy and McCoy is not.  That’s probably how it should be, unless you think Shurmur shouldn’t be trusted with any decision more difficult than paper or plastic.

What this all means is that the Browns’ management is taking a longer view of its path forward.  They recognize that this team isn’t playoff caliber and are willing to sacrifice another season so that a youngish team can mature all at once.  As far as plans go that’s as good of one as they’ve had for years.

At some point though the fans are going to get fed up paying for sacrificial seasons.  I suspect that there’s maybe one more season left in the tolerance bank so long as fans see legitimate forward progress and not the usual running in place on a 4-12 treadmill.

**

So Grady Sizemore is still feeling soreness and his rehab has had a setback, meaning he continues to collect a multi-million dollar salary while adding zero value back, which everyone knew was the most likely outcome.  That leads to this week’s question to ponder: Does Sizemore have the best agent ever?

Lingering Items--Depth Edition

Bad games and bad weeks happen in baseball.  They are far more easily absorbed then in football.  So if your team is otherwise fundamentally strong and soundly built then a bad week simply represents the usual bumps and bruises along a very long 162-game season.

The Cleveland Indians certainly had a series of bad games culminating in a very bad week.  After an emotional, perhaps too emotional, 3-game sweep of the Detroit Tigers, the Indians laid 3 colossal eggs in Chicago, undoing pretty much all that was done against the Tigers.  It didn’t get much better against the usual punching bad, Kansas City, thereafter and they fell out of first place.

It’s not the losses that are troubling, occasioned as they were bad some lousy pitching.  It’s the injuries and what they reveal about this team.  It’s not deep, intentionally.

The Indians by design are mostly held together by players without a great deal of experience.  It’s cheaper to do it that way.  But when the front line players are barely experienced, what does it say about the replacements behind them?  You’ve seen the results, you make the call.

It’s also troubling that once again Travis Hafner is hurt.  Perhaps the least versatile player in the major leagues, if not major league history, Hafner probably doesn’t even own a glove at this point.  All he needs to do is keep himself relatively in shape, step into a batting cage occasionally while his teammates are in the field, and come to the plate 4 times a game.

If you ask the average person off the street to do that task, he might not get the same results at the plate as Hafner but he’d at least be available for the entire season.  The Indians require very little physically of Hafner and he still can’t stay healthy enough to play a full season.  He’s out for the next 4 to 6 weeks (!) after having arthroscopic surgery on his right knee.

You can’t really blame a player for getting injured, but you can stop rewarding him.  Grady Sizemore is collecting millions for doing exactly what everyone outside of Chris Antonetti and Mark Shapiro thought he’d be doing, spending time on the disabled list.  Hafner will collect millions this season for doing exactly what everyone outside of Antonetti and Shapiro thought he’d be doing, muddling through the final year of his contract with indifferent results while occasionally spending time on the disabled list.  There isn’t any chance whatsoever that either player could come close to performing at their contract’s worth and that was a given before the season started.

In the case of Hafner, you can argue that the Indians didn’t have much of a choice.  He’s in the last year of a contract and even if he had been cut the Indians would still be on the hook for his salary.  True, but the other side of that coin is that a deeper, better financed team would simply have cut its losses with Hafner and let him instead spend some time on some other team’s DL while the Indians developed a better alternative.

As it is, the Indians have not developed a better alternative and now have no real plan in place for how to cover the loss of Hafner, except the usual “by committee” approach that teams with a lack of depth tend to employ.  The committee approach is understandable when a team’s closer goes down.  It’s rather ludicrous when it’s a designated hitter.

The Indians’ offense was already an iffy proposition and that was with a supposedly healthy Hafner who was having a decent but not great year anyway.  It begs the question though of how much better off if at all the Indians would have been had they made alternate plans instead of continuing to rely on Hafner solely because of his millstone of a contract forces their hand.

It’s just this kind of thing that tends to reveal the fissures in a team that needs absolutely everything to go right if it’s going to compete.  For the initial part of the season that seemed to be happening.  The injuries, always the fear on a team this loosely constructed, have started and the holes they create underscore why the skeptics out there looking for reasons to not believe in this team have their Exhibit A.

**

Not to continue to beat the dead horse over attendance too much more, there is an additional point that rarely gets mentioned in the debate as to why the Indians don’t draw better.  Virtually every game is on television. 

There’s always been an argument over how game attendance is impacted by the fact that the games are otherwise televised.  There’s no good way to do that study mainly because it relies on the opinions that may be earnest but inaccurate.

To most, attending a game is an event.  The cost is certainly a factor, but there is a certain hassle factor involved.  And one thing I’ve come to appreciate the older I’ve gotten is how much the hassle factor really does figure into whether or not I attend any particular event.

When you’re younger, the thrill of an event tends to outweigh any hassle factor.  You don’t mind parking far away from the venue because you’re young and can walk.  The late night isn’t that much of a problem because what’s a few lost hours of sleep anyway?

But as you get older, the hassle factor takes on a bigger role to the point where you weigh the thrill against the hassle.  And the older you get, the more the hassle factor dominates.

Indeed, that’s one of the reasons every game is broadcast in Cleveland and elsewhere.  Owners understand that the vast majority of the people can’t attend on a regular basis.  So they make their product available in another way—through a cable package that they control.  The Dolans own Sportstime Ohio, for example.  They get the revenue it generates through the sale of its programming to cable operators.  They also get a piece of the advertising revenue those games generate.

In other words, in the larger sense when you consider attendance you can’t just focus on butts in the seats at Progressive Field.  You have to take into account the eyeballs on the screens in all the households and bars in the greater Cleveland area.  If those ratings are down as well, then the Indians do have an attendance problem. 

I’ve not seen ratings yet for this season, but last season the Indians were 7^th in the major leagues in local ratings, up 105% from the previous year.  That’s impressive not just in theory but in practicality.  That gives the Dolans’ cable operations the ability to charge more for carriage of Sportstime  Ohio when it comes up for renewal and also makes the available advertising minutes more valuable.

The point though is that the Indians are still a popular draw locally when you take into account more than just those who watch from Progressive Field.  Certainly the team would be more profitable with higher attendance, but let’s not completely bemoan the lack  of support, mainly because it just isn’t true.

**

There’s little doubt that the Miami Heat are headed back to the NBA Finals and when that happens Cavs fans can recharge anew their angst meters.  The thought of LeBron James hoisting a championship trophy and wearing a championship ring is a unifying measure of anger for most of the locals.

Sooner or later, though, this is just something that we’ll all have to face.  James will win a championship at some point in his career and it won’t be with Cleveland.  And whenever it occurs it will be before the Cavs make it back.  Those are pretty well givens at this point. 

Still it’s hard to see at the moment the Heat actually winning the championship this season.  Both Oklahoma and San Antonio look deeper and better coached, assuming the Heat get past Boston.  James may be the star that shines more brightly but it’s not like Tim Duncan or Kevin Durant are dim bulbs.  They have better supporting casts, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh notwithstanding.  (Indeed, Bosh is proving that he always was about the 93^rd best player in the NBA anyway.  He’s been gone now for several days and no one has much noticed.)

If this doesn’t end up being the Heat’s year, then look for the kind of off-season in Miami that Cavs fans used to know.  James and his confederates will work to get Erik Spoelstra  a new title, “ex-coach.”  Then there will be the usual positioning of grabbing other players that fit more with James’ vision of how the team should be constructed.

The only saving grace for Miami is that Pat Riley is a far stronger figure at the head of the franchise then Cleveland has ever had.  Having one several championships, Riley has a good working knowledge of difficult personalities and there’s every reason to believe he’ll be able to control the lunacy just enough to actually build the Heat into the kind of team that James really needs to win a championship.

I suspect that Riley will get it right eventually and James will win his championship.  If Cavs fans have any aspirations in this regard, it should be that the Heat doesn’t go on an extended run once they do get that first one under their belts.  The longer they wait, the less likely it will happen.

**

As Indians’ closer Chris Perez becomes a more vocal and hence more controversial figure, this week’s question to ponder:  At what point will Perez’s act start to wear thin? (hint: it’s directly related to how many saves he blows).

Lingering Items--Turkey Edition

When all hell broke loose at Ohio State last Spring, it wasn’t surprising that eventually stories would get written that would be less than flattering of former head coach Jim Tressel, even if lightly sourced and highly speculative. He was fair game, after all, because he had admittedly failed to disclose potential violations of NCAA regulations to his boss, athletic director Gene Smith. When he signed an affidavit indicating he was unaware of any potential violations that pretty much made him a piece of raw meat to any writer with a grudge.

Those stories that did get written, like the Sports Illustrated hit job, were lightly sourced and highly speculative but mostly revealed nothing new nor did anything to cause people to re-assess all they ever thought about him. Tressel didn’t get a pass but his reputation didn’t take any more hits.

That won’t happen for Joe Paterno. The grievous nature of his misconduct is so insidious that in large measure it truly does undo a lifetime of other good work. It’s not just that Paterno failed at protecting innocent children from a creepy alleged pedophile, it’s also that Paterno actually used that lifetime of other good work as a club to bang over the heads of his bosses whenever they tried to rein him in.

The Wall Street Journal, in an article that appeared Tuesday, left no doubt as to exactly why Paterno did deserve to take the fall he did. Paterno may have had a supervisor but it was in name only. The story left no doubt that Paterno had an unrelenting grip on the administration at Penn State for years. It also left no doubt as to how exactly Paterno could become so blinded by the power that he yielded that he would look the other way when his friend and assistant, Jerry Sandusky, was engaging in very suspicious and odd behavior.

The best part of the story? It’s not lightly sourced or highly speculative. It is established not through whispery shadowy figures looking for their 15 minutes of fame but instead by the official records Penn State was forced to keep as a public institution.

A series of email exchanges and other incidents surrounding Paterno’s vaunted program tells the story very clearly of the man who really ruled Penn State and how in other contexts Paterno was willing to misuse his power to further not the interest of the school at large but those of his team and players and, ultimately, himself.

The WSJ article, written by Reed Albergotti, describes clashes that Paterno repeatedly had with the Penn State standards and conduct officer over the increasingly large number of disciplinary infractions committed by his players, things like campus fights and drunk driving, and how in each instance Paterno was able to keep his players from being subjected to the same standards as the general student population.

An old school type, Paterno was of the firm mind that athletes were different and could be dealt with separately and behind the closed doors of the locker room. He never did accept subjecting his players to the same rules as the rest of the student population.

In one particularly damning confrontation (though, frankly, it’s all pretty damning) Paterno forced the hand of university president Graham Spanier by giving him an ultimatum: fire the standards and conduct officer, Dr. Vicky Triponey, or forego any fund raising by Paterno. This was no idle threat. Paterno raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the university over his long tenure and he was telling Spanier that the spigot would stop unless Spanier fired another university employee that had dared to cross ol’ JoePa.

This ultimatum came out of an incident involving a player that Triponey had suspended, Dan Connor, for making harassing phone calls to a retired assistant coach. Despite the suspension, Paterno told Connor to suit up anyway. Triponey told Connor that if he did he faced expulsion. That’s when Paterno made his ultimatum, which prompted a visit from Spanier to Triponey at her home.

Spanier told Triponey that if forced to choose, he would choose Triponey over Paterno in the squabble but Spanier also made it quite clear to her that he didn’t want to be forced to make that choice. Given the not-so-subtle message, Triponey relented and significantly reduced Connor’s suspension.

That was somewhat of a prelude to another ugly confrontation, the one that ultimately pushed Triponey to quit her efforts to wade through the cesspool that Paterno created.

In 2007 6 players were charged with forcing their way into a campus apartment and beating up several students, one severely. Triponey’s department took over the inquiry and was thwarted in her efforts to investigate by the players who essentially refused to talk to her. When Triponey complained about the stonewalling to Paterno and suggested he have his players cooperate, Paterno refused, telling her that the players shouldn’t be expected to cooperate with the school’s disciplinary process because to do so would pit player against player thus impacting the team dynamic.

Stop and consider for a moment how seriously twisted Paterno’s thinking had to be to make that case. Publicly he espoused a “do the right thing” approach. That’s always easy when things are quiet. But “do the right thing” only works if you follow it when times are tough. Here, Paterno deliberately kept his players from cooperating in a university investigation into allegations that they beat up other university students.

Ultimately and not surprisingly the players suffered very little in the way of discipline for the ugly incident and Paterno cleared his conscience by imposing his own discipline—having the whole team pick up trash after football games. Very old school. Very stupid.

Once Paterno was able to rid the university of a pest like Triponey, her replacement was far more compliant, agreeing with Paterno and making a recommendation to the university that only Paterno should have the right to discipline his players.

In large measure, this all starts to answer the question of why Paterno, Spanier and the rest of the administration would be so tone deaf when it came to the accusations against Sandusky. In large measure it was because the university had long since abdicated any authority over anything Paterno touched. Is it really hard to imagine Paterno stonewalling a real investigation into Sandusky, especially when you consider that Paterno waited a day after he found out before he told his boss?

Meanwhile and despite all public statements to the contrary, it’s now more clear than ever that Paterno had little interest or regard for anything outside of his football program. His fundraising activities, while prolific and greatly benefiting the university generally, intentionally became the sword he’d use to cut down any resistance in his path. It’s kind of sick, kind of twisted but ultimately is why football programs like this get so out of whack.

Ultimately, for all the good that money brought, it was stained and what’s even more important, the university knew it. Spanier and the university’s board of trustees created a monster in Paterno and then recoiled at any attempts to control their creation. In truth they couldn’t anyway. His ego run amok and his values long since compromised, he was a runaway train for years and it was only a matter of time before he either died or crashed, the university administration apparently ambivalent as to which would occur first. Unfortunately, the well-being of several young boys became collateral damage.

**
So the Indians are on the verge of signing Grady Sizemore. Surprise, surprise. What I’m looking forward to is exactly how Sizemore and his agent spin the lack of interest Sizemore clearly failed to generate on the free agent market.

The anticipated incentive-laden one year deal is essentially the same kind of deal that the Indians have been giving the injured and lame for years on the if-come. It’s mostly little risk because if the player does perform the Indians benefit for a year and the player benefits by pricing himself out of a market the size of Cleveland. Rarely, though, do these actually work out.

The lack of interest in Sizemore isn’t surprising. He was good early, regressed and then has been hurt the last several years. His legacy will be of potential unfulfilled. The injuries mostly did him in but in truth even when healthy his skills were not improving.

Though Sizemore is more or less a fan favorite, the real problem with the impending deal is that it is simply a band-aid, a way of avoiding making decisions about the club’s future without Sizemore. By cutting him loose initially when he rejected a restructuring of his contract, the Indians more or less said that it was time to move on. Now they aren’t so sure.

It’s that kind of indecision that really keeps the franchise from fully progressing. There’s an argument of course that the team has other important decisions to make so avoiding one in the outfield for another year may make some sense. Perhaps. But the forceful counter is that every time they make a decision like this it keeps them from developing a longer term solution, which is what they ultimately will need.

In the long run the Indians would be far better off by being more definitive in their approach. Having decided that Sizemore’s talent no longer matched his financial ambitions, the Indians should have been content to merely move forward and stop inhibiting the progress of whoever it is they had tentatively decided would fill in the gap.

**
One of my favorite things to do after each Browns game is to listen to a couple of the radio call-in shows to gauge fan reaction where every loss is greeted with the gloom of a coming apocalypse and every victory is treated as one step closer to the playoffs.

For those not so inclined, let’s just say that there’s a fair amount of the fan base (assuming these callers represent the diversity of the fan base) that was already willing to pull the plug on Pat Shurmur after the loss to the Rams. While I expected similar irrationality after the Browns’ win over the Jaguars on Sunday, I was a bit surprised at its depth.

For many callers, the victory got them reassessing the Browns’ 4-6 record to the point where they concluded that this team really should be 6-4 if it had any breaks and in playoff contention. After all there was the 4th quarter melt down in the first loss. Then there was the heartbreaking loss to the Rams. And hey, when you think about it, there were only two games in which they really weren’t competitive—Tennessee and Houston.

Oy vey. Lest anyone get too excited, let’s concede for the moment that theoretically a few of their games could have gone a different way. Now let’s visit the reality as to why they didn’t.

Simply put, this team isn’t good enough to overcome even simple false start penalties. Even in those so-called tough losses, the Browns weren’t exactly lighting it up on offense nor were they losing to really good teams. This Browns team has struggled against every manner of competition in its fight for respectability. The fact that it only capitulated against two teams shouldn’t be used to deflect what your eyes are otherwise telling you.

If there is one positive about this team at this moment, it is in the simple fact that the basic structure of a real franchise is now in place. What’s missing of course is what makes the difference between bad and good teams—players. There just are too many people starting on the Browns that would be relegated to special teams almost anywhere else. When those starters get hurt they are replaced by players that would struggle to remain on most teams’ practice squads.

As much as we’d all like to believe it, this Browns team, as presently constructed, isn’t a good one just hoping to break out. It’s a bad one just hoping to hang on. There’s some reason for optimism for the future but let’s never delude ourselves into thinking that the playoffs are just one or two players away. It’s that kind of myopia that has for years put the franchise in the box from which it can’t seem to escape.

**

LeBron James and his other self-absorbed buddies are going on a 4-city basketball tour starting in Akron. Unless the tickets are free, it strikes me as a waste of time and money but it does lead to this week’s question to ponder: What’s a better value, LeBron’s Tour or the annual holiday visit of the Harlem Globetrotters?

Lingering Items--Letting Go Edition

Since it’s rare (it’s happened once) for a NFL team to go undefeated and win it all, it’s fascinating at times to gauge fan reactions to individual losses. There are always reactions as if no game should ever have been lost. There are players to blame, certainly, but mostly fans blame the coaches.

As an overall approach, that makes sense. The plays that don’t get made are, to most thinking, the best evidence of bad coaching. We tend to think, for example, that if a player is wearing a brown and orange uniform, he’s just as competent as anyone else wearing a uniform to execute the play that’s been called so all things being equal, the coach screwed up.

Of course that can’t possibly be true as a decade or so of incompetence in Cleveland can attest. We’ve had all manner of coaches and techniques and yet the performance has remained amazingly consistently bad. No coach could have won with these players.

The problems being experienced by the Browns at the moment are in many ways the same as those being experienced by the Ohio State offense. New schemes and raw players counsel patience. There’s just no substitute for the passage of time and all the repetitions that brings. Bitch all you want about Colt McCoy but if you’ve ever listened to the Beatles live in Hamburg recordings, you can get a better sense that development just takes time.

But that’s not to suggest that coaching hasn’t played a role in what’s transpired to date. It has, in both a good and bad way.

Pat Shurmur, like Colt McCoy, is new to this gig. He’s spent plenty of time prepping for his opportunity but heavy does lay the crown once you’re given it to wear.

Evaluating McCoy to this point is all about what you want to make of it but it’s far easier to do then evaluating Shurmur. We know the record, 3-4, but how much of that is really due to coaching? That is far harder to discern.

Since Shurmur serves as his own offensive coordinator you can certainly look at that aspect of his performance and make some conclusions. The reason Shurmur needs an offensive coordinator has less to do with plays called or schemes designed and has more to do with simply having another voice to bounce ideas off. There’s nothing worse then being the only person in the office with your particular expertise. You can talk to others about unique issues but mostly they can just nod in sympathy, clueless as to what the hell you’re actually talking about.

So it is with Shurmur, particularly on game days. What’s been evident in several games is that his offensive coordinator instincts have overtaken and in some cases inhibited the development of his head coaching instincts. What a particular game may be dictating to an offensive coordinator can be wholly different then what it may be dictating to a head coach who has to balance both sides of the balls.

For example, it probably made sense to the offensive coordinator in Shurmur to have McCoy keep huddling up and slinging the ball in abject futility during several games because he felt like a spark was needed. But to the head coach Shurmur, an even more frenetic approach, such as a no huddle, two-minute drill type tempo early in the game, with the knowledge that if it’s not working your defense is mostly good enough might be more appropriate.

But without any healthy discussion during game day except between the left side and right side of Shumur’s brain, Shurmur is rendering himself less effective. Thus it wasn’t a surprise when team president Mike Holmgren indicated that there would be an offensive coordinator hired next season.

Another area to judge Shurmur is in attention to detail. Whether a new coaching staff or a shortened training camp or both are to blame, the Browns are not nearly as disciplined as they should be. There hasn’t been a game yet this season when there haven’t been multiple false start penalties on the offensive line. There hasn’t been a game this season where there haven’t been multiple personal fouls committed. The Browns haven’t turned into the Oakland Raiders but they’ve certainly regressed in this area as compared to the two seasons under Eric Mangini.

These seem like the simplest of fixes and yet it continues to be a nagging problem with this team. Given its lack of overall talent, it’s simply not good enough to consistently or even predominately overcome these mistakes. If Shumur wants to placate the fans and take some heat off his team, rapid improvement in this area would be the easiest way. 1st and 10 is challenge enough right now. 1st and 15 might as well be 1st and 50.

Another more difficult area to judge Shurmur is in his use of personnel. He talks often about getting the ball in the hands of playmakers but he still has never adequately answered why he deliberately kept the ball out of Peyton Hillis’ hands early in the season. He’s likewise devised no gimmicks to get the ball to Josh Cribbs in the open field. As a receiver, Cribbs is very limited. But that shouldn’t stop Shurmur from trying to find him other opportunities. You can tell Cribbs is frustrated but he’s too polite to take it completely off the reservation.

None of this is to suggest that Shurmur won’t make it as a head coach. But too often someone new to the role tries to do too much with it and as a result fails miserably. Even Bill Belichick needed to fail in order to eventually succeed. Yet that’s the last thing this organization can withstand.

The Browns aren’t poorly coached at the moment but neither is this coaching staff extracting more value out of the team then its talent would otherwise dictate. Patience with Shurmur is just as necessary as it is with McCoy but in truth if Holmgren is going to have any lasting impact on this team it will be to teach Shurmur exactly how to be a head coach.

**

The Brian Robiskie era, such as it was, is officially over. It’s not a surprise. The writing has been on the walls for weeks and in skywriting last Sunday when Jordan Norton came in as the third receiver instead of Robiskie once Mohammed Massaquoi was injured and Greg Little and Cribbs stepped up in grade.

I’ve written about Robiskie before and mentioned how precarious his role on the team really was. A good route runner, he nonetheless had almost no ability to get himself open. His approach was too slow-footed and mechanical to be taken seriously by the defensive backs in the NFL.

My guess is that Robiskie will get a look from one or two other teams and may even stick around for a few more seasons. That will mostly be related to pedigree and draft status. But there’s also the not so small fact that if a team as deficient in receivers is nonetheless cutting one, how good could that receiver be? Not very.

Robiskie is the quintessential good guy. He was an excellent college receiver. He’s studious and well liked. He won’t struggle in a post-football career. There comes a time when, as the coaches like to say, it’s time to get on with your life’s work. For Robiskie it just came sooner then either he, or Mangini, expected.

**
Of even higher visibility in the letting go department was the Indians parting ways with Grady Sizemore by not picking up his $9 million option for next season.

The conventional wisdom is that the Indians’ small market status figured in the decision but I don’t think it really had all that much to do with it. Instead it was Sizemore’s agent that drove the decision.

There may have been a few teams in baseball that would have picked up Sizemore’s option, but very few. His health issues and his lack of productivity during those periods in between are hardly suggestive of a $9 million/year player and that’s true whatever size market your favorite team plays in. The only one not to realize it at the moment is his agent.

According to Chris Antonetti, the Indians’ general manager, Sizemore was disappointed because he wanted to remain an Indian. Well, Sizemore could have controlled that by getting better control of his agent who insisted that the contract would not be re-negotiated. That was a mistake because there’s usually no team that likes you more and willing to overpay you more then your current one.

Maybe Sizemore’s agent thinks a better long-term deal is in the offing from some other team and maybe he’s right, but it will be a struggle. I think several teams will make incentive-laden short term offers to Sizemore, with the Indians being one of them. But it will be a shock of major proportions if anyone is willing to give him a guarantee in any contract year of $9 million unless it vests three seasons from now following three seasons of significantly improved numbers.

Sizemore’s career has been mercurial, to say the least. It’s hard to say how much the injuries really impacted him though obviously they did. Yet his batting eye never really improved all that much. He struck out way too much and that never changed and he didn’t walk enough to be an effective leadoff hitter, his preferred spot in the order.

Ultimately, Sizemore has had plenty of time in baseball to live up to the potential he showed but his development stopped, because of injuries mostly but also perhaps because he didn’t work hard enough on the gifts he had.

The Sizemore story isn’t over yet and perhaps there’s still a chapter to be written in Cleveland, but no complaints here about the move the Indians made. We’ve all seen what a millstone contract can do to a team as Travis Hafner’s ridiculous contract continues to inhibit the financial flexibility of the Indians.

**

With the NBA lockout still holding strong and actual games now being missed, no one seems to be in much of a hurry to resolve the dispute. The NBA owners are saving money as the players are being led to slaughter. All this leads to this week’s question to ponder: Did NBA players really think there’d be a groundswell of support for their cause?

Lingering Items--Perspective Edition

The Ohio State Buckeyes' football program may not be quite out of the woods just yet, but Friday's actions by the NCAA confirm that whatever else the drive-by sanctimonious and moralizing numbskulls at the Columbus Disptach, ESPN and Sports Illustrated want to have you believe, the Buckeyes are not the rogue and lawless program they've been unfairly painted to be.

By telling Ohio State on Friday that there will be no new allegations against the program (in other words, the vast conspiracy alleged by Sports Illustrated, flamed by the Dispatch, and piled on by other even lesser media outlets who felt they were late to the party, wasn't true), the case sits where it started, with one man, Jim Tressel, having lied to the NCAA about potential NCAA violations by a handful of his players.

Tressel, having paid the ultimate price for his sins, now stands as the new face of all that is supposedly wrong with college athletics but at least we know that the Buckeyes program is hardly USC of the 1980s. And while I'm sure that ESPN and Sports Illustrated will continue to excoriate Tressel as a means of deflecting their shoddy coverage and treatment of the Buckeyes generally, it may be best if you read the transcript of the NCAA's 5-hour interview with Tressel yourself in order to draw your own conclusions.

If there's a picture that emerges of Tressel from that interview, it's one of a coach who cares very deeply about his players and his program but constantly wrestled with all the day-to-day realities of the multitude of issues that can veer either or both wildly off track. In many ways he comes across as perhaps too naïve to have ever gotten himself into the position as the head coach of a major Division I program, too unsure really of how to handle situations that his own upbringing may never have prepared him for. What he doesn't do, though, is come across as a cold, manipulative phony deliberating shielding himself by creating a false public portrait of who he really is.

On the key issue of a small group of players trading on their status and memorabilia for free tattoos, Tressel was straightforward in admitting that he understood this was a NCAA violation. But the circumstances surrounding those infractions were complicated by the shady character that at least some of the players had gotten themselves involved with and the specter of a FBI criminal investigation of that character.

Tressel didn't make light of the potential NCAA violations that these players had committed but like a parent he casts aside that immediate concern for what he believed was a far greater threat—their safety and personal welfare.

Where Tressel blew it and admits as much is that he should have taken this to the university's lawyers or the compliance department (which, by the way, comes across pretty well actually in the Tressel interview) and gotten their input. He says he didn't do that because he was working off of what he thought was confidential information that if disclosed could make the situation even worse, from a safety standpoint, for those players.

Ultimately, it was this bad calculation and what Tressel did to hide it that cost him his job. But yet when you ponder the interview it does leave you with a sense that as wrong as Tressel was he shouldn't have lost his job. It makes me wonder whether anyone on the school's Board of Trustees bothered to even read the transcript before arriving at the conclusion that the only way for the school to get past all of this is for Tressel to go. Shame on them if they didn't.

We undoubtedly live in a society where we too readily and too often dismiss simple truths in favor of far more elaborate and cynical explanations of human behavior. Thus I have no real expectation that those who jumped to crucify Tressel and Ohio State so quickly will be swayed by anything that came from the NCAA on Friday or anything they read (or probably glanced over) in the Tressel interview. But this case was always more nuanced than any of them had time to uncover in favor of a story line about a phony coach leading a too successful program that flaunted the rules in order to get that way.

I'm far from suggesting that Tressel was a victim here. He brought this on himself by making what amounts to two really bad decisions. But Tressel never was and still isn't the worst person in the world. What was needed most in his case was what the university gave him first and then abandoned—the benefit of the doubt. As the facts continue to emerge, his actions may not be any less wrong but they are for more understandable.

What's less understandable and always will be, is why so many people were so quick to judge and then to revel in the downfall of a decent, honorable man.

**
The NFL's lockout still hasn't been lifted and the reason for that remains the same as it was when the lockout was first imposed. The National Football League Players Association is an overmatched, outmaneuvered trade organization wholly incapable of adequately dealing with the complicated issues of a multi billion dollar business.

Led by DeMaurice Smith, a lawyer by trade who talks a good game but whose inexperience in labor negotiations put the union at a disadvantage, backed by a group of players too ill-informed and disconnected from the business side of their sport to fully comprehend exactly what's taking place, and supported by a group of clever lawyers more interested in making their bones on the backs of the players, the NFLPA has bungled every step of this labor dispute to the point where they found themselves backed into a corner by the owners. Now they're trying to scratch their way out and look rather small doing so.

Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner and the de facto lead negotiator for the owners, always faced two real challenges in this negotiations. First he had to corral a group of owners who are nothing more than a loosely affiliated group of competitors. No small task certainly but Goodell did a good job of keeping them in check throughout the negotiations. Second, Goodell had to find a way to keep Smith and his advisers from leading their lambs to slaughter. That's been the far more difficult task as these recent and final days of the lockout demonstrate.

While there appear to be a few remaining issues between the parties that could get quickly resolved if that was the players' desire, it appears that what's mostly keeping the lockout lasting these few extra days is Smith and his executive board's parochial interest in looking like they won't be bullied by the owners. Thus does Smith and his executive board continue to insist, for example, on using the most inefficient means available to re-certify as a labor union, a prerequisite to actually having a collective bargaining agreement, just because they want to demonstrate one last act of defiance, as if they're punishing the owners when all they're really doing is hurting themselves and the fans they claim to love.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. For those too jaded to want to pay attention to all the nuance and minutiae of these labor negotiations, let me just refer back for a moment to the process I laid out previously about how this matter gets resolved.

The collective bargaining agreement the owners voted on is merely tentative because the NFLPA, in a wrong headed strategy that has served only to prolong the lockout, claimed they decertified as a labor union. Thus until they recertify, the parties can't enter into a new collective bargaining agreement. And before they can recertify, they have to get all the lemming-like players they got to sign decertification cards last year to sign recertification cards this year. The union could accomplish this electronically but has chosen not to, opting to have the cards signed once the players report to camp. But of course the players can't report to camp until the lockout is lifted so what this is about is Smith and his executive board, the same group that caused this headache in the first place, telling the owners to go ahead and lift the lockout and trust them that they'll get their business taken care of.

Understandably the owners are in more of a “trust but verify” mode at the moment though I really think that a leap of faith could be taken here with little harm. Still it's a measure of the unnecessary acrimony that this situation created that this kind of issue is further holding up the NFL.

Smith claims that he and the players will work through the weekend, meaning that by the time they end up voting it will be close to six days since the owners tried to end the lockout. In the grand scheme, these six days will be meaningless. But likewise in the grand scheme, these six days are a marker for why this dispute has dragged on for as long as it has. The owners have always been willing to get a deal done. Sometimes the biggest roadblock is not an opposition that continues to say “no” but an opposition, like the NFLPA and Smith, that don't know how to say “yes.”

**
If there's one thing to really admire about the Cleveland Indians' management at the moment, it's that they've learned their hard lessons. In the days when former general manager and now club president Mark Shapiro used to come out and readily admit things like the Indians didn't have the budget to make any significant off-season or in-season moves, he would be lambasted by the fans who were tired of hearing excuses.

Not this time. Shapiro and general manager Chris Antonetti have done an effective job of using beat writer Paul Hoynes to get out the word that they really, really are looking to make a few moves before the trade deadline in order to bolster the roster in a pennant race. It's the right thing to say and it may actually be true. We won't really know until a move gets made.

If the Indians do make a move, the goal should be a bit more long term. Grady Sizemore, once again on the disabled list, has now proven to be a player that you can't count on. He's injury prone. And with each injury he comes back a little less effective than he was before. He's a centerpiece of this roster and because of that his absence becomes more magnified.

The Indians, like any other team in their situation, will probably end up relying on the if/come with Sizemore until it's well too late. His potential remains alluring, but pinning their hopes on his health and a permanent return to productivity will end up being a fool's game. Sizemore's injury-plagued career has followed a resulting pattern of regression. At this point it's far more likely than not that he'll never be the player we always thought he could have been.

Every sport has their Grady Sizemores and it's always sad when such promising careers end up never being fully realized. Sizemore is a good guy and the kind of guy that teams should build around. But in this case, whether it's because of his style of play or because he just has one of those bodies that injures more easily than others, baseball will end up never seeing the full value of his potential. That is until the Indians dump him.

Seriously, though, it's doubtful that the Indians can really replace Sizemore in a late-season deal. It's a problem that needs a larger solution. But when/if the Indians make a move, whether it's next week or in the off season or the one after that, it will undoubtedly be with the realization that what they really have to do is not supplement a roster but fill a new hole they were praying wasn't going to open but secretly feared always would.

**

With the NBA in lock out mode as well, here's this week's question to ponder: What's more likely to occur first, the end of the NBA lockout or a long-term solution to the nation's debt crisis?