Running Out of Paths Forward

  There are many ways to measure the depths to which the Cleveland Browns’ franchise has sunk as of December, 2017. You could count quarterbacks or head coaches, offensive coordinators or general managers.  You could even count owners.  Mostly though it’s just been the losses.  Losses and more losses and then more after that.  It used to be that this team could be counted on to win 3 games a year.  Now it can’t even win three games in two years. 

  Too many to count at this point have had a hand in creating the single worst franchise in all of professional sports.  Yet the alarming, almost inconceivable consistency in making the exact wrong decision every single fucking time is perhaps the best way to capture not just the ineptness that is the Browns but the serial incompetence that permeates each and every pore on each and every coach, player and front office worker, that has seeped into the brick and marble, wood and stone that hold together the Berea complex. 

  You’d think that simply going full tilt George Costanza and doing the opposite of what their instincts otherwise tell them is the right thing to do would be enough to at least make this franchise competitive.  But at its core those in charge, from owner Jimmy Haslam on down, lack even a modicum of Costanza’s fleeting self-awareness.  Not to be too impolite here, but they are just too stupid to recognize all that they don’t know. 

  That’s why it should concern the few remaining chuckleheads with an interest in this team’s success that newly hired general manager John Dorsey shut down any talk about head coach Hue Jackson being fired at season’s end.  Let me give you two data points. 

  In 2006, in this very same space, I wrote that Romeo Crennel, then head coach, had to be fired.  It was clear that Crennel had lost the team and that its trajectory was headed, again, in the wrong direction.  You don’t need to look it up.  Crennel won 6 games in 2005 and 4 in 2006.  He held on to his job anyway.  The next year he took the Browns to their Browns 2.0 high water mark by winning 10 games, a record grossly inflated by weird scheduling quirks that gave the team the easiest schedule in the NFL that season.  Still it was a real glimmer of hope even if the Browns didn’t make the playoffs that year.  But the flaws in the team were apparent when a 10-win season gave them a tougher schedule the following year.  Crennel and the Browns sunk back to 4 wins and he was fired for all the reasons that still existed two years later: he couldn’t control the team, he was disorganized.  In short he proved out exactly why after having such success as a defensive coordinator no team but Cleveland was willing to make him a head coach. 

  Meanwhile, by hanging on to Crennel, the Browns lost two more seasons to progress, two more seasons of choosing the wrong players for a system that wasn’t going to last anyway. 

  Fast forward, but just a little bit.  After Crennel was fired, then owner Randy Lerner jumped at the chance to hire Eric Mangini about 5 minutes after Mangini had been fired by the New York Jets.  Mangini flamed out in New York for much the same reason he can’t get another head coaching job today.  He’s arrogant to a fault without a scintilla of accomplishment to justify it.  Mangini came in and alienated players and fans before he even had a chance to rent a place to live. He was allowed to essentially hire his own boss as the general manager and then summarily fired him and acted as his own general manager instead.  A wave of poor personnel decisions inevitably followed.  His first season was a disaster and not just because he won only 5 games.  He was a dick to the players and the media which only served to create further separation between a struggling team and its way-to-loyal fan base. 

  Late in the season even Lerner could see that the wheels had fallen off and decided that this team needed a real “football” mind.  He brought in Mike Holmgren, not as the head coach, but as the team’s effective CEO.  Holmgren was a good concept poorly executed.  He had a chance to observe Mangini’s pettiness in action and while nearly everyone thought Holmgren would fire Mangini and replace him, Holmgren, in a fit of empathy as a former coach himself, decided Mangini should have another year to prove himself, never mind the smoldering embers of a franchise that already had been lit on fire once again. 

  All that did was delay, again, putting this franchise on better footing. 

  One of the lessons of these two episodes is that holding on to the wrong coach in the pursuit of continuity is as much a fool’s errand as turning over a team’s personnel department to a group that had never made a football decision in its life.  Stability, continuity, consistency, whatever you want to call it, is a laudable goal.  But it shouldn’t serve to obscure the fact that if things aren’t right they’re wrong. 

  The question now, of course, is whether Jackson should retain his job.  Those arguing for him point out the obvious: this team has the worst collection of players ever to grace any NFL roster ever.  Those calling for his firing point out the obvious:  Jackson has the worst record of any head coach ever.  It’s the most Cleveland of dilemmas, complicated, of course, by Haslam bringing on a general manager and yet giving him no authority to find a coach that can win a game. 

  Maybe Haslam is just tired of paying coaches no longer on the payroll.  Maybe Haslam is just being Haslam, meaning telling someone what he wants to hear in the moment.  But the most likely explanation is that Haslam meant it when he said it.  Which, as it usually does with Haslman, means that it may not be true the next moment.  He’s as impetuous as anything and everything associated with the Browns.  It would be useful if that could be counted on just one more time. 

  Jackson should be fired.  There’s no way to know definitively but I doubt that any other coach currently in the NFL would have ended up with only one win in two years.  The roster is as bad as it looks each week.  Outside of Joe Thomas there isn’t another player on this team who would be a sure starter on any other team in the league.  But not every loss has simply been an issue of talent. Jackson is overmatched. He’s not a good enough head coach even if he was just concentrating on being a head coach.  Acting as his own offensive coordinator has been a colossal failure but more to the point is that Jackson lacks the self-assessment skills to realize it.   

  You could literally cite any game in Jackson’s tenure to make the point but just look at Sunday’s loss to Baltimore.  Crowell had 1 carry in the first quarter that went for 59 yards.  He had 6 more carries the rest of the game.  Jackson may be calling plays but it can hardly be said that he’s coordinating the offense.  There is no theme, there is no approach.  It’s almost as if he doesn’t watch game film on the upcoming opponent to create a plan of attack.   

  There’s probably a more practical reason, however, that Jackson will get fired: attendance.  Losing so much for so long has deteriorated the base of this franchise.  There was a point where it looked as if nothing would keep Browns fans from the ‘80s from filling the Stadium no matter how bad the product got.  That’s not true.  Indeed what is true is that attendance has continued to deteriorate and the clip, just since Haslam arrived, has accelerated.   

  During Haslam’s tenure, this team has lost around 59,000 fans year over year.  To put that in perspective, the attendance at Sunday’s game against Baltimore, the last home game of the season, was a little over 57,000.  In other words, Haslam is losing the equivalent of another home game’s worth of attendance.  That’s not just money out of his pocket.  It’s costing other NFL owners as well.  Haslam must account for that to his brethren. Always a short term thinker anyway, expect Haslam to choose the quickest path in front of him and fire the coach.  It will create a year’s worth of enthusiasm if nothing else.   

  Fundamentally, though, the issues are more systemic.  Jackson’s firing will probably feel like a pardon to him and the fans who have no one else to complain about on a regular basis.  Jackson will survive in the league as an assistant somewhere and the Browns will once again find another coach, another system and another start.  But the fixes that need to get made are longer term in nature and start with Haslam.  He’s a terrible decision maker, at least when it comes to football, and he needs to embrace his own level of incompetence.  If he truly believes that John Dorsey is the right football person to run the team then, dammit, let him run the team.  Change the org chart.  Let him hire a legitimate head coach.  Make everyone report to Dorsey and Dorsey to Haslam. Then Haslam should sell the house in Bratenhal and commute every Sunday from Tennessee.  It really is the only hope.

What Sky? What Falling?

If Cleveland Browns head coach Hue Jackson doesn’t think that the sky is falling in after Friday night’s preseason debacle against the Tampa Bay Bucaneers it’s only because he knows the sky fell in long before he got here.  Indeed, if you’re a big picture person you could say the sky collapsed the very first game of the Browns 2.0 reboot, a 43-0 loss to Pittsburgh, and the ensuing 17 years have been about trying to find a way to prop it back up.

Don’t look for Jackson and the latest excavation crew he’s leading to add many support beams this season.  Either the Browns are the least talented team I’ve ever seen or the least prepared.  It doesn’t matter, really, just as it doesn’t matter if it’s really a combination of both.  This is a team that went 3-13 in 1999, went 3-13 last season, and will struggle to get to that record this season.  This version of the Browns, as woeful as any in franchise history, will not be favored in any game this season, of course.  But perusing their schedule I can’t find a game where they’re likely to be less than a 7-point underdog.  I’m sure that’s happened in the NFL at some other point, probably this same franchise in 1999.

What’s most intriguing though is that despite this franchise consistently offering its fans zero reasons to remain invested in their fortunes, interest is far higher in the Browns right now that the Indians who enter the last month of the season with a 4 ½ game lead in their division.  Not that local sports talk radio is any sort of accurate barometer, but Browns fans and questions seem to run at least 2-1 vs. Indians fans and questions.  Attendance on the other hand is a more accurate barometer and the Browns outdrew the Indians and it had nothing to do with the larger capacity at FirstEnergy Stadium.
But this isn’t a screed about misplaced fan priorities.  It’s not even a screed of any sort.  It’s just the resignation that once again the fans with all their misplaced priorities are going to be misused, abused and told that despite what their eyes can see this is a team with a future.

At some point this might actually be a team with a future.  But that future can’t ever arrive if the team doesn’t ever draft one.  This preseason has been about purging the team of the previous regime’s awful draft choices, creating openings for this regime’s shaky draft choices.  And while it is well too early to judge whether Corey Coleman or any of the 13 others drafted will be able to meaningfully contribute not just this season but ever, the trend is clear making the chances slim.

But because almost every draft pick from a previous regime has been sent packing, along with most of their free agent signings, this is a team that lacks not just depth but any semblance of depth.  After Joe Haden and Joe Thomas and Josh Gordon if or when he actually can suit up in a regular season game, you’d be hard pressed to find a player on this team who would start on any other team in the league.  What that says about how this team’s been run is plenty, but the larger point for now is that the overwhelming majority of this team’s starters would be back ups elsewhere.  Backing up the Browns’ starters, then, are players that might not even be in the league.

Without any depth anywhere, the team is doomed before it takes the field.  Injuries will take their toll, as they do on every team.  The next person up for the Browns is most likely a person who’d be scrounging for work in the Arena League.

Jackson is a good coach and thus far his attitude is appropriate.  He knows exactly what a shit storm he walked into and seems realistic enough to lower the expectations of not just the fans but the players remaining.  In some sense this entire season will play out like an extended preseason schedule.  Players will rotate in and out.  Combinations will be tried.  Some things will work, most won’t.  But when the season’s done if there has been measurable growth, if more than a handful of this year’s draft choices remain and are contributing, then from Jackson’s standpoint he’ll likely label the season a success even if there aren’t any wins to celebrate.

The problem from the fans’ standpoint, at least those willing to buy tickets, is that they’re being asked to invest full price to witness the continuing sins of bad ownership and lousy front offices.  From their perspective they, too, may see some measurable growth but what will remain abundantly clear is that even at that trajectory the Browns remain several years away from being truly competitive, and that’s assuming that this regime, top to bottom, bucks history and stays intact for more than a season or two.  Who wants to take that bet at even odds?

Jackson said after Friday’s game that he wasn’t overwhelmed by the task in front of him even after witnessing his untalented and ill prepared team fail in every possible way.  Who knows whether he’s even being truthful with himself.  What we do know is that the enormity of the task has swallowed up every owner, general manager and head coach who’s come before him in the last 16 years.  What will really be worth watching then is Jackson’s body language as the season wears on and especially after the inevitable beat down at the hands of the Steelers in game 16.  If Jackson can keep that spring in his step, then he will be a coach worth watching, at least until the front office fails him in next year’s draft.

So what we’re all really left with once again is a team that will not just be hard to watch, but almost impossible, particularly in the second half of most early games and both halves of the latter part of the season.  We’re also left once again scraping for any hope or even glimmer of hope, a long TD pass from Robert Griffin III to Corey Coleman, a breakout season for Terrelle Pryor, another Joe Thomas Pro Bowl, so that at some point all this time, money and passion will be rewarded.  That’s not the best way to start off the Monday leading into the last preseason game, but it’s really all Browns fans have, again.

Why Worry?!

The Cleveland Browns have their fan worried, again.  Maybe the right word isn’t “again” but “still.”  And for once it’s not about the head coach or even the quarterback they still don’t have.  It’s about analytics.

Despite about every possible reason why they couldn’t do it, the Browns did go ahead and hire a credible head coach in Hue Jackson.  But the rejiggering of the front office in a way that doesn’t otherwise exist in the NFL is an understandable cause for concern.  Of the three people most responsible for setting next year’s roster, two of them have absolutely no experience at any level, CYO, middle school, high school, college, semi-pro, pro, flag, evaluating talent.  The other is 28 years old.  In a fit of inspiration, an algorithm will be the chief evaluator.  It can’t be worse.

I’m a proponent of analytics.  You should be, too.  It’s transformed baseball in a way that in large measure has dulled the impact of simply having the fattest wallet.  And while analytics will certainly improve decision making, the human element can’t be eliminated entirely, particularly in making player evaluations.

At the professional level, many talent decisions make themselves.  Anybody, including the person who sees one NBA game every decade can draft LeBron James first.  Where the far more difficult decisions came is in filling out roster behind him. The talent difference between players is often razor thin with the stats giving no clear winner.

The other thing, of course, is that analytic-driven decisions often seem to defy logic or at least conventional wisdom, which also makes people worry.  Look at what just happened with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The firing of head coach David Blatt was driven in large part by analytics.  What worried Griffin was the statistic he quoted, that since 2000-01 season there have been 50 teams that have finished with a winning percentage of at least .700 but only 8 of those teams have won championships.  He feared the Cavs were once again on the same path, based on what he was seeing in the team’s advanced stats and what he was observing in the locker room.  As Griffin said, it seemed to be the least engaged winning team he’d ever been around.

That may very well be true and that’s the human element to all this.  As good as the Cavs are and have been, the losses to both San Antonio and particularly to the Golden State Warriors, while just two of the 82 regular season games the team will play, told you two things.  The first was that the Cavs still aren’t completely meshing.  The second, quite related and even more telling was that the Spurs and the Warriors have an “it” factor the Cavs do not.  There is something inherent in all great teams that just doesn’t lie.  Even when the sum of all parts is great, the great teams are still more than the sum of all those parts.  You saw it with the 2014 Ohio State Buckeyes and you see it now with the Warriors.  Call it chemistry or black magic.  What matters most in team sports is still the team concept and to Griffin’s eyes and stat sheet at least, the Cavs didn’t have it and weren’t getting it under Blatt.

The Cavs are all-in on analytics.  Now, too, are the Browns.  The difference of course is that the Cavs have the greatest player on the planet.  The Browns don’t have someone in the top 100 of the best players in the planet, maybe the top 200.  They need more than a good algorithm.  To paraphrase Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody, they’re gonna need a bigger computer.

And if analytics in the hands of really smart people with no football experience wasn’t enough to spook Browns fans, then owner Jimmy Haslam’s most recent comments about estranged quarterback Johnny Manziel should make them petrified because it defies all logic and analytics.

Manziel has mostly been AWOL from the Browns since before the last game of the season.  His bizarre trip to Las Vegas as his earnest but overmatched teammates played out the string, his brief visit to the facility afterward and then his party tour in Texas has been well documented.  So, too, has the fact that Manziel hasn’t reached out to his new head coach nor has the new head coach reached out to Manziel.

Yet at this week’s Senior Bowl Haslam talked as though the relationship with Manziel has simply hit a rough patch in the same way a marriage hits a rough patch, as if divorce is possible but reconciliation more likely.   Well, that rough patch just got rougher.  Manziel is again under investigation for domestic violence and irrespective of what the official police report ultimately concludes I suspect the NFL is going to take this one more seriously than the last time he got into a public argument with a girlfriend.

Mostly I attribute the talk to Haslam’s ill-conceived attempt to build value in a player where there is none as a prelude to some sort of trade.  But on the off chance that Haslam is serious that kind of thinking would qualify him as the biggest lunkhead to occupy an owner’s box since Ted Stepien.  Manziel is a person with a smattering of NFL skills who lacks both the maturity and the temperament to ever be anything more than a guy who used to be somebody in college.  And that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt.  More likely he’s an addict deep within the grips of drugs and booze for whom his first stint in rehab had no lasting impact. You don’t continue to have the kind of incidents that surround Manziel without drugs and/or alcohol being at the center

.

It doesn’t matter, at least to most fans.  The Browns aren’t running a social services agency.  The team has invested significant money and resources in Manziel and all it’s received in return is the attendant league-wide embarrassment that comes with having made such an awful choice in drafting him in the first place.  There is no set of circumstances, not one, where Manziel returning to the Browns for another disastrous season makes a lick of sense to anyone.  Stated differently, if Haslam is serious and ends up hanging on to Manziel it will be at the expense of undoing whatever good will Haslam’s cultivated this offseason.

That’s what has me most worried about the Browns’ new structure.  It’s not that there’s anything theoretically wrong with it.  It’s that the person making the key judgments in putting it together, Haslam, is the same guy who has botched every other decision he’s made up to this point regarding the fans.

Cleveland fans will always worry.  It’s a comfortable space.  They’ve known no real prosperity and when fleeting victories come they are just often preludes to bigger letdowns.  This franchise is finally trying something different for which there is no downside.  Having escaped the vicious cycle of their previous insanity, however, doesn’t put them on the right road.  It just puts them on a different road.  Where it leads is anyone’s guess but at least they’ll have a bunch of algorithms to explain why they got lost this time.

Lingering Items--Shakespeare Edition

Apparently the NFL has run out of head coach candidates. How else to explain the Kansas City Chiefs hiring Romeo Crennel as its next head coach?

Before answering that question, it’s probably worth asking why it’s even necessary for anyone in this corner of the world to contemplate the question.

It’s not except out of abject curiosity considering Crennel’s tenure in Cleveland. Crennel had one good year here.

It was 2007 and the Browns won 10 games. In typical Browns fashion, they didn’t make the playoffs, one of the few 10-win teams ever to not make the playoffs. That 2007 season was transcendent nonetheless. The Browns were riding high from the draft after grabbing Joe Thomas as an anchor left tackle and then seeing Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn fall to them late in the first round due to a weird confluence of events. At the time, Charlie Frye was the team’s starter and Derek Anderson was the back up, albeit a very tentative back up. He had a big arm but little experience and was floundering in the Ravens organization until general manager Phil Savage grabbed him on his way out of Baltimore.

The season opened in rather typical fashion, with the Browns getting thumped by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Frye had a season opening debut that was such a disaster that he was benched before halftime. Crennel took responsibility for that, as if he could avoid it. A few days later Savage traded Frye to Seattle for a 6th round pick. It suddenly elevated Anderson to starter, a position most fans also thought was simply a placeholder until Quinn found his sea legs. Indeed, had Quinn reported to camp on time instead of stupidly holding out, he almost certainly would have been the starter instead of Anderson and both Quinn's and Anderson's trajectories may have been forever changed. But missteps like that have defined Quinn’s mostly inert career.

Then a funny thing happened. Anderson caught fire in a way that was in many ways far more unreal then anything either Tim Tebow or Cam Newton have done this past season. Tebow and Newton were well known commodities. Anderson could have walked through any mall in Cleveland at noon on a Sunday in December and no one would have noticed. The Browns under Anderson didn’t go on a specific tear. Their longest win streak was 3 games. But Anderson was terrific, putting together a season of historical significance. And while the Browns tied the Steelers for the division lead, they lost the tie breaker as the Steelers, not surprisingly, swept the season series. Then the Browns lost out on a wild card when the Indianapolis Colts tanked the last game of the season against the Tennessee Titans. It was a large measure of satisfaction when the Titans lost to San Diego in the first round of the playoffs and the Colts, coming off a 13-3 season and with great Super Bowl hopes, also lost to the Chargers.

Things looked so good for Crennel at the moment and for Savage, the general manager who stoutly stood behind Crennel when the wheels were falling off in 2006, that owner Randy Lerner gave both new contracts.1  

1 If you want to know why a hold out inevitably follows a player’s first break out season, it’s because of owners like Lerner. Neither Crennel’s nor Savage’s contract was up. But buoyed by one year of success and disregarding one year of failure, Lerner acted like he had just won the lottery and decided to blow all the winnings on a flying car, which would have been a much better investment then giving either Crennel or Savage new, more lucrative and longer term deals that neither had quite yet earned. Lerner had to swallow both contracts after a disastrous 2008 season, thus continuing the pattern of throwing good money after bad when he Butch Davis quit and later perfected when he bought Aston Villa. He may be an idiot with money but wouldn’t you like to be one of his kids? Better still, someone he likes enough to hire?

But the 2007 season ended up being far more smoke and mirrors then substance. Those passes Anderson completed in 2007 became overthrown interceptions the next and Braylon Edwards, off of his one good season, became an intolerable pain in the ass in the locker room that Crennel simply couldn’t control. As other players watched Edwards do what he wanted without consequence (remember the trip to the Ohio State/Michigan game that caused Edwards to miss a team meeting on the night before a game?), other players acted similarly. Each week you could literally watch parts fall off the car as it careened down the highway with no one at the steering wheel.

The season ended at 4-12, just like Crennel’s first season, with the 10-6 season sandwiched in between. What characterized Crennel’s tenure most, though, was his massive disorganization. A lifelong assistant suddenly thrust into the spotlight, Crennel was gentle in his demeanor and approach, treating the players like visiting grandkids and he the goodtime grandpa. The problem was that the grandkids were an unruly mess and there were no parents to send them back to at the end of the day. The inmates were running the asylum and tried to keep the status quo by constantly praising the warden as the greatest guy around.

I’m surprised Crennel has gotten a second chance though in context, maybe not so much. He worked with Scott Pioli, Kansas City’s general manager, in New England. But this won’t end up any better for Crennel then it did in Cleveland. Crennel may have learned some lessons in the last few years, but he’s never going to be a successful head coach. His niche is as an assistant, someone that the players can occasionally confide in when they feel they’re being picked on by the head coach. He’s simply too good natured to draw firm lines with the various malcontents that populate NFL locker rooms from time to time. Stil, I envy Crennel a bit. Securing the Kansas City job is like winning the lottery but not because he’s a head coach again. More so because it will give him a chance in the next year or two to retire quietly on the contract that the Kansas City owner will have to eat for having greenlighted this hire in the first place.

**

Although many in the media have been writing the obituary of the Pittsburgh Steelers for years, this time they may be right. When the playoff season closes after this season, the award for the worst performance will undoubtedly be handed to those Steelers.

First of all, the Denver Broncos aren’t a very good team irrespective of what miracles Tim Tebow and Jesus are able to accomplish this year. The Broncos play in the worst division in the NFL at the moment and basically by finishing 8-8 won it by default. (Fascinating, though, isn’t it, that three teams in the division finished 8-8 and the fourth 7-9?

That’s the kind of mediocre parity that would have given Paul Tagliabue a chubby.) The Steelers on the other hand looked to be on the upswing. They finished 12-4, which was tied them with the Ravens for the second best record in the conference. But if there is such a thing as a soft 12-4, these Steelers accomplished it.

This past Sunday they were exposed for the aging mess that they’ve been building toward for several seasons. All it took was a few key injuries to the several octogenarians on the team to underscore this fact. Ben Roethlisberger will recover from the gimpy ankle he suffered against the Browns but he’s not the biggest problem anyway. The Steelers are old on offense and old on defense. Their best players all are on the back sides of their careers.

The bigger problem though is that the Steelers, who for years seemed to always find the right replacements, may have made a major miscalculation by letting this group get old together. Where they had been deft in cutting ties to players at just the right moment, this time they let it ride for a few more years and lost the opportunity to do what they had done nearly better then any other—draft well and work those players in quickly.

No one who watched the Steelers’ wretched offensive line on Monday came away thinking that they are poised for a quick rebound. Indeed, four of the front seven on the offensive line, indeed half the offense, are at least 29 years old. In NFL dog years, that’s old. The situation is even worse on defense where 7 of the starters are at least 32 years old. It’s now clear why James Harrison resorts to thug-like antics such as the cheap shot on Tebow Sunday. He’s 33 years old and that’s the only way he can make his presence felt. I don’t see the Steelers taking any sort of Browns-like nose dive to the bottom of the conference, but neither do I see them being an elite team in the near-term either. The great year they just had, from a record standpoint, will just serve to delay their repairs as they suffer the purgatory that’s created when you limp into the playoffs and then end up with only a lousy draft position to show for the effort.

**

I wonder if Reggie McKenzie, the new general manager for the Oakland Raiders, learned something from how poorly Mike Holmgren handled the Eric Mangini situation.

Emboldened by the death of Barnabas-in-a-turtleneck Al Davis and being the first person to hold the GM title for the Raiders, McKenzie decided that head coach Hue Jackson wasn’t his type of coach and canned him after only a year at the helm. It is either that McKenzie didn’t think Jackson had the right stuff to be a head coach or that he felt Jackson had bungled key personnel decisions, like acquiring Carson Palmer for a first and second round draft pick. Either would have been enough. Both sins put him squarely in the Mangini camp.

Whereas Holmgren kept Mangini and wasted an entire season in the process, something Holmgren now reluctantly admits in the same way that I reluctantly admit I watch the Cavs, McKenzie decided that would be a ridiculous approach and sent Jackson off to contemplate his next coaching job.

The move isn’t going to make McKenzie popular with the fraternity that is NFL head coaches past and present but it is the right thing, if the Browns are any example. But ultimately it’s the right thing for the Raiders. By almost every measure imaginable, the Browns latest facelift was delayed at least 12 months, and actually longer when you factor in the impact of the lockout, by Holmgren’s incessant need to look like a good guy to his coaching brethren. That’s why the Browns find themselves, at best, stuck in the lowest ring of purgatory now and for probably another season or two, and the Raiders will find themselves much closer to the playoffs next year.

**
With the playoffs in full bloom and this weekend representing the single best weekend in professional football, this week’s question to ponder: Why is it so difficult for the NFL to simply guarantee each team one possession in overtime?

A Not So Special Team

If the Cleveland Browns did any work during their bye week it wasn't particularly apparent in the Oakland Coliseum on Sunday. Looking mostly like they were still hung over from the game two weeks ago, the Browns fell hard to the Oakland Raiders by a somewhat deceiving score of 24-17.

It's only somewhat deceiving because it never really felt like the Browns were in the game despite the objective proof that they had a chance to tie the game with under a minute remaining thanks to a late touchdown pass by Colt McCoy to Mohamed Massaquoi with just over a minute and then a successful onside kick brilliantly executed by kicker Phil Dawson and recovered by defensive back James Dockery.

But McCoy couldn't capitalize on the opportunity for mostly the same reasons the Browns were in the position they were in at that moment. He was off target on his throws when it mattered most and the Raiders went away with the victory on the day that they honored the recently deceased Al Davis.

The hubbub near the end of the game notwithstanding, the Browns' offense had another miserable day against another team that was ripe for the taking.

And lest anyone think that the Browns inability to again generate any consistent offense had more to do with the emotion of the day exhibited by the Raiders for Davis, it was not. The Raiders were without their starting quarterback for most of the game and while that stymied their offense from that point forward, it didn't matter. Almost from the outset it looked like an early Raiders 14-7 lead was really more then enough anyway against a Browns' offense that seems to regress each week.

The funny thing is, this Raiders team, particularly with Kyle Boller in and Jason Campbell out, isn't very good. They're the usual undisciplined mess they've been for years. There's some talent on defense and a few good skill players on offense, but they aren't a first tier ball club.

Let's consider the evidence. Before getting injured, Campbell was 6-9 for just 52 yards and no touchdowns. Boller was, well, Boller. He was 8-14 for 100 yards and no touchdowns. The Raiders didn't have a running back gain more than 100 yards, though Darren McFadden was close with 91 yards on 20 carries. In many ways, the Raiders' offense resembled the Browns' offense. It generated one early touchdown, a Darren McFadden 4-yard run on the Raiders' first possession of the game and a Sebastian Janikowski 48-yard field goal in the third quarter. And that was it.

So why did the Browns lose? Well, a decent amount of the blame can be put on the special teams, which yielded two touchdowns. The first was a 101-yard kickoff return by Jacoby Ford and then, for good measure, another when they bit hard on a fake field goal as punter Shane Lechler found a wide open Kevin Boss for a 35-yard touchdown. The Ford return was particularly damaging because it completely sapped the Browns' only real offensive momentum of the day. On the previous play quarterback Colt McCoy hit tight end Alex Smith on a 1-yard touchdown pass that helped knot the game at 7-7.

So, yea, throw out the mistakes by the special teams and theoretically the Browns win the game. But the problem with that kind of thinking is that it ignores two overarching points. First, the Browns got as close as they did because Raiders' head coach Hue Jackson channeled Ron Zook at just the right or wrong time, depending on your perspective. Second, the Browns have fundamental problems on offense. The Raiders have theirs and that's for them to figure out. But the Browns have to answer some serious questions around why their offense gets worse when it should be getting better.

Let's go back to Jackson. Had the Browns been able to tie the game, he would have had some 'splainin' to do. Seemingly taking pity on a Browns' team his Raiders' were dominating to that point, Jackson eschewed a late field goal on 4th and 1 from inside the Browns' 10-yard line with just under 5 minutes remaining that would have given the Raiders a 17-point lead. With Janikowski kicking off, the Browns would likely have had to march 80 yards quickly and recovered two onside kicks in order to actually get back into the game. But the 4th and 1 failed and probably caused more then a few butts to pucker when the Browns recovered the onside kick. Good think for Jackson that Davis died. Otherwise he might have fired him on the spot. He still might from whatever middle earth lair he's occupying at the moment.

But the Raiders' escaped and the Browns are left to wonder why a team with two weeks to prepare looked like they hadn't practiced in a month, particularly on offense.

McCoy, looking more confused and uncertain then at any time since freshman football, couldn't discern coverages, couldn't detect pressure, and missed receivers all day in the most spectacular of fashion. Balls sailed high. Balls fell short. Balls missed their targets by 5 yards. It was a miracle, really, that he wasn't picked off.

The late rally juiced his stats but he still was only 21-45 for 215 yards, though he had the two touchdown passes.

The running game was again non-existent. It's becoming increasingly clear exactly why the Browns haven't extended the contract of running back Peyton Hillis. He's just not in their long range plans. After starting the game, Hillis was mostly absent from there on out, making a brief appearance in the fourth quarter. Marv Albert, announcing another Browns' game as if it's a permanent assignment, said that Hillis supposedly tweaked his hamstring. Perhaps, but he did re-enter the game, so that explanation falls by the wayside.

So, too, will the explanation that Shurmur used for not deploying Hillis against the Titans two weeks ago, that the situation didn't dictate his use. It's not clear why those same situations dictate using Montario Hardesty instead of Hillis, especially since Hardesty can't catch. It must be that Shurmur sees something in Hardesty that isn't quite apparent to the untrained eyes of every other observer. Hardesty rushed 11 times for 35 yards and Hillis had 6 carries for 14 yards.

Whoever is running the ball at the moment isn't really the issue anyway. Teams are stacking the box against the Browns because they simply don't fear any part of the Browns' passing attack. They're willing to concede short and even mid-range routes because they don't sense that anyone receiver on the Browns has big play capability. And they're right until they're proven wrong.

That means that McCoy needs to get better and quickly. His decision making isn't crisp. He's not handling pressure well. His fundamentals are awful. His lack of accuracy has everything to do with an inability to set his feet and throw, even when he does have time. It is up to him and the receivers to stretch the defense and give the running game some breathing room and they're failing miserably.

So while the loss can be pinned on the offense and the special teams, at least the defense was mostly respectable, despite the absence of cornerback Joe Haden. You had to feel some compassion for his replacement, Dmitri Patterson. The Raiders threw in his direction on nearly every pass play. The Raiders had only 14 completed passes and it seemed like every one was in front of Patterson who kept coverage soft to avoid the big plays.

It would be nice to think that what fans are seeing from this Browns team at the moment are the necessary growing pains of a team in transition. And hopefully that's all this malaise really is because anything more is too difficult to ponder at the moment. So standing at 2-3 and not even at the half way point of the season, it's not time to write the season off completely and start planning next year's draft. But that's not to excuse what's taken place to date. There has to be progress soon or all of this just ends up being another wasted season for a franchise that, unfortunately, has that act down pat.