Coming Back

If you’re going to come out of retirement, even briefly, it should be for a very good reason.  A year ago, almost to the day, I took a break.  The Cleveland Browns were setting themselves for historic failure, again, and the numbing sameness became too much.

 

The Cleveland Indians got themselves to the very edge of a World Series victory and that didn’t pull me back in, although the victory probably would have.  The Cleveland Cavaliers getting into the NBA Finals didn’t do it either.  And yet here we are a year later and I was pulled back in by this:  Today the Browns released beloved cornerback and all around good guy Joe Haden.  It’s not the loss of Haden so much as what it represents.  It’s the clearest signal that Browns finally are serious about improving.

 

This shouldn’t be a pitchfork moment for anyone.  Stripped of sentimentality Haden has been in decline for years. That decline accelerated most certainly because of injuries but the decline has been clear nonetheless.  It’s been a bit sad watching it because Haden was one of the few positive things about watching the Browns for many, many seasons.  But the game takes its toll on all players and Haden’s time has come. He wasn’t worth the $11 million he would have been paid for this year and he wasn’t willing to take a pay cut to a more reasonable number.

 

By releasing Haden now the Browns showed the cold heartedness best exhibited by Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, the benchmark for the entire league.  It’s better to move on from a player just before he’s done then after.  Many consider Belichick the consummate prick because he is so willing to cast aside team and fan favorites in the pursuit of victory.  The list is long and distinguished but know this much: Belichick has rarely if ever been wrong.  The players he’s discarded have not gone on to prolonged glory anywhere else.  Either will Haden, despite all the nonguaranteed and less money showered on him by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

 

There’s little doubt that Haden would probably have contributed something to this year’s defense.  He’s a good player to have in the locker room and was a visible and positive influence in the community. There’s also little doubt that his contributions, whatever they may have been, wouldn’t have made a lick of difference in the won/loss column which, as Belichick knows, cures fans’ hurt feelings more quickly than anything else. The Browns may be improving, slowly, but having Haden simply doesn’t move the needle.  What his release does do, for once, is give the Browns an opportunity to find a replacement without the baggage and temptation to appease a complaining fan base to play a fan favorite at the expense of developing the future.

 

The other news the Browns made today was the dumping of a number one draft pick, offensive linemen Cameron Erving, to Kansas City for a 5^th round pick.  That’s good value any way you slice it.  If/when the Chiefs have to play Erving they’ll find out something every Browns quarterback who lined up behind him did.  Don’t run any plays in his direction.  Design every quarterback rollout to go in the opposite direction.

 

Dumping Erving will make far less noise than when the team parted ways with Johnny Football but it’s no less noteworthy.  When it comes to offensive linemen, first round busts are hard to find.  They exist, certainly, and there’s little doubt that the Browns would be the one team to find one.  But they are hard to find.  Indeed it’s one of the easier positions to scout.  Cleveland.com posted the press conference when a leading candidate for worst general manager in Browns’ history, Ray Farmer, touted Ervin’s incredible versatility.  That video is revealing also for the shell-shocked look on former head coach Mike Pettine’s face as he tried in vain to support that thesis. 

 

That commentary aged about as well as a Trump tweet.  The only versatility Erving showed was that he was an unworthy first round pick at any position along the offensive line.  But know this.  Erving was every bit the bust as Manziel.  He simply went about being so in a much quieter fashion.

 

None of this means the Browns will necessarily show significant improvement this season.  The team does have an incredible number of upcoming draft picks though and while virtually every regime since the Browns 2.0 were launched has blown the vast majority of picks they’ve had, there still is hope.  Success in the NFL is a slow, steady climb.  It takes the kind of thinking that understands the value of draft picks, the need to not be ruled by sentimentality and the courage to correct mistakes quickly.  Let’s hope all of this doesn’t end up being an anomaly, you know like it’s been in the past.

No Such Thing As a Bad Win

Sports in general and professional sports in particular are the ultimate bottom line businesses.  Success is measured week by week and chronicled daily in a million or so outlets.  While it is definitely true that a team that consistently wins more than it loses can be considered a success in the same way that a team that consistently loses more than it wins can be considered a failure, on a micro basis there are truths to be learned in both the wins and losses irrespective of a team’s record.

This past weekend, both the Cleveland Browns and the Ohio State Buckeyes walked away with wins. And while that should be good enough to all the bottom liners, of course it was not because the wins were not impressive in their crafting against ostensibly lesser competition.

In the case of the Buckeyes, I guess what this means is that unless 50 or more points are scored and 500 or more yards are compiled on offense, the win might as well have been a loss.  In the case of the Browns, I’m not even sure what it means.  Given the Browns rather consistent pattern of losing at least twice as many games as it wins, season after season and that just the previous week it actually lost to a winless team, the Oakland Raiders came into the game winless and left the same way and that is somehow unsatisfactory. 

I understand the frustration of Buckeye fans.  The preseason seemed to hold realistic hope of the team getting to the first ever national championship playoffs. But the injury to Braxton Miller, coupled with very inexperienced back up, altered both the perceptions and the reality.  Couple that with a home loss to what is, at best, a very average Virginia Tech, and this season seemed like it wouldn’t take any flight.

But since that game the Buckeyes have completely turned the season on its head.  Quarterback J.T. Barrett, playing for the first time in two years, seemed to have the light go on immediately and suddenly, against weak competition, the Buckeyes’ offense turned into a juggernaut.

Well, that juggernaut got slowed on Saturday night against Penn State, a supposedly vastly inferior team and that got everyone all upset.  Rather than acknowledge the growing pains of a team that has been far better than most imagined when Miller first went down, fans and most of the media instead chastised the Buckeyes for apparently not destroying Penn State at their home field at night in front of the national media and a drunk and crazed fan base making it almost impossible to call out any signals.

There was plenty to critique in the Buckeyes’ win, but let’s keep that critique in perspective and acknowledge what is likely to be one of the more important wins this team will have in the next few seasons.

Probably the biggest issue in the entire game was the play calling.  This isn’t the first time, just the most recent, when Urban Meyer went ultra conservative in a big game.  Meyer has a fascination with letting his quarterbacks carry the entire running load even when his running backs have more than proven capable.  Michigan State last year late in the Big Ten championship game was another prime example.  Meyer seems to lose faith mostly in himself.  Stated differently, he goes into small ball protection mode too quickly at the first sign of trouble.

But let’s also remember that the Buckeyes mostly dominated Penn State even if the score didn’t reflect it.  The only Penn State touchdown in regulation came on a very well thrown pass into very tight coverage.  Sometimes the other team is going to win a battle.  It happens.

The far larger point though was the manner in which the Buckeyes reversed a huge momentum swing and found a way to win.  In thinking about the Ohio State win on Saturday and fan and media reaction to it, it was best to recall the words of LeBron James last week when talking about what it takes sometimes to build a team, according to the Plain Dealer:

 “You got to go through something in order to create a bond, and that means for the worse. You've got to lose ball games that we think we should have won. We got to get in an argument here and there every now and then just to test each other out. It has to happen. It's going to happen. I know it's going to happen. A lot of guys don't see it but I see it. That's the only way we're going to be able to grow.”

That’s exactly what Saturday night’s victory ended up being, an opportunity for this team to get tested, to bond, to grow.  If this is a team with big aspirations, whether by a confluence of events this year or a more defined approach next season, this Penn State victory will be the fulcrum on which those aspirations pivoted.  We’ll see soon enough as the Buckeyes go into hostile territory in a few weeks against Michigan State.

As for the Browns, it simply is a case of confusing progress with success.  The two concepts can intersect and sometimes they can be almost the same thing.  But for now, for this Browns team, they are at best 2^nd or 3^rd cousins.

What most of the dissection of the Browns’ win has been is to highlight the team’s faults without acknowledging some emerging strengths.  The Raiders, easily one of the worst if not the worst team in the league, is horrible in every phase of the game, including stopping the run.  Yet the Browns couldn’t find a way to run the ball because, again, Alex Mack is apparently the most important player on this team.

And yet, despite the numerous 3-and-outs, the bad passes, the lousy routes, the blown blocking assignments, this team found a way to pull together late and overcome whatever adversity it faced, much of which was arguably self-inflicted.

For all that went wrong on Sunday, plenty went right, starting with the defense.  Joe Haden, of whom I’ve been a frequent critic, played one of the best games of his entire career.  Sure he was in the right place at the right moment to field an oddly errant mid-air fumble, but his coverage was at an elite status the entire game.  Late in the game on a sideline route deep with a receiver seeming to have a step on him, Haden close fast and made a textbook deflection.  It was the kind of play that coaches from other teams at all levels will use to demonstrate proper technique.

Let’s also mention Paul Krueger who is fulfilling this year much of what was expected of him last year.  Maybe it’s head coach Mike Pettine’s defensive schemes that appeal more to Krueger’s sensibilities or it’s a case of just being more in sync with this coaching staff.  Whatever it is, Krueger played well Sunday as he has this whole season.  Even poor Justin Gilbert, who has mostly appeared overmatched since the first preseason game, looked better. 

There is still plenty of improvement this team needs.  Buster Skrine is still, well, Buster Skrine and the Browns might be the worst team I’ve ever seen at any level fielding and returning punts.  But this team is already at four wins for the season and it’s a season that’s only 7 games old!

Just as with the Buckeyes, the Browns have gone through the kind of adversity now that tends to bond teams together.  Indeed, the little battles it fought in other games is largely responsible for the team’s ability to respond late this past Sunday.  In almost every other year in the last 12 other Browns teams have crumbled under like circumstances.  The fact that this team didn’t and the fact this it won should be celebrated for what it was, not the Super Bowl, but a gritty win.

I’ve been part of the fabric of this town’s crappy sports teams for more than 50 years now so I understand the manner in which all performance gets filtered.  But that doesn’t make it any less irritating for the same tired narrative of pulling defeat from the jaws of victory every time it doesn’t go to some ill-informed predetermined script.

Winning games at any level, be it Division I college football or the NFL, is hard enough.  Let’s not make it harder on ourselves by constructing impossibly high standards just so we can satisfy our inner insecurities that our teams will never be good enough to win something meaningful. And if that task is too hard then keep it simple and just remember that while you often can make the case for a good loss, you can never make the case for a bad win.

The Not So Numbing Sameness of It All!

Photo Courtesy of ClevelandBrowns.com

When a team has been on the same unending stretch of rough road for as long as the Cleveland Browns have, it would be easy to miss the subtle improvements that occur along that route, let alone the moment that a meaningful corner was turned.  And while fans have had to endure other false positives, perhaps the Browns really are a team on the come after overcoming a historic deficit on the road to beat a woeful Tennessee Titans team, 29-28.

There may have been no exact moment on Sunday where one could say that the road got smoother or an actual corner was definitively turned, but there are plenty of candidates for consideration.  The one that stood out though was the precise moment in the 4^th quarter when Titans coach Ken Whisenhut channeled his inner Brady Hoke in an all-or-nothing call in which careers tend to be either made or broken.

With just over 3 minutes remaining in the game, Whisenhut decided that his defense could be trusted less than his offense and called for a quarterback sneak at the Titans’ 42-yard line on 4^th and inches.  It wasn’t successful and it put the ball in the Browns’ hands and set them up for the go ahead touchdown that gave the team its first road win since, I think, LeBron James first left Cleveland for Miami, maybe longer.

Let’s pause on this particular moment because it really is what could be a key moment in the entire season.

Whisenhut was forced into making the call in the first place because tight end Delanie Walker caught a Charlie Whitehurst pass on 3^rd and 6 and carried the ball on his right hip instead of his left as he went out of bounds.  The difference in inches from one hip to the other ended up being the difference between 1^st down Tennessee and 1^st down Cleveland.

Initially the referees signaled first down and in another small but pivotal moment a Browns assistant, secondary coach Jeff Hafley watching from the press box (in order to get the best view of the Browns awful secondary?),noticed that Walker’s body but not the ball had crossed the plane for a first down that could have allowed the Titans to likely run out the clock and win the game.  Hafley signaled to head coach Mike Pettine and the red flag was thrown.

It was probably the single best use of the challenge flag you’re likely to ever witness, at least by someone affiliated with the Browns.  It was only a half yard but as Al Pacino said in “Any Given Sunday” you have to fight for every inch at every moment.  Those were the most critical inches in the long death march that has mostly marked the Browns’ return to the NFL over a decade ago.  The first down call was overturned setting up Whisenhut for his make or break moment.

It was both a risky and curious call in the same way Michigan’s Hoke decided to try a two-point conversion to win the game against Ohio State last season instead of tying the game in regulation and moving on to overtime.

The risk was obvious.  But the reason it also was curious has to do with how Whisenhut viewed his own defense at the moment, similar to Hoke.  He didn’t trust them.  He didn’t think his defense could stop the Browns!  Roll that around in your head for a moment.  He decided at that moment that punting and putting the Browns’ offense deep in its own zone ultimately still held less chance for a Titans victory then gaining those few extra inches on a Whitehurst sneak and running out the clock.

Such are the decisions of head coaches who end up having to append the term “former” to the front of their title.  The objective of course is to win but going for the quick money and ignoring the long game is a sign of desperation and the Titans and Whisenhut were clearly desperate to win a game they seemed to have won have 30 minutes of play.  Whisenhut now has to face the rest of the season with players who already know their coach doesn’t trust them.

The Browns are only 2-2 at the moment and aren’t yet in anyone’s objective conversation about playoff teams.  But there are a fair number of positive signs.  For example, the Browns have a legitimate running game at the moment.  Ben Tate had 123 yards on 22 carries, demonstrating while he’s a starter.  Still the Browns already were establishing a running game with Tate’s rookie replacements Terrence West and Isaac Crowell.  Tate at the moment just makes it a little better.

It also looks like Brian Hoyer wasn’t just last year’s premature flash in the pan.  However else Hoyer looked in preseason, he is a gamer.  He’s a little gawky at times, his throws a little wobbly at times.  But he plays with poise and generally makes smart decisions.  In all candor, he’s the first Browns quarterback in the 2.0 era about whom you can say anything positive.  He’s kept the team moving forward and is certainly a key reason that it is clicking.  What all that says about Johnny Manziel in the near or far term is hard to say.  Just know that at some point Hoyer likely will get hurt and then we’ll see if Manziel can get to at least a similar level.

Then there are the receivers, perhaps everyone’s pick as the weakest link on the team.  General Manager Ray Farmer stood steadfast in his statement that the receivers on the roster were good and the fans and the media were counting them out just because they didn’t know anything about them.  There is something to be said for having players with established reputations on the roster, but at the moment Farmer seems to be more right than wrong.  Offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan is making good use of the no-names on the roster and it has kept the Browns mostly moving in the right direction.

Speaking of Shanahan, he’s been another of those positive signs.  Play calling always looks better to the naked eye when the players are able to execute what’s called.  So to a certain extent even Pat Shurmur would have looked brilliant calling the plays had the players he had been able to execute.  But Shanahan also is demonstrating great patience. 

If you’re being honest you’ll admit to wanting to throw a shoe through the television midway and late in the fourth quarter when Shanahan kept calling for running plays with the Browns still more than a touchdown behind and the clock moving in the wrong direction. But because Shanahan had been able to establish the run earlier, sticking with it at the moment was the right call. The Browns needed to score but also manage the clock because, let’s face it, this defense can’t be trusted either.  Those runs allowed the Browns to do both because it kept the Titans from selling out on the pass.  Their linebackers and defensive backs had to stay closer to the box in order to prevent a long run and that ultimately loosened up the secondary.

Another positive is the man who hired Shanahan.  Mike Pettine may have dropped into the Browns’ laps reluctantly but at the moment it seems to be working well if only because Pettine has the exact right temperament for a head coach in this city.  He is no nonsense but self-deprecating.  Intense but with a sense of humor.  It also helps that physically he looks like about 75% of the guys who hang out at the tailgates before the game.  In other words, he may not have been born here but he looks and acts like he could have been for all the good and bad that means.

Pettine has done a nice job of both understanding the paradigm in which this franchise has operated and embodying the commitment it takes to really alter it.  The only way to change is to actually change.  Shut up and do something.  Sometimes having a rookie head coach has its advantages.

But before we enshrine Pettine, he needs to fix the defense.  There’s a reason why the Browns look better when they’re playing from behind.  It’s because opposing offenses in the NFL playing with a comfortable lead rarely go for the jugular.  Instead they’re usually content with managing the game from that point forward.  They stop taking chances and that feeds right into the strengths and weaknesses of the Browns’ defense.

Looking at both the Pittsburgh and Tennessee games, the similarities are fascinating.  Both teams have very average offenses.  Not great, certainly, but not New York Jets level bad either.  And both had their way with the Browns’ incredibly weak secondary in the first halves of those games.  Then both teams buttoned up in the second half, playing mostly not to lose.  That played into the relative strength of the Browns’ defense, its defensive line.  By short circuiting their own offenses prematurely, both Pittsburgh and Tennessee allowed the Browns’ offense to get into gear.

In the Pittsburgh game the Browns still lost because ultimately once the Browns did come back, the Steelers were forced to open the offense back up, sort of like putting the starters back into a game that had been a blowout but now was getting uncomfortably close.  The Steelers moved the ball well enough in that last moment to get into position to kick the game winning field goal.

Tennessee however couldn’t manage the clock nearly as well.  With less than a half a field and playing against a defense its own head coach didn’t believe in, all that was left for the Browns to do at that moment was use just enough clock to ensure that the Titans couldn’t get into field goal position to win the game.  It helped that Whitehurst was at quarterback as his lack of mobility and experience led to his being sacked on first down.  The clock ran out for good on a pass that couldn’t get to the sideline and the Browns had the most improbable comeback and win in the last dozen years, at least.

But what to make of the future?  While it holds promise the team won’t find the Promised Land with that secondary.  Joe Haden, the putative leader, isn’t the lock down corner he thinks he is.  Justin Gilbert is playing less and less each week.  He hasn’t adjusted to life in the NFL and that doesn’t look to change in the near term.  And Buster Skrine is Buster Skrine.

The secondary might be better if the defensive line could put more pressure on opposing quarterbacks when the game hangs in the balance.  But for a variety of reasons that isn’t happening under Pettine.  If anything, the defensive line has regressed in that regard from last season!  Still it is the least poisonous part of the defensive tree at the moment.

This team is far from a complete product.  Heck it’s not anything close to playoff ready.  But after four games it’s proved itself to be competitive and interesting, something no other Browns team has been in a very long time.

The Numbing Sameness of it All, Again--Jags Edition

Describing Cleveland Browns quarterback Brandon Weeden’s desperation pass that was just out of the reach of Josh Gordon with seconds remaining in the Browns 32-28 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, Browns’ broadcaster Doug Dieken observed, “it was almost nearly on the money.”  Unwittingly Dieken succinctly captured the game, the season and the franchise.  Two steps removed from greatness it is and remains almost, almost good.

That the Browns lost to the Jaguars Sunday was not particularly unusual.  December losses in Cleveland are like December snowflakes.  There are always plenty of them. If anything was unusual, it was the manner in which the Browns went down, not so much by the feeble hand of an offense whose quarterback still hasn't won a start but by the feeble play of a defense that has kept the team mostly competitive all season, except in the season’s most important games.

Defensive coordinator Ray Horton seemed to have a lot of chatter and carefully segmented statistics to bolster his case last week about how great of a job he’s apparently done coaching the defense.  And it’s mostly true if you ignore the statistics that Horton didn't bother to discuss, the defense’s repeated failures inside the opponent’s red zone all season.  Teams that get their score touchdowns and have done all season. When Chad Henne, as much a journeyman quarterback as any in the league, who struggled all second half to get his offense a yard, moved swiftly and quickly through the defense at the end of the game, the touchdown that followed their entry into the red zone seemed inevitable.  That it came against cornerback Joe Haden seemed appropriate as well.

The other thing that was unusual, in the sense that it’s never happened before in the NFL, was the second consecutive 200+ yard receiving game by Gordon.  I’m not sure if it’s more incredible that it’s never happened before or that Gordon accomplished it off the arm of Brandon Weeden.  In 10 years, if that record is still standing, the second part of the trivia question, “and who was the quarterback who threw to him” will be harder to remember than the names of every Real Housewife.

Anyway, kudos once again to Gordon.  If last week’s record setting performance required the obvious caveat that most of his 249 yards were compiled during garbage time of a game that had long since been lost, Sunday’s performance required no such embarrassment.  Gordon is quickly placing himself among the elite receivers in the league with the kind of show he put on Sunday, highlighted of course by the 95 yard touchdown reception, about 85 yards of which were all Gordon that put him in the record books for the second straight week.

Weeden for once wasn't terrible in the way the fans are used to, meaning from bell to gun.  He had legitimate NFL quarterback moments, throwing some pretty nifty passes, actually, to both Gordon and tight end Jordan Cameron.  It’s those moments that tend to confound coaches who would just rather write off another failed quarterback experiment but can’t fully when he does things like that.

But with Weeden it’s never two steps forward one step back.  It’s always the opposite and so it was Sunday.  After staking the team to a 14-7 lead that almost everyone in brown and orange seemed ready to take into halftime, Weeden turned into Lucy Ricardo in the chocolate factory, overwhelmed and not sure what to do next while living up to the frustration that safety TJ Ward expressed a week ago about turnovers.
First, Weeden tossed an interception that led to the Jaguars tying the game as running back Maurice Jones-Drew threw 8 yards to Marcedes Lewis.  Weeden’s throw, considerably less accurate than Jones-Drew’s, looked exactly like every other Weeden interception—an off target throw that makes you remember exactly why you forget the good things he can do from time to time.

With the ball back and time, Weeden then threw another interception.  It led to a 44 yard Josh Scobee field goal that gave the Jags the lead.  Weeden then fumbled away the ball on the next series as he was being sacked.  That led to still another Scobee field goal and a Jaguars 20-14 lead at halftime.  It was a stunning two minutes and 47 seconds that almost perfectly captured Weeden’s short and likely to remain short career in Cleveland.  He was diagnosed with a concussion after the game but that’s not the reason he won’t start.
It is worth a second pause on those final few minutes of the first half.  They played out as if Weeden was trying to give the Jaguars all of their Hanukkah gifts in one night.  That the Browns only surrendered 13 points in that span was a tribute to the defense that ultimately failed them in the end.  Truthfully the game could have and maybe should have been over at that point.

But so it is when two bad teams collide.  They don’t necessarily play compelling football but it can be interesting.  The Browns could have been eastbound and down with Weeden looking as out of place on a football field as a scoop of ice cream does in a bowl of lobster bisque.  Instead the team came out and looked almost inspired in the second half.  I say almost because, let’s face it; the Jaguars had only won two games before the day started.  No team should need inspiration to beat them.

The Browns opened the second half as they had the first, taking the ball to the end zone courtesy of a Weeden 4 yard touchdown pass to Greg Little.  It gave them a 21-20 lead and may be the first time in a decade that the Browns opened each half of a game with a touchdown.    After that both teams more or less settled into their mediocre selves, running plays in theory while gaining yards begrudgingly and inducing slumber in those still watching.

It all changed though midway through the fourth quarter, as if both teams awoke from their own mid game nap.  With the Browns backed up on their own 14 yard line, Weeden dropped back in the shotgun.  With the ball yet to be snapped the scene looked particularly set for the typical Weeden off target late pass over the middle that would find nothing but the arms of an opposing player.  A steady dose of Weeden over nearly two seasons now, or just from the first half, take your pick, inspires such thoughts.  But Weeden didn't get a chance to touch the ball, except with his foot.  Center Alex Mack uncharacteristically sailed the ball over Weeden’s head and into the Browns’ end zone.  Weeden charged after it as if it was a contract extension and did the only right thing he could do.  He kicked it out of the back of the end zone for a safety.  It put the Jaguars back in the lead, 22-21.

It also woke them up.  After returning the free kick 31 yards, Henne led the Jaguars to another Scobee field goal and a 25-21 lead.  That meant that the Browns would need a late touchdown and in this city at this time of year those are as rare as a close in parking space at the mall.

That’s when things got really interesting.  On the ensuing kick off the Browns were penalized and had to start the drive at their own 5 yard line.  That wasn’t unusual.  It’s what came next .  Weeden threw short to Gordon who spun off the receiver and went essentially untouched for a 95 yard touchdown and a 28-25 lead.  It was the most remarkable play of the season, easily.  It also sent the crowd into a frenzy; the kind usually reserved for a team that just scored an important touchdown while fighting for the final playoff spot in a season that actually meant something.  Desperate fans will celebrate anything.

It also didn't last.  The defense then and almost inexplicably let Henne lead a really moribund Jaguars offense straight down the field. It culminated in a 20-yard Henne to touchdown pass to Cleveland native Cecil Shorts with 40 seconds remaining.  It was another defensive breakdown, of which there have been many, for the defense in the red zone.  The only thing more deflating was the sadly comical series that followed.

Weeden was done.  Overwhelmed by what he had done and not done and flashing back to his handiwork near the end of the first half, he settled for a series of short passes and another (his second of the game, fourth of the season, and proof once again he learns nothing from his mistakes) ill advised flip of the ball to running back Chris Ogbonnaya.  It was as if Weeden was hoping to capture the same lightning in a bottle he had earlier with Gordon only this time with Davone Bess.  Lightning is hard enough to capture once.  The game clock ticked harmlessly away as the Browns left another December crowd cold and miserable and pondering once again why this team, this franchise has failed them.

Weeden had an impressive day statistically once you ignore the interceptions and fumbles.  He threw for 370 yards and 3 touchdowns.  Gordon, of course, was the main benefactor and it is a tribute to his skills as a route runner that despite being frozen in Weeden’s sights all day long he still had 10 receptions for 261 yards and two touchdowns.  Absolutely no one should complain about the context in which those yards and receptions were made, even accounting for the dismal competition.  Gordon has emerged as one of the few, perhaps only, legitimate play makers in the Browns 2.0 era.

As for the rest of the team, sympathy goes to head coach Rob Chudzinski.  Visually, the team looks better coached in so many ways than in seasons past.  The results simply aren't’t there and that, as usual, stems from a lack of talent.

Consider just Joe Haden.  Often he plays like one of the better cornerbacks in the league.  His interception Sunday was a triumph of superior technique and the manner in which he caught the ball, in stride as if thrown to him, makes one wonder whether he should be converted to receiver.  Yet it was Haden who disappeared again late in the game.  Henne’s touchdown pass to Shorts happened because Haden blew his assignment, being faked by a relatively benign double move.  It’s Haden’s wont as he rarely has a complete game.

Players like Haden dot the roster.  T.J. Ward can be an intimidating safety with a mouth he can’t control but he likewise disappears for long stretches at a time.  Gordon has been great the last few weeks and maybe he’s turned the corner after being hot and cold earlier in the season.  Meanwhile Greg Little is, if anything, regressing.  He caught a touchdown pass but he also dropped a pass in traffic and was mostly a non factor in the game, again.  He’s a big receiver who plays smaller than Bess, another forgotten acquisition.

Then, of course, there is Weeden.  He didn’t lose the game, at least not by himself, but he also couldn’t win it against a team that was 2-9 after starting 0-8.  As a fantasy player, and prayers go to anyone who has the misfortune to have Weeden on his roster, Weeden turned in a decent performance.  But the distance between fantasy and reality is that yardage and touchdown passes are nice.  Turnovers cost games.

Weeden’s flaws coupled with the defensive failure at the end of the game cost the Browns the game.
The Browns had a chance to win a game against a team that should be able to handily beat.  And for most of the day they were nearly on the money.  It’s just that when the money was set to be counted it was the Browns who once again walked away with less than they had when they started the game.

The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Bengals, Again Edition

Depending on one’s perspective, the Cleveland Browns either never or always disappoint.  For those watching long enough to know which way that particular wind blows, nothing much about the Browns 41-20 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals was particularly surprising or disappointing.

For reasons almost completely untethered from the reality of the environment, the Browns had briefly entered the national conversation about potential playoff teams.  Ensconced in a division that suddenly has gone weaker than the Big 10, the Browns and found themselves near the division lead relatively late in the season while still sporting a losing record, as if.

The headiness of those modestly inflated expectations were well served in a first quarter that featured 3 Browns scoring opportunities and a quick 13-0 lead against a Bengals team that almost looked like it was playing scared, not loose.   The planets realigned in a quick and jarring fashion.

Letting a team score 31 points in any quarter, indeed in any half, in football played at almost any level is a relatively rare occurrence generally reserved for the most obvious of mismatches.  To see it happen at a professional level was stunning.  The level of ineptitude a team must exhibit to allow itself to be tossed about like a Frisbee on a Saturday afternoon in the park is actually hard to describe.  When the final points of Sunday’s second quarter were tacked on by Cincinnati’s Mike Nugent after the Browns frightful punt unit couldn’t contain Adam Jones felt like piling on.  The Browns were finished and they knew it.  So did everyone else.

Remember, too, that this was the Cincinnati Bengals doing the piling on.  The Bengals’ record is better than it should be by virtue of the company they keep within the AFC North.  It will surely continue to improve as they prance their way to a division title that no one else much wants.  That doesn’t mean that this is a good Bengals team.

Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis may dream of playing in late January but right now there isn’t a playoff worthy team in the whole of the AFC that is worried about the Bengals.  I don’t expect that to change.  The Bengals are simply too average in virtually every aspect of their operations to do much damage to talented or even modestly talented teams, as the Browns 17-6 victory against the Bengals earlier this season attests.

Sadly, the Browns aren’t one of those talented teams.  It’s not so much that the Bengals game exposed the Browns as some have suggested.  It’s more that this Bengals game came at that point in the season where the highs and lows tend to even out.

If you want to be disappointed about something specifically in Sunday’s loss then let it be the absence of any clamoring to have a clearly struggling Jason Campbell, a quintessential nice guy journeyman, replaced by last year’s number one pick.  That’s the kind of disappointment that really lingers.  Teams like the Browns can’t afford to miss on first round picks and when they do they inevitably suffer untimely occasional drubbings at the hands of even lesser lights like the Bengals in subsequent seasons.

This isn’t to say, however, that folks like head coach Rob Chudzinski will be so existential in their analyses.  They already know about the holes.  Chudzinski and his staff need to figure out why his team, which had two weeks to practice, played like it hadn’t practiced in two weeks.

There were the obvious signs early, of course.  The Browns did have that 13-0 lead but it should have been more, much more.

Consider, for example, the sequence that followed running back Chris Ogbonnaya’s 43-yard run.  On a first and goal from the 8 yard line, Willis McGahee got the ball to the 4 yard line.  A penalty then put the ball on the Cincinnati 2.  McGahee was able to get it to the one yard line but then two particularly lousy throws from Campbell made it 4th and goal at the 1 yard line.

Chudzinski, who has not seemed particularly wedded to conventional coaching conservatism most of the season, got married in a hurry.  He clearly cherished early points of a modest amount as paramount to the payoff of a low-risk gamble and kicked the chip shot field goal.  It suggested if anything else that Chudzinski only gambles when the stakes don’t matter.  His Browns were in what he had been told was the most meaningful football game played in these parts in over a half a generation and so he decided that any points were better than none even if an unsuccessful 4th down attempt would have given the Bengals the ball at their own 1. Considering that the two most immediate runs had gained at least 1 yard each, it set the wrong tone.

A similar decision wasn’t necessary a few minutes later when Joe Haden, who played wonderfully now twice against one of the league's best receivers, A.J. Green, had his first interception.  Haden returned it to the 14 yard line but the offense couldn’t move it beyond the 10.  Again, conventional coaching conservatism says to take any points off a turnover, though truthfully but for the Ogbonnaya run the Browns hadn’t shown any ability yet to execute a successful 4th and 6 anyway.  Fourth and 1 a few minutes earlier was far more manageable. The easy call was made in the form of another chip shot field goal attempt and a disappointing 6-0 lead, assuming any lead can be disappointing, was acquired.

What this particular brand of lousy and conservative offense did was to actually provide the bounce, the springboard, to the dizzying 31 point second quarter that the Bengals slapped on the Browns.  As bad as the start was for the Bengals, they had to look up at that scoreboard and think “at least it isn’t as bad as it could be.”  When the half mercifully ended it was the Browns looking up at the scoreboard and thinking “that’s as bad as it could be.”

Though the two blocked punts (one was technically not a block because though it was tipped it garnered 7 positive yards) and the Jones punt return near the end of the half tend to make the game look as though it was a special teams meltdown, what Chudzinski will see as he replays the game over and over in his mind were all the little things, too, that were hallmarks of an unfocused, undisciplined team; things like fumbles, interceptions, false starts and holding penalties.

Even as the game spiraled beyond its control, the Browns never really did much to shake things up, particularly on offense.  Likely the gravity of the game that pushed Chudzinski into a careful, plodding approach had an impact on players like Campbell.

Looking almost nothing like the quarterback who had a better than 100 rating in his last two starts, Campbell repeatedly checked down to receivers hovering near the line of scrimmage.  It was hard to tell whether the Bengals’ secondary was just so good that no receivers could break open (unlikely) or that Campbell was just too scared to take a shot after throwing an early interception (more likely).  Either way there was a point up until about the 74 yard touchdown completion that Campbell made to Josh Gordon early in the third quarter on about as well thrown of a ball as there could possibly be that Campbell was averaging less yards per completion than Jim Brown averaged yards per rushing attempt for his entire career.

To illustrate the point more forcefully, consider that after the pass to Gordon, Campbell attempted 27 more passes the rest of the game.  A grand total of two of those were thrown beyond that series’ first down markers and one of those two were intercepted.  Giving due notice to the two sacks Campbell also suffered, that means that 23 of 27 passes attempted were intended to garner but a few yards vertically and perhaps more only if tackles were broken and one of those passes also was intercepted.  Even with nothing to lose Campbell played as if there was.

Sunday’s game, to the extent it was hell bent on proving anything, was that the Browns are still a franchise very much in the midst of still another transition.  This particular version has already won 4 games which at this point in the season gives it a leg up on the various other versions that were tried but failed.

That is, I suppose, a positive but even as I ponder that thought I’m haunted really by another more disturbing one:  that this franchise’s high water mark is still measured by Romeo Crennel’s 10-win non playoff season of 2007.  With a record that dispiriting how could anyone really feel a lingering sting of disappointment after Sunday?

The Things We Know--Week 2 Edition

The Cleveland Browns 2.0 haven’t exactly been a NFL franchise as much as a NFL experiment. Like the L.A. Clippers in the NBA or the Kansas City Royals in Major League Baseball, the Browns have become that team, the one where we see how many times it can change every ingredient in the recipe and still produce the same miserable stew week after week, year after year.

It’s worked pretty well for the last 13 years. The Browns have had more starts and restarts, system failures and reboots, new blood and tired blood in the last 13 or so years then most franchises go through in 50 years, no discernible progress being the given. The last time the Pittsburgh Steelers, for example, had a major change in course was when Bill Cowher retired (after winning a Super Bowl) and the Rooney family hired Mike Tomlin to fill his shoes 7 years ago. As a measure of the distance between the two franchises, Browns fans still dream of hiring Cowher.

Having long since grown tired of recapping the same miserable loss that everyone else saw with their own eyes, I decided to try and search for a better way. Thus gave life to this new venture, one that tries to at least figure out the things we know about the Browns based on their performance this past week in context with the previous week’s failure or, on the rare occasion, its success. With but that bare framework to launch, here’s The Things We Know about the Browns, week two:

1. It’s come down to this. When a team has had so little success for so long a time, its fans inevitably will start counting the good losses as half wins. Sunday’s defensive and special teams’ breakdowns against the Cincinnati Bengals were just that sort of half win. Fans felt kind of good, like there may be a spark of something to work with here, that perhaps they can win more than 5 games this season.

The problem, though, is that these half wins count as full losses in the NFL and according to some cubicle-dwelling geek housed in the Bristol compound deprived of nourishment until he can find a meaningful statistic that hasn’t yet been used, only 12% of the teams that have started 0-2 made the playoffs. After two weeks in the NFL, there already are 6 teams that are 0-2, which equates nicely to 20% of the league, give or take a fraction. That means, if I remember my high school math correctly, that at best only one of those six teams has a chance at making the playoffs this season.

Somewhere in the universe that is Bristol surely there is someone that can tell me the odds that of those six teams (Cleveland, Tennessee, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Oakland and New Orleans) the Browns will be the one to emerge. Because I have the patience of a new born puppy when it comes to such things and can’t wait for another cubicle-dwelling Bristol geek to finish his work, I’ll just make up the odds and assume it’s at best 5%. It's probably less.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Likely none of those teams make the playoffs. But if you had to make a wager, and say you had to either make that wager or watch 24 straight hours of the Kim Kardashian wedding tape (as opposed to, say, the Kim Kardashian porn tape), you’d choose New Orleans, right? They are without their head coach and are a mess, but they still have far more talent then any of the other six. The difference between them and every other team on the list can be summed up in two words: Drew Brees. But even the Saints are a long shot.

So we know it won’t be the Browns, meaning that just two weeks in any stupid, delusional hopes of the playoffs have been effectively dashed. Statistics may lie and liars may use statistics and a Bill Belichick team might lose a home opener to the Arizona Cardinals when their kicker shanks it at about the same time the previously vanquished Patriots kicker was winning a game for the Colts, there are still two things that are true in the NFL: statistics are Gospel and the Browns never, ever defy the odds. That means another early pick.

But back to that feel good loss. Why all the happy faces? It’s because Brandon Weeden and Trent Richardson had good games. That gets the fans to thinking that if the defense and the offense could just come together at the same time, then this team might be worth watching?

But that’s rather the point, isn’t it? A team tends to be worth watching when they actually do put all phases of their game together. Until then they are at best like your golf game. You may be driving well, and that makes you feel you played well even when your putting was off and you didn’t break 90. The next week you sink 6 putts of 15 feet or more but hit 5 drives out of bounds and you didn’t break 90 and feel worse. Surely if you would quit hitting your drives out of bounds and make a bunch of 15 foot putts, you’d regularly break 80, maybe even 70 on occasion and then who knows?, with a little more practice maybe you can get on the Senior Tour.

You’re not getting on the Senior Tour because the chance that you will consistently do both things well is exactly the same as the Browns consistently playing good offense, defense and special teams. That hasn’t happened in generations and it may be generations before it happens again.

So what we know right now is that the defense still has an incredible depth problem. If Buster Skrine remains on this team it’s only because whoever else is out of football at the moment and used to be a defensive back is either too concussed to remember how to wear a helmet and/or too slow to cover Joe Thomas on a tackle eligible play. Joe Haden is a nice player, but he’s not nearly as good as Skrine made him look on Sunday.

Skrine told the media after the game “I don’t think I played very well.” How am I to argue.

As for the other hole in the defensive backfield, the one created when Sheldon Brown didn’t play, rookie Trevin Wade wasn’t exactly a revelation. He seemed about as ready to play as Weeden did the week before. On the other hand, he didn't get hurt. Call it a half win.

2. Speaking of Brandon Weeden, we know that he’s not the worst quarterback in the league, certainly not as bad anyway as his 5.1 rating from Week 1 would indicate. He’s probably not as good as his 114.9 rating from this week would indicate either, but he did enough positive to stop the Colt McCoy Chorus from straining their vocal chords for another week. In truth, I really liked what Weeden did this past week, mainly because it was such a dramatic improvement from the week before even if the end result was the same.

Weeden had a couple ways he could have gone after the debacle against the Eagles last week. That he chose to ignore the cacophony and instead work harder during the week so that he could be a little less wide-eyed on game day was a bold and admirable choice. He didn’t have a perfect game, certainly, but he did show that his confidence and his psyche aren’t too fragile for the pro game.

All that said, Weeden has a long way to go to prove that he’s not Derek Anderson or Mike Phipps. Anderson had an entire season where he looked every bit the franchise quarterback and yet he failed when his strong arm kept putting the ball in the hands of opposing defensive backs. Phipps had a big arm and the intellect of Jeff Spicoli. In other words, there is still plenty of time for this to go another way.

The other number one pick, Trent Richardson, had a good game as well, as dramatic of a difference from week one as was Weeden’s, perhaps even more so. Richardson’s moves to get in the end zone on the pass from Weeden was just the kind of moment that does make you think he could actually be special.

Anytime a running back has more than 100 yards in less than 20 carries and then adds a catch for a touchdown is a day to celebrate, especially in Cleveland. If you want to add perspective to it, here’s why Kansas City lost: Peyton Hillis fumbled on the two yard line at the exact moment that Chiefs were poised to get back into the game. It’s why Hillis isn’t in Cleveland. He can’t hang on to the friggin’ ball.

So the rookies, the two the team really are counting on anyway, had a good week. The results haven't changed but string together more of those performances and the results have to change.

3. There’s something about defensive coordinator Dick Jauron to like. His teams bend like a Russian gymnast but typically don't give up a lot of points. You have to like, too, that his career as a head coach pretty much matches the success rate of the Browns 2.0, right down to all those losing seasons. But he keeps plugging away and never seems to carry a chip on his shoulder. He knows defense and now seems content to let that phase of his career play out without any greater aspirtions. That's why, despite having virtually no success as a head coach, players still respect him and still listen to him.

But one thing I didn’t like on Sunday about Jauron’s defensive game plan is the way he purposely exposed his incredibly weak defensive backfield by blitzing so aggressively. There was a perverse logic to it—put pressure on Bengals’ quarterback Andy Dalton and force him to throw short. And it sort of worked. The Browns defensive line and linebackers kept Dalton scrambling but as Browns fans have seen too many times, short passes are this team’s Achilles heel. That was a problem last year and the year before that (when Jauron wasn't here) and based on yesterday's results (two shortish passes turned into a 50 yard and 44 yard touchdown) is still a problem.

It's especially a problem against Andy Dalton. Weeden had that aforementioned 114.9 quarterback rating against the Bengals yesterday. Dalton has put up that kind of rating against the Browns for three games now, which means three straight wins. (It's only in Cleveland that a quarterback puts up that kind of rating and loses, kind of like when the Browns went 10-6 under Romeo Crennel and didn't make the playoffs.) If Jauron doesn't find another way to try to stop Dalton, who essentially is Brandon Weeden only younger, then it's likely to be another season gone without winning a divisional game.

Frankly, I'd rather see the Browns defense challenge most quarterbacks to throw long. Accuracy decreases the further the pass. That would mean of course that the Browns would have to count on a very weak defensive line to pressure the quarterback and I think we all know how that would go.

But poison must be picked and right now the better choice would seem to be to play 5 defensive backs on every down and hope that the line and linebackers can stop the run and keep marginal pressure on the quarterback. The against-type method of defense let the Bengals score 27 points and this isn't that good of a Bengals team.

4. There will be no real progress for this franchise until it can win AFC North games. They've now lost 11 straight. It's understandable when the Browns are playing the Ravens and the Steelers. But how do they lose that many to the Bengals?

Let that roll around the crevices of your brain for a moment. The Bengals, perhaps the league's next biggest doormat, has beaten the Browns 13 of their last 16 times they've played. You can throw out everything you ever really know about the Browns 2.0 and just look at that stat and know that this is a franchise in trouble. That's why it's hard to look at any loss, even the supposedly feel-good half-win type losses, and feel that progress has been made.

There were plenty of other things we now know but why get on a screed about Greg Little's celebration after his touchdown? I'd say he should act like he's been there before but he's not that good of an actor.

Early Onset Indigestion

Some losses are tough. Some are dispiriting. And then there are those like the ones the Cleveland Browns experienced on Sunday in Jacksonville that can't be measured by such traditional concepts. After taking the ball away from the Jacksonville Jaguars 6 (that's not a misprint) times, the Browns still found a way to lose 24-20 and, in the process, give its fans the kind of indigestion that can only come when Mom overcooks the turkey and undercooks the stuffing.

When a football team at virtually any level of competition turns the ball over 6 times, and at one point on 5 straight possessions, they are usually looking up at the wrong end of a gaudy score, like 49-3 or 62-10 or something ridiculous like that. But there they were, the Jaguars, with the ball midway through the 4th quarter when they found themselves down only by 7 but facing a crucial 4th and 1 at the Cleveland 39-yard line. Just before the ball was snapped, the Browns called their first time out, perhaps sensing this might be the most critical play of the game. Not the two T.J. Ward interceptions or the one by Joe Haden. Not the 3 fumble recoveries, but this fourth down.

And when the other team has a running back like Maurice Jones-Drew and you are at the game's most critical point, you have to know where the ball should end up, which it did. Stop him and you have a chance to secure the win that should have been yours anyway. If you don't, well, you get what you deserve.

Jones-Drew got the first down on a carry that put him over 100 yards rushing for the game. And then he found more yards on first down. And then he found even more, getting the ball down to the Cleveland 5-yard line.

The Browns then took their second time out, but this time because they had 12-men on the field, though it easily could be been just to regroup. It was a good break, or so it seemed as the defense then sacked quarterback David Garrard back to the 15-yard line. Tiquan Underwood then dropped a ball near the goal line. But just when it looked like the Browns might escape, Garrard found tight end Marcedes Lewis at the one yard line and he reached the ball over the goal line as he was being tackled by Ray Ventrone. It helped tie a game that should have been a blowout at 17-17 with 3:34 remaining.

Still, there was time.

Starting what looked like it might be their final drive at their 41-yard line with the knowledge firmly entrenched of one offensive failure after another in the second half despite the gift wrapped points the Jaguars were seemingly giving them with each ensuing turnover, McCoy nonetheless would lead the Browns down the field for a go-ahead 41-yard Phil Dawson field goal.

McCoy, battered most of the day by a Jaguars defensive line that was having its way with the Browns' offensive line, completed a 38-yard pass on first down and then on a key 3rd and 4 from the Jacksonville 36-yard line scrambled 18 yards on what appeared to be a bad ankle. But McCoy couldn't get the Browns into the end zone for a touchdown leaving the game in the hands of the defense once again as Dawson drilled the field goal through the center of the uprights.

And just as in overtime against the New York Jets a week ago, the defense couldn't get it done, allowing Jones-Drew to turn a screen pass into a 75-yard play that served as the season's most backbreaking play, supplanting, by the way, the Santonio Holmes overtime touchdown a week before. Jones-Drew was dragged down at the 1-yard line by cornerback Joe Haden, but Jones-Drew cleaned up this minor annoyance a few minutes later with the 1-yard run that gave the Jaguars the lead and the game, 24-20 with just over a minute remaining.

McCoy did a nice job of getting the Browns down the field quickly but the game ended, as did McCoy's 98-pass streak with no interceptions, when safety Sean Considine picked off a pass intended at the 3-yard line that was intended for tight end Ben Watson. It didn't help either that the Browns had squandered their timeouts earlier in the quarter, but the failure to convert on this last drive wasn't what lost the game anyway.

The enduring question of the game may be why the Browns could move the ball so well on their final two possessions when they couldn't move the ball at all for the rest of the second half. After Ward's first interception, which was at the Jacksonville 48-yard line, the Browns quickly went 3-and-out. On Jacksonville's next possession, Haden intercepted and the Browns again went 3-and-out. Garrard fumbled on Jacksonville's next possession and the Browns couldn't get a first down and Phil Dawson missed a 51-yard field goal, his second missed 51-yard field goal of the game.

What was most frustrating about those Browns' possessions was how soundly their offensive line was being beaten by Jacksonville's defensive line. Throw in an occasional blitz and an inability to effectively pick it up which led to McCoy being sacked before he had any real chance to do anything with the ball and you pretty much have it capsulized why the Browns' offense looked like the Browns' offense circa 2008 or 2009 despite being handed one opportunity after another to blow open the game.

In a sense, it was a game as hard fought as the previous week's game and with painfully similar results. But in another sense, it shouldn't have been that kind of game. The difference between good and bad teams in the NFL can often be found in turnover margins and you'd have to go along way back then I'm willing to look at the moment to find a game in which a team with a -5 turnover margin, in the game, still came away with the victory.

Until that bizarrely disappointing second half, the game was shaping up far more traditionally.

The Jaguars opened the scoring with a 47-yard Josh Scobee field goal, but that was just a prelude to one of the more amazing Cleveland Browns' drives in recent memory.

Starting with the ball at their own 8-yard line as a result of a penalty on the kickoff following the Jacksonville field goal, McCoy engineered what would turn out to be a 16-play, 92-yard drive that covered nearly 10 minutes and ultimately gave them a 7-3 lead. It kept their string alive of having a lead in every game this season.

During that drive, the Browns converted 4 third down plays. McCoy was 6-8 on the drive and also scrambled for 10 yards when the Browns were 2nd and 21 on the Jacksonville 44-yard line. It gave the Browns a much more manageable 3rd and 11 which they converted when McCoy hit Mohamed Massaquoi for 14 yards.

After holding the Jaguars on their next drive, Cleveland appeared to be back in business, moving the ball from their own 19 down to the Jacksonville 33-yard line. But the drive died when McCoy and Massaquoi were not only not on the same page but actually reading different books. On a blitz, McCoy threw deep where Massaquoi appeared to be heading but instead Massaquoi broke off his route and the ball bounced harmlessly away. Phil Dawson missed a 51-yard field goal that gave Jacksonville good field position on their own 41-yard line.

But the Jaguars' drive died when they tried to crib a play from Brian Daboll's playbook and had Jones-Drew attempt an option pass. There's a reason why running backs don't play quarterback and Jones-Drew perfectly illustrated it as he soft-tossed the ball in the direction of receiver Mike Thomas as Abe Elam stepped in for the easy interception. The Browns weren't able to capitalize, however, going a quick 3-and out. It turned out to be foreshadowing, in a big way.

That gave the Jaguars an opportunity to put together their own long drive and take the lead at halftime when Garrard found Thomas on a 5-yard pass to help give the Jaguars a 10-7 lead. Thomas had gotten inside of defensive back Sheldon Brown for the touchdown. The drive covered 68 yards in 13 plays and used up most of the last 5 minutes of the half.

After an exchange of possessions to open the second half, the Browns regained the lead when Elam stripped Jones-Drew at the end of an 8-yard run. Elam, who was on the bottom of the pile, scooped up the ball and walked into the end zone as the other 21 players on the field stood by, each with a look on their face that said “wasn't the play over?” It wasn't as the referees signaled touchdown. On the replay the ball was indeed fumbled but a solid case could have been made that Elam was down by contact. Oddly the Jaguars appeared to give no thought to challenging the call as Dawson kicked the extra point that gave the Browns the 14-10 lead.

The Browns seemed to be right back in business when Ward intercepted a Garrard pass that had bounced off Thomas and was down at the Jacksonville 48-yard line. But they went 3-and out with McCoy getting sacked on third down and were forced to punt.

But the Browns' defense proved to be as resilient as Beef Jerkey when Haden got an interception off Garrard 5 plays later. Haden had a nice run to near the Jacksonville 10-yard line but the ball was stripped at the last moment and fumbled backward, where Chris Gocong recovered. On 3rd and 11 and the Jaguars blitizing as if Rob Ryan were calling the plays, McCoy dropped back and attempted to hit no one in particular on what would have amounted to a screen pass. It was nearly intercepted. That set up a 38-yard field goal by Dawson that pushed the Browns lead to 17-10 late in the third quarter.

From there, the Jaguars kept bouncing back from their own self-inflicted wounds just long enough to tie it on the Lewis touchdown and then take the lead on the game on the Jones-Drew touchdown.

For McCoy, the game was a learning experience, if nothing else. Subjected to repeated pressure, he did wilt and mostly handled it well when he wasn't otherwise secretly hoping he wouldn't get injured in the process. He was 17-28 for 241 yards and one touchdown. He also had two key scrambles but was sacked 6 times. Running back Peyton Hillis, facing his near-twin in Jones-Drew, was far less effective. Bottled up all day by a swarming Jacksonville defense, he had only 48 yards on 21 carries, though he had the one touchdown on the McCoy shovel pass at the 10-yard line.

Garrard, far more experienced than McCoy, wasn't really much better. He was 20-24 for 254 yards, 2 touchdowns but 3 interceptions. The difference was Jones-Drew. He had 132 yards rushing on 24 carries and had 87 more yards on 3 pass receptions, the bulk of which came on that 75-yard screen play.

The Browns haven't really been favored in any game this season so it's difficult to say they lost a game they were supposed to win. Still, circumstances sometimes dictate when you should win and those circumstances so dictated on Sunday. But though this team is progressing, it isn't yet good enough. They are a better team with a better future than last year's model. But at 3-7, it's hard to argue that their record isn't what it should be.

A Grading System

The Cleveland Browns are only 6 games into the season so it will be a few weeks before we see the usual spate of “mid term grades” columns from the local media drones. In the best of years, these obligatory semi-interesting space fillers serve roughly the same function cotton candy does at a county fair. In a year like this, it will be as useless as putting Eric Wright in single coverage.

The problem, dear readers, is that trying to evaluate the Browns this season is a little like trying to evaluate Bristol Palin’s performance on Dancing with the Stars. So much of how you look at it depends on the perspective you brought into the conversation in the first place.

After so many years of being such a downtrodden franchise, many fans have become desensitized to what good, competent football looks like. They see other teams play it from time to time, certainly, but they haven’t had enough of a steady diet to really remember how it tastes, how it feels.

It’s the opposite problem, really, of the Ohio State fans. They are so used to great football over virtually the same time period that Browns fans have been suffering that they come unglued at every loss as if it’s the next sign of the apocalypse, even though the losses have been few and far between.

Different fans have different reactions to the constant beat downs. Some because hyper-optimistic. For this group of Browns fans, dulled to the point that Jake Delhomme looks like Tom Brady to them, every little positive is celebrated as if it’s a trend and every little negative tends to get lost in the flood of all the big negatives.

If you’re one of these fans looking at the Cleveland Browns’ defense through that prism, you tend to think it might be one of the better units in football at the moment because, heck, that’s kind of where they fall statistically. That then begets the thinking that if only the offense could have been slightly better this team might very well be 5-1 and fighting for a playoff spot.

Then when you parse that down to the individuals, you start getting all misty-eyed at the absolute awesomeness of players like T.J. Ward, who you’re sure is the greatest draft choice in the history of the franchise, the spectacular running of Peyton Hillis, the likes of which you’re convinced you haven’t seen since Jim Brown, and on and on it goes until you insert enough Tab As into Slot Cs to reveal a team that is one, two players away from being a Super Bowl contender, tops.

Of course, there is another group, the flip side of the same coin, the hyper-critical. They’re convinced that Eric Mangini is really Beelzebub and that the franchise is still paying for the ultimate sin of being located in Cleveland.

They see the defense as a group of mostly has-beens and never-will-bes whose statistics thus far are the product of a bunch of smoke and mirrors and that absent a major upgrade at every position it will languish and hold this team back forever. They also feel like the offense has been stuck in a mediocre re-make of Groundhog Day with Tim Couch playing the Bill Murray part except that no matter how fully realized the individuals on offense becomes, the alarm clock still goes off at 5:55 a.m. every morning with Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” in the background.

Parse that down to the players and it gets even worse. The quarterback situation is a joke with a washed up starter who can’t stay healthy, a career backup as the backup and a guy who only the Browns would have drafted in the third round. There are better receivers on the Glenville High School team and don’t even get them started on the joke that is the defensive backfield.

The problem is that both camps are actually right. This isn’t a “the truth is somewhere in the middle” kind of thing. It really is a case where both sides are right.

The Browns occupy a particularly odd space at the moment where there seems to be evidence of improvement in some things and yet it’s not made one bit of difference in the record and isn’t likely to as the rest of the season drags on because this team isn’t good enough to make that happen.

Ward really is an excellent draft pick, hyperbole aside. Joe Haden looks like he’ll fall in the category as well. Hillis is an excellent, hard-nose running back who’s brought some needed excitement to the running game. The defense really is playing better than last season, much better in fact, and has the stats to prove it. They have kept this team in games they otherwise probably wouldn’t have been in last year and but for some ill-timed offensive miscues, the record probably is better than the current 1-5.

But no, sadly, this team isn’t in line to be a Super Bowl contender anytime soon. If the current state of the Browns was represented by one of those evolution scales, they’ve just entered the phase where the monkey has lost its tail but is still mostly walking on all fours.

The team still has way too many question marks at way too many key positions to ever be taken too seriously by any of the better teams in the league. The quarterback situation is as tenuous now as it’s ever been because it is true that Delhomme, a real professional though he may be, is on the back 10 of his career and Seneca Wallace is likely going to find productive work in the league for another 4 or 5 years but as a serviceable back up.

It’s also true that no one was rushing the podium in New York City to draft McCoy when the Browns did. The defensive backfield’s two best players at the moment are rookies and the defensive line would struggle putting pressure on a quarterback whose blindside protection was anchored by Cloris Leachman. The offensive coordinator is unimaginative and the defensive coordinator is reckless. Meanwhile, the head coach is still just trying to find his niche in a front office hierarchy that he didn’t sign on to when he agreed to join the Browns.

When you stop to really consider that both camps of fans really have a good bit of truth to chomp on, you’re left with virtually no way to really put any sort of grade on anything associated with this team. At times it looks vastly improved. At other times, you wonder whether CBS is just showing game films from early last season.

All this is a very long-winded way of saying that the most compelling thing about this team and the basis on which to evaluate it going forward is the same way you might view a really novel science experiment that by-passed the lab in favor of testing it under real-life conditions.

Sometimes it goes well and we’re ready to write about it in the Science Journals as the greatest breakthrough since ketchup. Sometimes it’s like an episode of Mythbusters where everything goes horribly wrong and it’s all we can do to put the detritus in a medical waste bag and throw it into some heavy-duty incinerator somewhere, preferably outside the watchful eye of the EPA.

Perhaps someday the Browns will actually walk upright and all the experimenting will yield useful, repeatable results and actually bust a few myths in the process. But that time isn’t now and isn’t any time soon. Is that worth a grade? Probably not. But if pushed, the only answer is “incomplete” and that applies to the entire organization, except Eric Wright who’s actually regressed.

Back On Familiar Ground

So much for getting off to a fast start for the game and the season.

The Cleveland Browns, after dominating the Tampa Bay Buccaneers early, saw that mojo disappear in the the dust of two key turnovers as they lost 17-14 on a hot, muggy and sometimes rainy day at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay.

The loss puts the Browns in a spot they know well, 0-1, to start a season. It also ends the modest 4-game win streak dating back to last season.

With the Browns leading 14-3 and seemingly on their way to, at worst, a field goal late in the first half, the Jake Delhomme that most fans feared might rear its ugly head once the regular season started did just that when he failed to see Ronde Barber closing in on tight end Ben Watson. Barber stepped in front of the pass and took it 61-yards to the Cleveland 2-yard line. From there, Tampa Bay quarterback Josh Freeman, he of the broken thumb and rabid inexperience, found Michael Williams in the back of the end zone that closed the Browns' lead to 14-10. It was an acrobatic catch of a ball that had been tipped by Sheldon Brown.

In fairness to Delhomme, though, on the interception, he really hadn't noticed Barber much that entire first half in avoiding at least two other interceptions.

More importantly, though, it killed what ever momentum the Browns had mustered via a balanced offensive attack that for most of the first half kept the Buccaneers mostly scratching themselves.

The Browns had a chance on their opening drive of the second half to recapture the momentum and for awhile anyway, looked as if they had. But running back Peyton Hillis fumbled at the Tampa Bay 15-yard line, killing the Browns' last real threat of the day.

From there, the Browns offense played most of the second half scared, except when they were playing desperate. After exchanging punts with the Buccaneers, an exchange that ended up putting the Browns deep in their own territory with 6:39 remaining in the fourth quarter, Delhomme threw late and over the middle and everyone knows what happens when you throw late and over the middle. Corner back E.J. Biggers was there to receive the gift at the Browns' 39-yard line.

The Bucs, on the verge of putting the game away for good, showed why they are who we think they are as fullback Earnest Graham fumbled the ball at the Browns' 2-yard line. Lineback Eric Barton recovered and gave the Browns one last chance, or at least what looked like one last chance at the time.

But there would be no miracle drive and no memories, really, of a preseason that looked more promising. Delhomme couldn't complete the one pass he needed and the Browns turned it back over to the Bucs with at their own 14-yard line with a minute remaining.

But alas! The Buccaneers are who we think they are and they strangely gave the Browns still one final chance to tie the game. Eschewing a field goal that would have given them a 6-point lead and forced the Browns to score a touchdown with just seconds remaining, Bucs head coach Raheem Morris instead had Freeman attempt a pass only to see him get sacked and give the Browns one really last chance. But having burned all their time outs on the Tampa Bay possession, the Browns really never had much of a chance to get the ball into field goal range with any time left on the clock.

Not that it much mattered, but one of the key reasons the first last chance drive probably didn't produce came after Delhomme completed a pass to Josh Cribbs for 6 yards, setting up third and 4. With three time outs in their pocket, head coach Eric Mangini strangely decided the time wasn't quite right and instead hoped, apparently, to catch the Buccaneers' defense off-guard. It didn't work as the offense instead couldn't get set. Floyd Womack was whistled for the false start setting up a 4th and 9 and Delhomme's gasp of a throw to Chansi Stuckey that sailed harmlessly away.

Like a putt that looks good until it finds a way to avoid the cup at the last minute, the Browns looked like a team that knew what it was doing until it found a way to avoid a victory.

New quarterback Jake Delhomme,showing a veteran's poise, and a newly-slimmed down offensive coordinator in Brian Daboll,together involved the entire offense in a first half that would have been much more satisfying had it not also featured the usual mistakes.

In that first half alone, Delhomme completed passes to running back Peyton Hillis and Jerome Harrison and wide receivers Mohammad Massaquoi, Stuckey and Brian Robiskie. The pass to Massaquoi in particular was a thing of beauty, a tight spiral threaded between two Buccaneers defenders that went for 41-yards and the Browns' first touchdown and an early 7-0 lead. The half also featured nearly 100 yards of rushing from the combination of Harrison, Hillis and Cribbs.

But then there was the bad. The Delhomme interception late in the first half followed by the Freeman-to-Spurlock touchdown followed by the Hillis fumble early in the second half effectively put the Browns away. They just didn't know it at the time. From there the offense had four straight 3-and-outs and then the Delhomme interception by Biggers before their final two last gasp attempts.

Credit for that should probably go to the Buccaneers' defense. But a healthy dose of the credit or blame, depending on your perspective, can be laid at the feet of an offensive line that couldn't open up holes for the running game against a defense that was the worst in the league last season against the run. That same offensive line didn't give Delhomme much time either as most of his passes were rushed.

If there was a bright spot of sorts, it was probably the defense. The Buccaneers 17 points were hard earned and should not have been enough to win the game in any event. Tampa Bay's first points came via a 49-yard field goal from Conner Barth. Their first touchdown, which covered all of 3 yards, was set up by the Delhomme interception in the first half. Their second touchdown, a Freeman 33-yard pass to Michael Spurlock who had a step on Haden, was set up by a Reggie Hodges punt from the Browns' own end zone that gave the Bucs the ball at the Cleveland 47-yard line.

While Haden was the victim on the Freeman touchdown pass to Spurlock, he otherwise played well in his first NFL start. The same goes for rookie safety T.J. Ward. And while we're being free with the accolades, the linebackers played effectively throughout as well. In short, the defense was mostly solid.

For a team that thought it would struggle more on defense then offense, when the opposite proved to be the case it cost the team a victory it should have had.

Delhomme, counted on so heavily to lift this team beyond its current bottom-feeder status, was 20-37 for 227 yards, with most of those yards coming in the first half. The running game yielded another 104 yards but again, virtually all of it came in the first half.

The Buccaneers weren't all that impressive either. Freeman completed 17 of 28 passes for only 182 yards. But he had the two key touchdown passes and only turned it over once, an interception by Mike Adams in the second quarter that seemingly set up a Browns score that wasn't because of the Delhomme interception. On the ground, Cadillac Williams had a quiet 75 yards rushing, though he had a couple of good gains called back because of penalties, and Freeman added 33 yards, most of which came on one run.

In the pantheon where all losses go to be evaluated, this will go down as a bad loss for now. But because it came in the season's first week, at least there is plenty of time to recover. Beat a team you shouldn't and all is soon forgotten. Lose to the Kansas Chiefs next week, though, the team and town go into panic mode.

Still, don't read too much into this loss unless you were in the camp that thought the Browns were a playoff team. It's about baby steps now and when baby steps are involved, often times a fall is just around the corner. If the Browns can find a way to quickly stand back up, then this will just be another painful lesson in a very long learning process.