Beaten Down and Broken

If a team is going to lose it might as well do so in epic fashion. At least the Cleveland Browns got that part right and not much else as they were pummeled at the hands of the Tennessee Titans, 31-13.

If there's any consolation to the fans, it's that the players will have to watch films of this mess all week. The fans won't have to look at this again.

There were enough missed tackles of all shapes and sizes that helped the Titans build a 24-6 lead late in the third quarter. And while those missed tackles are worth considering, and they will be, the signature play of the day came just at that point, the Browns down 24-6 and with the ball.

Starting at their own 18 yard line, Colt McCoy and the Browns looked as if they were finally putting something together with plenty of time to still do so. Eighteen points isn't an insurmountable lead and while the offense was once again waking up late, at least they now looked like they had the sleep out of their eyes.

After an 18-yard pass to Ben Watson took the ball to the Titans' 29-yard line and gave the Browns a first down, McCoy was flushed from the pocked and ran to his left. As he was spotting Peyton Hillis come across the back of the end zone, McCoy was hit and severely under threw the ball into the waiting arms of safety Jordan Babineaux at the 3-yard line.

Now let's freeze the action right there for a moment.

This wasn't a case of McCoy throwing it in the flat to a defensive player who jumped an out route and had essentially an open freeway to the end zone. Instead, Babineaux was surrounded by Browns players when he caught the ball. Nonetheless, Babineaux weaved his way first down the side lines and then through the middle of the field on his way to the end zone. As he was doing so, Babineaux was hardly touched as literally no one on the offense made any real effort to disrupt his journey.

Maybe they all had the Titans' defense in their fantasy league.

The Babineaux touchdown gave the Titans a 31-6 lead that was as safe as about 94% of the plays that head coach/offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur was calling all day.

Maybe it's a measure of the Browns' resilience or a measure of how confident the Titans felt at that point, but McCoy and the Browns did actually respond to that rather deflating touchdown return by Babineaux (and yes, I keep saying his name because it's kind of fun to type it). Employing a no-huddle offense and simultaneously making the case for sticking with that strategy from here on out, the Browns put together a 15 play 69 yard drive that culminated in a 18-yard touchdown pass to a wide open Watson in the end zone. It brought the Browns to a more respectable 31-13 score but probably frustrated the fans even more.

Why? For the same reason that last week's win frustrated the fans. It's not exactly clear why the Browns' offense struggles so often and yet can look so good in spurts. As if to prove the point, following the Watson touchdown the Browns got the ball right back after a Mike Adams interception and the offense went right back into slumber mode thanks mostly to underneath passes that had no chance of getting additional yards anyway or dropped passes. The lack of production there didn't seal the Titans' victory but only because it had already been sealed much earlier.

There are any number of places to start when considering why this offense struggles. But let's start with the running game.

One of the things that Shurmur is going to have to decide pretty quickly is whether he has two running backs or one starter and a backup. Hillis, either still suffering the effects of last week's illness or in Shurmur's dog house for some unspecified reason, yielded a fair amount of his playing time to Montario Hardesty. All that really did is give neither player a chance to stay in the offensive flow long enough to be effective.

But the other thing to keep in mind is that Shurmur really didn't seem all that committed to the run anyway, so it probably didn't matter all that much whether it was Hillis or Hardesty in the backfield. You can blame it on the fact that the Browns were so far behind as the reason for the offensive imbalance, but the game plan looked from the outset like the running attack was being used solely as a decoy.

I'm going to freeze the action right here for another moment. As much as I've praised McCoy and still believe he's a long-term answer at quarterback, he has more work to do, particularly if he's going to sell this offense to opposing defenses. At times he does a very nice job on play action passing because he actually concentrates on trying to make the play look initially like a run. Too often, though, McCoy goes through the motions and makes a perfunctory move that fools no one, especially the linebackers who are supposed to freeze in place thus giving the tight ends the extra step they need to get open.

For a quarterback and a head coach that rely so much on the tight ends, you'd think McCoy would be good at this move. It's not that he's bad, it's that he's inconsistent. This has to get better for the play action to be much more effective.

Back to the action.

The West Coast offense isn't necessarily designed to stretch defenses but it also seemed like Shurmur's primary goal throughout was to try and give McCoy more confidence in the passing game by calling for so many short underneath routes. Mission accomplished, I suppose. McCoy had a boatload of completions (40-61) and a decent amount of yardage (350) but ultimately that accounted for just 13 points and that is never good enough.

Part of the reason, of course, is that the Browns wide receivers just aren't very good. Mohamed Massaquoi had 6 quiet receptions. Brian Robiski had his first three catches of the season none of which were particularly meaningful. Josh Cribbs, until he proves differently, is on the field simply as a decoy. His route running just isn't consistently good enough for defenses to worry about him. That leaves Greg Little who, though playing well in spurts, is still learning.

As a result, McCoy has to consistently lean on his three tight ends, who are mostly reliable, and the running backs to keep the passing game moving forward. But one of the more obvious points proven in that regard is that Hardesty can't catch very well with nearly has many drops (4) as receptions (5).

Put that together and in that context, the 13 points really isn't that hard to explain, yardage gained and time of possession notwithstanding.

It's a fair point if you want to argue it that when a team only scores 13 points it shouldn't expect to win. I wouldn't necessarily disagree. But it's only part of the story as to why this loss was so complete. The other part of the story is the defense played like it was starting to believe its press clippings.

One of the reasons the Titans didn't seem like they had the ball much had to do with their ability to score quickly early on when good defensive play was needed most and gotten least.

After going 3 and out on their first possession, the Titans rectified it on their next. Starting from their own 40-yard line following a Phil Dawson kick off that went out of bounds (which took the shine on his 48-yard field goal moments before) Matt Hasselback moved the Titans quickly down the field finding tight end Craig Stevens for an 18-yard touchdown pass. It put the Titans up 7-3, a lead it didn't relinquish.

The thing about the Stevens catch is that it was the result of a mental mistake by safety T. J. Ward. With Stevens heading toward the left corner of the end zone, Ward worked back toward the middle instead. Stevens was wide open as a result.

But an even bigger defensive blunder came on Hasselback's next pass, which followed a Browns drive that led to a Dawson 51-yard field goal. On first and 10 from their own 20 yard line, receiver Jared Cook ran right past linebacker Scott Fujita, who was on the coverage. Defensive back Usama Young was late helping out (which is being generous because Young was actually nowhere to be found initially) and then took a horrible angle to Cook while Fujita ran futilty behind. Young wiffed at the tackle and Cook went the distance untouched. That pushed the lead to 14-6.

The Titans then pushed the lead even further with a minute remaining in the second quarter on a 4-yard pass to Damien Williams. But the real back breaker on that drive was two plays earlier when Nate Washington turned a short pass into a 57-yard gain that got the ball to the Cleveland 4 yard line in the first place. Chalk that one up, too, to poor tackling and a general lack of effort. It's really the same thing.

It matters little that from that point forward, the Titans only had 3 more points on offense. They didn't need any more. The damage was done.

As much as last week's last minute win was a confidence builder, this week's loss was that much more demoralizing. It would be one thing if the Browns had kept some of the momentum from that victory but instead they came out as if they were 0-3 instead of 2-1. In other words, just when the team answers one question, it raises a whole bunch of new ones.

Where do they go from here? To the bye week first and to Oakland next, but that's logistics. Where they really go is in Shurmur's hands. And like all the coaches who have tried and failed before him, he probably won't find enough time, even with a bye week, to figure it all out.

Lingering Items--Striking Out Edition

The Cleveland Indians may be in extreme cost-cutting mode, which is about the only explanation out there for how they found a doctor to medically clear Russell Branyan. Perhaps their medical staff is made up of equal parts Dr. Vinnie Boombatz, Dr. Bombay and Dr. Demento.

Branyan has yet to sniff an at bat in the preseason as he supposedly rehabilitates the bad back that kept him out of the last month of the season. With almost no competition for his services given both his incredibly mediocre major league career and his physical condition, the Indians got medical clearance and couldn’t wait to throw $2 million of its shrinking revenue pool at him. Now Branyan looks destined to start the season on injured reserve.

To which I can only say, really? It’s exactly this kinds of bizarre moves that gets fans so frustrated with general manager Mark Shapiro. There is nothing about Branyan’s history that suggests the Indians should have signed him even if he was completely healthy. He’s a hack in the field and a hack at the plate. He can occasionally hit the long ball but all the stuff he does in between those pokes isn’t worth the effort.

But Branyan isn’t healthy, which makes this signing even worse. Supposedly Branyan is at least participating in some spring training activities but the fear is that Branyan’s back won’t physically let him swing and miss too often against actual pitching. Here’s the thing, I think Branyan would strike out just as often if he was hitting off a tee. He doesn’t need 50 spring training at bats to polish his batting eye, he needs a new set of eyes.

Branyan claims he really only needs a week of spring training to get ready for the season and for once I can’t disagree. Branyan has been kicking around professional baseball since the mid 1990s. In that time he’s shown remarkable consistency in his ability to strike out, whether it’s against the American League, the National League or the minor leagues. That’s not a skill that takes much practice to master. You could literally pull a man off the street, give him a uniform and a week of practice, and accomplish the same thing. And I’m guess that would have cost Shapiro far less than $2 million.

At some point, which means when Branyan actually goes on the disabled list, Shapiro will switch into “it was worth the gamble” mode when it comes to justifying the Branyan signing. As Branyan’s back persistently refuses to respond favorably to rehabilitation Shapiro will then switch to “this now gives us a chance to look at the prospects” mode.

Meanwhile as the season turns from one fitful month to the next and Shapiro starts entertaining offers for any assets left of value, we can then begin to calculate the real impact of this little $2 million mistakes. As they like to say in government, $2 million here, $2 million there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

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The National Football league has changed its overtime rules for playoff games to hopefully lessen the impact that winning the coin flip can have on the outcome of the game and this is hailed as progress.

For professional sports’ most tightly wound league, I guess it is.

Now, if the team that wins the coin flip kicks a field goal, the opposing team gets a chance. If that team kicks a field goal then play continues. If that team scores a touchdown or fails to score at all, the game is over.

As innovations go it’s a step in the right direction. The NFL has been reluctant to embrace the college overtime rules because how long it can extend a game and hence increase the chance of injury. That’s fine. But what isn’t quite fine are the reasons the NFL has given for not putting its new overtime rule in effect for the regular season.

The first reason is that the outcome of a playoff game is far more important than a single regular season game. That’s not completely true. Teams miss the playoffs by a single game every year and it’s not hard to imagine a 9-7 record being 10-6 but for the want of a chance in overtime. This is even more true in the last few weeks of the season when there are few if any games remaining to overcome that loss.

Moreover, the sheer number of opportunities for overtime games in the regular season vs. the playoffs strongly suggests that keeping the current overtime rules for the regular season will have a far greater chance of negatively impacting the playoffs than keeping the old rules in effect for the playoffs have had.

And while all that’s a fine debate, it’s not the primary reason the NFL isn’t implementing the new rule for the regular season anyway It all has to do with the length of games and the impact on the networks’ schedules.

Everything about the NFL is regimented, from how much of a sock must show on a player’s leg to the starting and finishing times of games. When a 1 p.m. game runs long because of overtime, it bleeds into the 4 p.m. game. When the 4 p.m. game runs long, it bleeds into the network’s prime time lineup and when a Sunday or Monday night game runs long it bleeds into a network executive’s sleep time.

I’m not one of those who will rail against the influence of the networks when it comes to sports because, frankly, without them most people wouldn’t get to see any sports. They bring the games to the masses and pay hundreds of millions each year to do just that. So if their needs can be accommodated, they should.

Where I think the line gets drawn, though, is when the networks’ influence goes from accommodation to actually impacting the outcome of a particular game. The networks invest a lot of money into their primetime lineups but preserving them by enhancing the predictability of when regular season games end is a step in the wrong direction.

The NFL’s overtime rules have never been particularly fair in the first place but they were equally unfair to all teams and that’s a paradigm relatively acceptable. But as the NFL tinkers with the unfairness, it should address it not just for certain games but for all games. It’s as if major league baseball were to suddenly decide that regular season ties after, say 10 innings, are decided by rock/paper/scissors, best two out of three, while post season ties are decided by as many extra innings as it takes to get a winner on the field.

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The Plain Dealer’s Tony Grossi recent article about Holmgren and his philosophy for drafting quarterbacks was interesting both for its candor and it’s message.

As things stand now, according to Holmgren the Browns don’t intend to try and get one of the nameplate quarterbacks early in the draft. That may be a reflection of the Browns’ gaping needs at every position or a reflection of the relative quality of those nameplates such as Sam Bradford and Jimmy Clausen. It’s probably a little of both. And wasn’t it refreshing to hear Holmgren admit on the record that he doesn’t much like Clausen?

Certainly the Browns could course correct and head coach Eric Mangini alluded to as much in his recent comments about how the Browns plan to use all the draft choices they’ve collected like Beanie Babies. But I doubt it, based on Holmgren’s history.

Holmgren has an excellent perspective on drafting players, particularly quarterbacks: keep replenishing the stock. If one doesn’t work out, cut the ties and move on to the next.

Most of the time NFL teams spend years trying to paper over their draft mistakes instead of making the hard decisions early on. Drafting is an inexact science, at best, so it’s not a surprise that it goes awry occasionally (or in the Browns’ case, often). Holmgren’s approach appears to be to treat them as lessons learned and move on.

But Holmgren’s approach, as noted, also is not to pick quarterbacks in early rounds possibly to avoid exactly that trap of trying for years to pound a square peg into a round hole in order to justify the initial drafting decision of a player that doesn’t work out. Think Brady Quinn.

I wonder, though, how this approach really plays out in reality. According to the Grossi story, Holmgren has basically drafted 10 quarterbacks in his years in both Green Bay and Seattle and of those 10 only 3 have been relatively long-term starters: Ty Detmer, Mark Brunell and Matt Hasselback.

On the surface, it’s not a very good percentage and belies, to a certain extent, Holmgren’s reputation with quarterbacks. There are various factors you could attribute to the success rate including, as Holmgren notes, the relative late picks he had when he was in Green Bay.

But the other factor simply is the fact that Holmgren doesn’t seem to like to spend 1st or 2nd round draft picks on quarterbacks. That alone will decrease the chances of success. It’s bound to.

In some ways it’s similar to Ernie Accorsi’s philosophy in Cleveland (and probably elsewhere) when it came to drafting linemen. He felt NFL linemen were made not drafted and thus anything other than a late round pick or an undrafted free agent was all it was worth spending on them.

Eventually that came back to haunt the Browns, just ask Bernie Kosar.

The problem sometimes with successfully converting a late round pick into a valuable skill player (Hasselback was a 6th round pick) is that you begin to think you can replicate it again and again.

The Browns’ quarterback situation may not be on life support but the patient isn’t doing too well either. Jake Delhomme is a question mark and Seneca Wallace isn’t exactly an established star. If Holmgren’s goals with this team are realized, meaning it’s successful, then this may be one of the last chances for the Browns to parlay a relatively good draft status and a bevy of picks into a frontline quarterback. I’d hate to think that instead of taking advantage of it the Browns begin a decade long pursuit of picking a bunch of Spergon Wynns in the hopes of finding the next Matt Hasselback. We’ll see.

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You can start with Butch Davis, travel through Phil Savage and end with Eric Mangini and still have only part of the reason why Browns’ owner Randy Lerner finally determined that he needed a serious, credible leader for his franchise.

The rest of the picture is the money. What these various folks brought to Lerner’s franchise didn’t just raise the ire of the average fan who sits at home watching one torturous decision and game after another it raised the ire of those who Lerner really counts on to fund his lifestyle: season ticket holders.

It’s no secret that once the novelty of the Browns return wore off and the reality of massive mismanagement blossomed like dandelions on a spring lawn revenues started going in the wrong direction. Corporations stopped renewing loges, season ticket holders dwindled.

Mangini didn’t do Lerner any favors last season as he seemed to openly work in ways to alienate the fans that remained. Lerner didn’t do himself any favors either as he stayed in the background and remained silent while Berea burned.

Proving that irrespective of your economic status money still talks, Lerner behind the scenes had to see what was taking place and was forced to act. It was time to bring in real grownups to run the franchise. Hence the hiring of Holmgren.

While Holmgren’s hiring was a huge step in the right direction, it didn’t fix everything overnight. Now comes the hard part of wooing back the alienated in order to get the revenue item of the budget back in line. As a first step, the Browns have quietly been trying to re-engage former season ticket holders by offering them a chance to get back into the tent without paying a for a new personal seat license so long as they jumped ship within the last 3 years.

The way to think about this is to think of season ticket holders like disenfranchised members of a country club. Having once paid the initiation fee in the form of a PSL only to find the experience miserable and not worth the money, the likelihood of them returning for more punishment is greatly diminished particularly if they have to endure the indignity of once again paying an initiation fee in the form of another PSL. Waiving the initiation fee or, in this case, the PSL, might get a few back though.

I suspect that the Browns may be able mildly successful with this move but I also suspect that before it’s wildly successful the Browns are going to have to show some tangible and sustainable improvements on the field.

So far this offseason it’s mostly been confusion, but at least it’s the good kind of confusion. Still, having been burned with one of life’s all time worst investments, does any season ticket holder or loge owner suddenly freed of paying for games they aren’t likely to attend ready to immediately jump back in? Probably not. Good try, though.

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The Browns’ signing of free agent linebacker Scott Fujita may not have moved the needle all that much in the fans’ eyes, but here’s a reason to like Fujita: brutal honesty.

Fujita is an executive committee member of the players’ union. Talking with the USA Today about the possibility of the owners locking out the players in 2011, Fujita said, among other things: “Why would you want to lock us out and ruin what is such a good thing right now? When 40 to 50 million people are turning in to watch the NFL draft? It’s one of the most boring things on television. So why mess that up with a lockout?”

Good point. But for clarification’s sake, it’s not the most boring thing on television or even the most boring thing the NFL does. That would any preseason game.

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Since I’ve given short shrift to the Cavs in this column, here’s a question to ponder: When Zydrunas Ilgauskas decided not to sign with the Cavs for next season as well, do you think he knows something we don’t about who might