Getting Defensive

Because it was the end of the season and because he had to say something, Browns general manager Phil Savage conducted his post-season post-mortem on the state of the Cleveland Browns this past Wednesday. Perhaps the most newsworthy item of all was that there really wasn’t much to report. For a season that started and ended poorly but had a whole bunch of good stuff in the middle, the relative quiet and stability and all the hope that brings for next season was the message that Savage wanted to convey. That lasted exactly two days.

Though there were plenty of opportunities for general manager Phil Savage to address the issue when he met with the media on Wednesday, the Browns chose instead to wait until Friday to announce that defensive coordinator Todd Grantham had been summoned to head coach Romeo Crennel’s office and told to bring his playbook.

The announcement on the Browns web site of course strongly suggests that the decision rested with Crennel as it solely quotes him saying that “following our discussions after the season, it was decided that it was in the best interests of the organization to move in a different direction.” Indeed. Just like it was Crennel’s decision to dump accept the resignation of former offensive coordinator Maurice Carthon. And just like it was Crennel’s decision to hire Rob Chudzinski.

Given that the Browns already had the worst defense in the league, moving in a different direction was a given. The fact that it is without Grantham is a mild surprise, but that’s about it.

What is strange, though, is that Savage didn’t take care of this essentially clean-up item prior to trotting himself out in front of the media just two days earlier. At the very least, this suggests that there is much more to the story. However, don’t look for Grantham to spill the beans, at least not anytime soon. He signed a two-year contract extension last June and it’s likely that his ability to continue to collect on that contract, at least until he gets another job that pays him as much or more, hinges on his being tight-lipped about his parting.

The most likely scenario though is that Grantham and Savage ultimately had a fallout over philosophy, the classic reason for most coaching changes. It would hardly shock if Savage felt that schematically changes had to be made. The defense has clearly deteriorated each year under Grantham. In 2005, it ranked 16th in the league. Last year, it was 27th. This year, it finished 30th, a ranking that is actually aided greatly by the fact that two of the Browns last three games were against the Buffalo Bills and the San Francisco 49ers, two of the worst offenses in the league.

These statistics merely reinforce what was becoming more and more apparent on the field. Defensive backs were simply out of position much of the time and thus prone to giving up the big play. But even that paled in comparison to the consistently awful play of the front seven. The Browns were 28th against the rush and no team around them in that category came close to having a winning record. In other words, it’s reasonable to conclude that Savage felt that the only thing standing between the Browns and the playoffs was a better defense. That’s not completely wrong.

But it wouldn’t shock if Grantham felt that the schemes were less of an issue than the injuries, the fact that the most of the aging veterans Savage signed didn’t work out and an overall lack of talent that Savage otherwise failed to procure. While Savage was spending all of his time and capital on the offense, the defense once again was patched together with used parts purchased with the change found under the seat cushions. With better players, Grantham likely argued, no one would be questioning his schemes. That’s not completely wrong, either.

Given this stalemate of sorts, it probably became clear to Savage in the last day or so that Grantham’s likely desire to stay the course and the Browns stated desire to change the course couldn’t coexist. The general manager is always going to win in that battle, something Crennel himself learned when he decided not to fall on his sword by protecting Carthon last season. Frankly, it’s why Crennel is still with the team.

Another factor that can’t be discounted in this matter is the pending contract extension for Crennel. Whether warranted or not, the fact that it is likely to happen, according to Savage, solidifies Crennel’s position with the team in the near-term. That doesn’t mean that Crennel suddenly became emboldened by his new found status to take a stand against his own hand-picked coordinator. More likely, what it probably means is that Savage essentially used the extension as a way to salve any hurt feelings that Crennel might have over Grantham’s firing.

For Grantham, this certainly was a free-fall from the heady days when he was being considered as a head coaching candidate at his alma mater, Michigan State, and even with the Browns if Crennel didn’t work out. As for who might replace him, there is speculation that Mel Tucker, Jr., the secondary coach, is a likely choice. But if past is prologue, the Browns will look outside, just as they did at the end of last season when Chudzinski was hired instead of elevating Jeff Davidson to the job, even after Davidson essentially performed it after Carthon was fired allowed to resign. And if past is prologue, again, the decision on who to hire will rest solely with Savage with Crennel acting in a consultative role only.

Don’t look for any of this to result in the Browns suddenly dumping the 3-4 defense, Crennel’s signature. What you should look for, though, is the Browns to hire someone whom they feel can better translate Crennel’s defensive philosophy to the players on the field, someone who can ultimately get more out of the likes of Kamerion Wimbley and someone who can, in the end, find a way to get the defense off the field once in awhile.

But even if Savage can indeed find all of that in one person, the job is only half complete. If he fails to turn his attention to fixing this pitiful defense by bringing in better players, then it won’t matter even if Savage can find the reincarnation of Buddy Ryan in his prime. The defense won’t markedly improve and Browns fans will spend another season pulling out whatever hair remains in their heads while Grantham if off resting somewhere pausing once every two weeks or so to cash another of Randy Lerner’s checks, silently smirking.

Lingering Items--Cardinals Edition

If the first step in a successful rehabilitation is recognition of the problem in the first place, then maybe the Cleveland Browns actually have a chance to deliver on the promise of this season. It thus is with some satisfaction that Browns head coach Romeo Crennel acknowledged two great truths on Monday: the his team is, in fact, undisciplined, and he is, in fact, to blame.

But Crennel having taken that first step means nothing if he can’t find a way to actually fix the problems. His short tenure with the Browns suggests, at the very least, that fans should have the same expectations for an effective fix as they had for getting the pony they asked Santa for when they were kids: don’t wish for things you’ll never get.

The season is now 12 games old and the patterns are more than set: game on Sunday, film on Monday, off day Tuesday, install game plan, prepare for opponents Wednesday-Saturday. In other words, there isn’t exactly an abundance of time to double back on re-instilling certain fundamentals. That’s what training camp is for.

At this juncture, there is very little chance that the Browns will suddenly turn into a smart, mentally disciplined team. That’s not exactly been a trademark in any of Crennel’s seasons. If penalties are one measure of a lack of discipline and preparation, and they are, the Browns currently stand first in the AFC and second in the NFL with 95 penalties. Although Green Bay, a legitimately good team, is right there with the Browns, the rest of their company in this regard, particularly in the AFC is what you’d expect. Right behind them are such underachievers as Baltimore and the perennially penalty-prone Oakland Raiders.

The issue, though, goes well beyond just penalties. Too many times in too many games there are simply mental errors that suggest that there is an institutional shortcoming. He may deal with the media in a much more open fashion than his former boss, Bill Belichick, but clearly Crennel did not pick up Belichick’s obsessive attention to detail. It’s no coincidence then that this flaw is starting to make a difference just as the pressure and expectations increase.

The fact that the Browns have won three more games this year than last, with four still to play, will undoubtedly earn Crennel another year from GM Phil Savage. In fact, it’s not going out on much of a limb to say that even if the Browns finish 7-9 Crennel will be back. But unless or until he fixes these kinds of issues, there will always be lingering doubts about his abilities as a head coach. And unless or until he fixes these kinds of issues, any talk of a contract extension should be shoved further into the background than any talk about reaching the playoffs this year.

***

If the chat boards and talk shows are any indication, then the fan base is starting to question the abilities of quarterback Derek Anderson. It’s what happens, apparently, when you throw a few interceptions and the Browns lose a game.

Anderson didn’t have a great game against Arizona, far from it in fact. He made a number of poor reads, often hoping against hope that his player would somehow emerge with a catch amidst double and triple coverage. And that was when he was relatively on target. He, too, threw a number of passes high, low and behind his receivers even when there was single coverage. He even committed intentional grounding on the very first play of the game. In short, he made a lot of rookie mistakes.

But the Cardinals game doesn’t necessarily represent any sort of step back in his development. The truth is that the development of most players, quarterbacks in particular, is rarely a straight line progression. It’s bound to be uneven, if only because opposing teams are generally coached by pretty smart guys who can usually figure out ways to counteract what worked for you in other games. They do get the films, after all.

If you look at the big picture, what does emerge is a pretty favorable comparison between Anderson and some quarterbacks who have attained a pretty lofty status. As of this past Sunday, Anderson, in his first year as a full fledged starting quarterback, is averaging 19 completions in 34 attempts per game for 255 yards, two touchdowns and one interception. He also is averaging 7.5 yards per completion.

To put that in perspective, those averages, across the board, are better than the first starting years of Peyton Manning (16 games); Dan Marino (11 games), Tom Brady (15 games), Ben Roethlisberger (14 games) and Troy Aikman (11 games). In fact, Anderson’s averages after 12 games (one of which he didn’t start) are better than Aikman’s second year. To put it in even further perspective, if Anderson’s averages hold for the remainder of the season, he’ll have more than 300 completions, surpass 4000 yards passing and throw for 32 touchdowns against 17 interceptions. Not even Manning had anywhere close to that success.

Of course, there is a lot of football between now and the end of the season and there are certainly no guarantees that Anderson can maintain his pace. But even Sunday, in what many view as one of his worst games, he was 21-41 for 304 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions. This also doesn’t mean that Anderson ultimately projects out as an elite quarterback. The league, indeed all of sports, is filled with players who had one or two great years and then couldn’t sustain it when opposing teams made their adjustments.

The point, though, is that while there may be much to gnash your teeth about with respect to the Browns (see the first point, above), Anderson is well down on the list if he even makes the list at all. His development, in context, has actually been quite remarkable. If the Browns decide not to hang on to him, Brady Quinn will have a lot to live up to in his first year.

***

One of the more hotly debated issues arising from Sunday’s loss was whether or not tight end Kellen Winslow II was forced out of bounds on the last play of the game thus nullifying a truly magnificent catch that would have allowed the Browns to win a game they didn’t deserve.

By this point, I’ve seen the replay at least 30 times, which is 29 more times than the official on the field did and still couldn’t definitively say whether Winslow indeed would have come down in bounds. In fact, it looks to me like the official made the right call.

According to the rules, if a receiver would have landed inbounds with both feet but is carried or pushed out of bounds while maintaining possession of the ball, the pass is complete at the out-of-bounds spot.

Clearly, Winslow caught the ball. But whether or not it would be considered complete by rule comes down to two distinct issues: was he carried or pushed out of bounds and if so, had he not been would he have come down with both feet inbounds?

In the first place, it’s not even clear that Winslow was pushed or carried out of bounds. He was surrounded by two defenders who also were trying to make a play on the ball at exactly the same moment, which means they weren’t instead pushing or carrying him out of bounds. Next, it appears that the defenders did a great job of forcing Winslow to the side of the end zone and, even if they hadn’t, that’s where Anderson’s ball sailed, meaning that Winslow’s positioning and the placement of the ball were at least as big a factor as anything else as to why he landed out of bounds after the catch.

It was a great effort, but the official didn’t get it wrong. And to the Browns credit, up and down the organization, they didn’t complain about it or use it as an excuse for the loss.

***
And speaking of the rule book, left unsaid in all the whining by the Baltimore Ravens after Monday night’s loss to the New England Patriots is the fact that the referees actually blew a call in their favor, giving the Ravens another opportunity to hold Tom Brady on that critical fourth down play, an opportunity which they squandered.

If you saw the game, you know that it was fourth and one at the Baltimore 30 yard line with 1:48 left. Hold the Patriots and the Ravens can at least salvage a little self-respect in an otherwise dismal season. But just as Brady snapped the ball for the inevitable quarterback sneak, Ravens defensive coordinator Rex Ryan called timeout from the sidelines. As the whistle was blowing, the Ravens were tackling Brady for a loss, thinking they had won the game. Instead, the officials awarded them the time out.

According to the rules, however, an assistant coach is not allowed to call a time out from the sideline, only the head coach or player can. Ryan having done so however the officials could have flagged the Ravens for unsportsmanlike conduct, which would have taken the ball down to the Ravens 15-yard line. Instead, by granting the time out, the officials actually gave the Ravens a chance to stop the Patriots and end their perfect season.

Of course, you won’t hear this mentioned by the Ravens. Instead they complained about the holding call on the next fourth down situation, even though it was a blatant penalty. They also complained about Jabar Gaffney’s touchdown grab, saying that he didn’t have possession in bounds. He did.

All the complaining is a sign of only one thing, Brian Billick is in trouble. Rather than focus on his massive shortcomings as a head coach, he instead has resorted to blaming the officials for his team’s plight (remember his rather pathetic claim that the officials robbed the Ravens of a victory against the Browns by actually making the correct call on the Phil Dawson field goal?), a theme his team has now picked up. In the end, though, it’s doubtful this tactic will work on GM Ozzie Newsome or owner Steve Bisciotti. If Billick isn’t fired at season’s end then we know one thing: he’s holding incriminating pictures of either Newsome or Bisciotti, or both.

***
Finally, it was amusing to read that Arizona Cardinals running back coach Maurice Carthon is not bitter over his “resignation” from the Browns last year. Which begs two questions to ponder as the Browns prepare for the Jets: First, if Carthon truly resigned in the middle of a season, why would anyone think he’d be the least bit bitter? Second, how surprised were you to find out that Carthon actually found another coaching job in the NFL? And since it’s the Christmas season, here’s a bonus question to ponder: given that Carthon has gone from an offensive coordinator to a running backs coach, will his next job be as the guy who catches the practice kicks before the game?

The Better Question

It was probably sometime around Brady Quinn’s second completion last Saturday night that the debate began in earnest: what to do with the kid? As the game ended and Saturday night grew into Sunday and Sunday into Monday, the debate has taken on a life of its own. It seems that the only person who hasn’t yet weighed in on whether Quinn should start or see significant playing time against Denver this Saturday or Pittsburgh on opening day is the Plain Dealer’s Bill Livingston and that’s only because he’s waiting until everyone else has gone on record first.

But lost in all this debate is a deeper, darker question: does anyone trust that Browns head coach Romeo Crennel can actually handle the situation appropriately? Personally, I do not. And it’s not that I’m totally anti-Crennel. As a head coach he makes a fine defensive coordinator. But nothing he has said and done to this point in his career as a head coach even suggests that Crennel can make the right decisions when it comes to the offensive side of the field.

There are any number of examples, of course, but just take a stroll down memory lane, all the way back to last season and how poorly Crennel handled the situation with former offensive coordinator Maurice Carthon and you can begin to understand why the chances are virtually nil that the quarterbacking situation now will be handled any better.

With Carthon, there were any number of troubling signs early and often. Carthon in many ways was the football coaching equivalent to Eddie Murray as a hitting instructor. Uncommunicative and prickly, Carthon did precious little to forge a relationship with anyone other than Crennel and it showed both in the results and the comments by the players thereafter.

Maybe it was too much to ask of any coach to control serial loudmouths like Braylon Edwards or Kellen Winslow, Jr. Certainly Crennel hasn’t been able to do that fully. And maybe it’s just coincidence that two of the least quoted players since the arrival of new offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski are Edwards and Winslow. But what was at least clear is that Edwards and Winslow, to the extent that they respect anyone anyway, had little affection for Carthon and vice versa. Carthon’s inability to reach these two strong personalities was as much a problem with the offense as was Carthon’s stubborn insistence that the fullback be the focal point.

But rather than recognize that Carthon was, at the very least, about 10 feet in over his head, Crennel continued to back the troubled coordinator in ways that are still puzzling. As most will recall, it wasn’t until things were really spinning out of control that Crennel said that he might have to start spending more time with the offense in order to make sure things were going in the right direction. In making this statement, Crennel unwittingly admitted that Carthon, so overmatched and underprepared, basically had the kind of free reign with the offense that he neither earned nor deserved.

Crennel did, however, show that he at least has a better survival instinct than, say, Charlie Manuel, and eventually stopped covering for the inept Carthon and sent him packing. While it didn’t save the season, not even close, it did demonstrate that Crennel wasn’t willing to put his own job on the line by standing behind Carthon, George Bush-like, all results to the contrary notwithstanding.

But it is instructive to go back to that sordid history in order to rightly wonder whether there is any chance that Crennel might handle the quarterback situation any better than he handled last year’s debacles. The early signs aren’t promising even for the most optimistic among us.

Based on the late play of Derek Anderson last season, it seemed fair that Crennel would open up the competition for the starting job this year. And it likewise seemed fair that Quinn would be part of that mix when he was first drafted and just as fair when Quinn was not after he voluntarily took himself out of that mix by foolishly holding up his own progress over little more than pocket change for the first 11 or so practices of training camp. But since opening up the competition Crennel has seemed mostly paralyzed by indecision, a state not necessarily self-inflicted but a state he’s found himself in nevertheless.

Unable to muster any command presence whatsoever, Crennel essentially made himself a national laughingstock by admitting he’d just flip a coin to decide who would start—Charlie Frye or Anderson—against Kansas City in the first preseason game. It’s doubtful that’s the kind of attention either owner Randy Lerner of GM Phil Savage wanted to see for their struggling franchise. It’s understandable why it was a difficult decision for Crennel (or anyone) given Frye and Anderson’s performance in camp to this point. But as the head coach, Crennel owns that decision and it’s his to make. Leaving it to fate may seem whimsical but it’s really cowardly. It’s hard to imagine Bill Belichick or Tom Landry or Bill Cowher doing likewise.

Crennel offered the lame excuse that he wanted to see how the quarterbacks would respond to such uncertainty as the reason for flipping the coin. What he really did was ensure that neither quarterback was fully prepared. Though Crennel abandoned his coaching by coin-flipping strategy for the second preseason game, he refused to make his decision on which quarterback would start known either publicly or privately until just before kickoff, again using the same “let’s see how they respond” excuse. Maybe it was just coincidence that Anderson fumbled the opening snap.

As the Browns enter this week’s game against Denver, Crennel has essentially admitted his mistakes and has named Frye as the starter. Crennel told the media at his press conference yesterday “I’m naming him early because I think both guys-not knowing who the starter is going to be and when they’ll play, it began to wear on them.” It took Crennel two games to figure that out?

One could fairly argue that the onus is on Frye and Anderson to be ready, irrespective the inane obstacles thrown in their way by the head coach. Perhaps. But adjusting to unforeseen circumstances within a game is one thing, being kept in the dark about your overall status by the head coach is quite another. It doesn’t matter whether you are a NFL head coach or the floor supervisor at Wal Mart. Employees respond best when they understand what is and is not expected of them. Keeping them in the dark and then dropping them in the deep end of the pond to see if they can swim to shore is hardly the enlightened view of any high performing organization. Put it this way: if Eric Wedge didn’t reveal to his pitchers who would be starting until just before the opening pitch, would it be fair to criticize the starter if he wasn’t effective?

One of the key responsibilities of a head coach is to know his personnel. The reason Bill Parcells was such an effective head coach for so many years is that he knew which buttons to push on each player. What worked on Terry Glenn might not work as well on Tony Romo and so on. But Crennel has never been able to grasp that simple concept, even if its execution is deceptively difficult, and his handling thus far of the Frye/Anderson conundrum is Exhibit 672.

It’s hard to know whether a different head coach might be able to ring more out of either Frye or Anderson to make any discussion of Quinn’s status moot. But it is at least as clear as anything else with the Browns these days that the quarterback quagmire is as much a manifestation of Crennel’s abject mishandling of the entire affair as anything else.

Which is what really makes all this discussion about Quinn foreboding. How much Quinn should play Saturday night or going forward, based simply on his performance last Saturday, is a nice debate but its resolution hinges on an incredibly shaky platform and that is Crennel himself. It’s highly unlikely that Crennel will suddenly become adept at handling tricky situations and, whatever else one might think of the troubles with Crennel had with resolving the Carthon situation, that will seem like a day at the casino as compared to what he currently faces right now with Frye, Anderson and Quinn. But given all that’s come before it, is there really any chance that Crennel won’t roll snake eyes again?