Lingering Items--Winter Doldrums Edition

 When the Super Bowl ends sometime around 10 p.m. EDT this Sunday it will mark not just the end of a very curious but interesting football season. It is also will mark the beginning of the dullest period of the sports season.

Fortunately, the dull times don’t last too long as it’s at most a few weeks until major league teams report to spring training. Until then, though, you have time to catch up on Mad Men before the next season starts in March or waste your time with meaningless games in whatever sport you follow.

The Ohio State Buckeyes men’s basketball team, talented and athletic and a real contender for a national championship, have a difficult schedule ahead over the last half of their regular season, but the presence of a Big Ten tournament and the knowledge that the Buckeyes will be in the NCAA tournament come March render these upcoming games mildly interesting and overwhelmingly irrelevant, like the Plain Dealer on a good day.

Far worse, though, is the NBA season and not just because the Cavaliers are still in the early stages of a major rebuild which, if history is any indication, is a minimum 8 year process. If there are any NHL fans in this area, and I suppose there probably are a few, nothing much interesting happens this time of year, either. Like the NBA, more teams make the playoffs then should and only a few teams really have a chance of taking the crown. That much was known months ago and not much has changed in the interim.

So what we’re left with for the next few weeks is to engage in postseason speculation when it comes to the Browns, preseason bitching when it comes to the Indians and in season indifference when it comes to the Cavs.

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Let’s start with the Cavs. With them, the current mostly boring debate surrounds whether or not the team should just continue on a losing path for the rest of the season in order to secure a better draft pick. Right now, the Cavs would make the playoffs and wouldn’t make the lottery. It’s a situation known as NBA purgatory. There are only a few teams with a legitimate chance to make the NBA Finals. There are a few others that are close to that level and thus would likely benefit from the seasoning that the NBA playoffs bring. The rest of the teams though are just spinning their wheels in the most unproductive manner possible in purgatory.

There is no good that could come from the Cavs making the playoffs this season. They are simply too far away to reap any tangible benefit from playing in the postseason. If/when the Cavs are able to cobble together enough pieces and parts to make a far more legitimate run, most of the players on the current team will be playing elsewhere. In other words, getting playoff experience under their belts, to the extent that matters, won’t benefit the Cavs anyway.

All that said, of course, it’s ridiculous to think about tanking an entire NBA season. Professional athletes for the most part are imbued with a strong sense of pride and competitiveness. They may know their team sucks, but when the whistle blows they still tend to play hard if only because they don’t want to be embarrassed.

There are notable exceptions to this of course. The Cavs, for example, have had rosters full of players that mailed it in for millions a year. But this Cavs roster isn’t of that ilk. They aren’t talented enough to compete at the highest levels but neither are they jaded enough to spend the rest of the season going through the motions.

I don’t think that fans need to worry anyway. Water finds its level and for this Cavs team, that’s somewhere far closer to the ceiling then the upper floors. The lottery looks secure for another season.

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The Indians, on the other hand, are about to embark on another gun fight once again wielding a dull knife. They spent another offseason gathering spare parts and broken hearts through barter while the key competition around them acquired assets with cash.

It’s to their detriment but not their fault that they didn’t acquire Prince Fielder and his expanding waist line. It was an ill advised move by the Detroit Tigers. But it does emphasize why the Indians will always fall short of filling the gaps they need. They are essentially playing in a different league when it comes to better financed teams.

The acquisition of Fielder by the Tigers is interesting because it somewhat dispels the notion of small market vs. big market teams. I don’t think of Detroit as a big market anymore although that tide could be turning along with the fortunes of the auto industry. They're just a small market with a big market thinking owner.

That said, I don’t recommend that any team, least of all the Indians, overpay someone like Fielder who looks like he took training tips from an online consortium run by CC Sabathia and Dinner Bell Mel Turpin. The contract the Tigers committed to for Fielder will be a bigger millstone around their neck then the Travis Hafner contract has been around the Indians’.

I fully expect that Fielder will have some good numbers for the next year or two and some of that will come at the expense of the Indians as they try to claw back into relevance. But come years 6, 7, 8 and 9, if not years 3, 4 and 5, someone in Detroit is going to lose his job for green lighting Project Fielder for $200+ million.

Meanwhile, back at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario, the Indians are putting on their usual offseason flourish designed to systematically lower expectations as part of their overriding goal each year to under promise and over deliver.

Indeed that’s why last season felt like such a revelation. With nothing promised, the Indians easily exceeded expectations. The problem is that with the limited bit of a success comes the implied obligation to further upgrade. Instead fans received the same warmed over players that can be had on the cheap as they rehab from injuries. About the only thing different from any number of seasons past is that the Indians applied that same criteria to one of their own, Grady Sizemore.

The key word in every Indians’ offseason is “if,” as in, “if Grady Sizemore can stay healthy” or “if Kevin Slowey can stay healthy” or, well, you get the picture. But as we know full well by not, most of the “ifs” become “buts” and the Indians, by virtue of their inaction, will again be scrambling to develop other revenue sources besides the more traditional route of good play-inspired attendance. And the circle goes unbroken.

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The Browns have underwhelmed thus far in the off season, but it’s early. They're is still time to massively disappoint. The only move of consequence was the addition of failed former head coach Brad Childress as the offensive coordinator.

But like most things that happen in Berea, it looks like it will come with the odd condition in the form of not allowing Childress to exercise the full benefits of his title by being the team’s play caller. But perhaps Childress was chosen exactly for that reason. As Andy Reid's offensive coordinator in Philadelphia, Childress didn't call plays then either.

Still, it smacks of a compromise reached between head coach Pat Shurmur and his boss, team president Mike Holmgren. Shurmur doesn’t appear to want to relinquish what little power he has and Holmgren needs to quell a fan insurrection over the awful state of the offense. Who better to step in and play the part of a well paid patsy then another client of both Shurmur’s and Holmgren’s and Tom Heckert's agent, Bob Lamonte, the out of work Childress?

Like most compromises of this nature, its structure suggests failure and not success. If the Browns need an offensive coordinator, and they do, then hire one and let him do the job. The last thing this team needs is another consultant, which is what Childress essentially has signed on for.

This is the kind of thing that really is starting to grate on the nerves of fans when it comes to Holmgren. Brought in to make tough decisions, he continuously backs away at the sign of any internal resistance. He kept Eric Mangini on for a year because Mangini literally pleaded to Holmgren to spare him the ax. It was nice for Mangini but awful for the fans and the progress of the franchise.

When he brought in Shurmur, who hadn’t been a head coach at any level, Holmgren allowed Shurmur to control the narrative by suggesting that he could handle both head coaching duties and the job of first assistant. It only sounds reasonable if the Browns were trying to cut costs on the number of assistants, but then when have the Browns ever been on that kind of austerity plan? They trend in the opposite direction, doling out money to meaningless coaches long since gone.

Armed with empirical proof that Shurmur (or any head coach) is ill suited to do the job of two coaches at once, Holmgren nonetheless again backed away from forcing Shurmur to relinquish some control. This can only mean more of the same for next year. If Childress lasts the entire season under this construct I’ll be amazed.

As for upgrading the roster, the first thing the Browns need to decide is which of their free agents they want to pursue. It would seem like D’Qwell Jackson and Phil Dawson are layups. More interesting is running back Peyton Hillis. Heckert is now leaking it to the media that the Browns do want Hillis back.

Hillis, when healthy, is exactly the kind of running back most teams need these days. While the presence of a running game is still important to the overall effectiveness of an offense, attitudes have changed on exactly what a presence means. There can be no doubt, for example, that a team does not need a Walter Peyton or a Barry Sanders to be successful. Quick, name me the starting running backs for the New England Patriots and the New York Giants.

Hillis is exactly the kind of effective no-name player that most teams look to have on board, as long as he doesn't cost too much. His problem is that he is injury-prone. He plays football like Grady Sizemore plays baseball and it leads to more injuries and less effectiveness.

The injuries have hurt Hillis’ bargaining power, but not in the same way they hurt Sizemore’s. Because there’s very little guaranteed money in the NFL, the chances are much better that a team would be willing to sign Hillis to a long-term contract. Sizemore couldn’t sniff anything more than the one-year deal the Indians offered him.

If Hillis is lost to free agency, it won’t be a major blow. I like his game, but he’s fungible with backs like Chris Ogbonnaya, a point that will become more evident when the Browns develop a better right side of the offensive line and employ credible receivers. At that point they’ll become far more pass oriented, like the rest of the league, with just a dash of running thrown in to keep teams honest.

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The other Browns story that remains in the background concerns the fate of former Plain Dealer beat reporter Tony Grossi. The PD’s public editor, Ted Diadiun, gave a rather farcical account of what he termed a painful but necessary decision to demote Grossi, as I anticipated in my earlier column on this subject.

Diadiun pulled out the old “standards” card and essentially suggested that it wasn’t Grossi’s views of Browns owner Randy Lerner that got him in trouble but the fact that he expressed them publicly. Apparently the Plain Dealer discourages its sports reporters from having opinions.

Diadiun is making a distinction without a difference. Irrespective of whether Grossi expressed the opinion publicly, the fact of the matter is that he didn’t respect Lerner and that didn’t seem to matter to the PD until Grossi said it out loud.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not buying the whole “inadvertent tweet” defense Grossi offered in order to save his job. Maybe Grossi did mean to respond only privately but the fact remains that he didn’t and it doesn’t matter anyway. Whether he made his views of Lerner known publicly or privately is irrelevant. He held the opinion and it did impact in some fashion on his coverage. That isn’t a sin because every reporter has an opinion on his subject matter and many times it isn’t favorable. So be it.

Indeed, I think it’s cowardly for Grossi to try and hide behind a defense that relies on the phrase “inadvertent tweet”, two words that shouldn’t ever be uttered consecutively, by the way. He feels that way, he said it, end of story. But even more cowardly is the journalistic yarn the PD is hiding behind in order to assuage the feelings of a pathetic and irrelevant billionaire and his ineffective and weak first lieutenant.

The Plain Dealer demonstrated, to the detriment of the rest of its staff, that when the going gets tough, the reporters get tossed.

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With the Super Bowl upcoming and Bill Belichick further affirming his status as one of the all time great head coaches in NFL history comes this week’s question to ponder: When Art Modell hired Belichick, he said it would be the last head coach he’d ever hire. If Modell has stuck to it, would he now be in the Hall of Fame?

Lingering Items--Meaningless Edition

It seems that the rich really are different than the rest of us.

When life gives them lemons instead of roses they don’t make lemonade. They sue. Everybody. Such is the case with Ken Lanci, a self-described self-made millionaire with an abiding need to be loved or at least noticed.

Maybe you read the story, certainly Lanci hopes you did. You see Lanci, the holder of 10 personal seat licenses at Cleveland Browns Stadium (which alone is cause to commit him against his will), filed a lawsuit against the Cleveland Browns and the entire NFL because he believes their labor troubles will deprive him of what he bargained for, mainly to have games to watch.

There's a principle in the law called “laches” which means, essentially, that a person has sat on his legal rights so long, it's unfair to sue the supposedly offending party. That seems an appropriate way as any to dismiss Lanci's looney lawsuit. In the entire time Lanci has owned his PSLs the Browns have barely if at all filled their bargain to him and every other fan. If anything, it was a lawsuit he should have filed years ago.

Sure, games have been played at the Stadium, but that’s a mere technicality. The Browns haven’t given their fans anything more than a few brief moments of competitiveness in over a decade. If Lanci is worried that he won’t have NFL football to watch at the Stadium come the fall, I’d argue that he hasn’t had NFL football to watch the 10 previous falls, either.

So why now? Why indeed and why do you think?

Lanci's an opportunist with an acute need to be noticed who apparently isn't getting enough love from his family. So he decided to essentially light a few dollars on fire by paying a local lawyer who apparently has no other clients to file a ridiculous lawsuit designed not to advance a valid claim but only to bring attention to Lanci as some sort of champion of the little guy. If Lanci is trying to position himself as the voice and face of the fan, it may be time for the rest of us to switch sports.

Let me be crystal clear, though, about this point: Lanci’s lawsuit doesn’t have a chance of succeeding on any plausible legal theory whatsoever and it wouldn’t surprise me if in the process of it being tossed out the lawyers involved aren’t subject to sanctions. They should be.

Lanci bought his PSLs subject to the conditions under which the NFL operates. One of those conditions is that both the players and the owners have certain rights and obligations under the National Labor Relations Act. That the exercise of these rights could result in a strike or a lockout is hardly a novel concept or even unexpected.

But of course that's just stating the obvious which is what the local judge burdened with this dreck will quickly conclude well before Lanci and the inevitable local television station camera crew can get past security at the Justice Center downtown.

If Lanci is just a frustrated fan with a few extra dollars, that’s one thing. But his money would have been better spent on the charity of his choice rather than on the hack lawyers he hired to advance his ego. But of course where’s the publicity value in quietly donating to charity? By being loud and outrageous, Lanci gets his 15 minutes of fame, proving once again that it doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right.

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There was a column earlier this week by the Plain Dealer’s Terry Pluto who detailed exactly why the Indians are a failing franchise. As Pluto rightly noted, the sorry state of this team at the moment isn’t so much due less to its place among other small market clubs than it is to the simple fact that it's been poorly run for years.

As Pluto noted, the Indians have pitched nearly a shutout in viable draft prospects from the years 2004-07, with pitcher Josh Tomlin, a 19th round pick, the only potential player to make the Indians this year that was drafted during those years.

The mystery in all this is not just how team president and former team general manager Mark Shapiro has managed to keep his job with that kind of track record. It’s also in how Chris Antonetti gets promoted to general manager with this same kind of track record.

To put this in perspective, the Browns have had 3 different general managers and 3 different head coaches since 2004 in large measure due to an incredibly poor track record in the draft. Bad decisions in the draft and bad decision in the free agent market have doomed this franchise in every way imaginable.

Indeed the fans are so conditioned to the team’s status as a league doormat that they’ve taken to celebrating the smallest of accomplishments as a way of charting any sort of progress. It's why there was a mini-backlash over the firing of Eric Mangini.

As for the Indians, the fans understand that the Indians are in sad shape but Shapiro first and now Antonetti have done a somewhat masterful job of placing the blame on economics—the league’s and the city’s. It's why no one much cares that the Indians hired Manny Acta as their manager. They know it doesn't matter.

While the sell job from Shapiro has worked in terms of deflecting blame for the underlying problems, it hasn’t helped the gate. Wins still matter. The Indians are no longer much of a draw because in a sport where there are 81 homes games, no one much sees a need to see more than one or two a year when they know that there is maybe a 42% chance of seeing a win.

Arguably, though, the Indians’ situation is far worse than the Browns, which is what is far scarier to contemplate. Assuming the NFL and its players solve their problems, there will be a salary cap of some sort in place and by design it puts teams on equal footing. Players can bid up their services, but there is no New York Yankees in the NFL, a team that can consistently overpay in order to get the best talent. The difference maker is talent evaluation and if the Browns suddenly get good at it, the results will show up sooner rather than later.

The Indians, on the other hand, play in a league where the financial deck is stacked in favor of a handful of teams and the rest of the owners don't seem to much care. The Yankees don’t worry about the draft because they can buy their way to competitiveness each and every season. For teams like the Indians, they only real chance they have (and it isn’t much of one) is to consistently make good choices in the draft and hope that the talent develops. And because talent develops slowly and unevenly, it can take years to show results at the major league level.

And perhaps the most sobering thought of all is that while the Browns at least continue to try and find a system that works, all the Indians have done is go about promoting those most responsible for the mess thus assuring that the systemic problems that exist have little chance of ever getting better.

But sure, let's blame the economy.

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This is the place in one of these columns where I’d try to find some sort of Cavs item to offer but the Groundhog Day nature of their season and their situation means that pretty much everything that can be said about them has been said.

Ok, not everything. The Cavaliers beat the Detroit Pistons on Friday night and thereby closed the gap to three games between themselves and the Washington Wizards and the Minnesota Timberwolves for the league's worst record.

What the Cavs need most right now are the most ping pong balls in the NBA's draft lottery. This may be a somewhat down year for college talent, but one truism in the NBA draft each and every year is that the drop off between having the first pick and even the fifth pick is usually dramatic. The Cavs simply can't afford to lessen their chances at the top pick by winning meaningless games this late in the season.

I'm not advocating that the Cavs lose purposely because, heck, they don't need that kind of push. But with a mere handful of games left in the regular season, it would be nice if teams like the Detroit Pistons took the end of the season with a little more pride than they did Friday night by laying down for the Cavs.

If the Cavs do blow this golden opportunity for the first pick, and statistically that would be difficult but not impossible, there is at least one positive. They will have increased the likelihood of getting the most amount of ping pong balls in next year's draft as well.

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With opening day in baseball a mere week away, this week's question to ponder: how many players on the Indians' opening day roster will be on it when the season ends?