Minimizing Success

The Cleveland Browns had the kind of draft this past week that they should have had given the kind of team they have.  It was solid and unspectacular, built around the defensive and offensive lines.  In short it was the kind of draft that teams trying to rebuild should have.  

Too bad it’s taken them almost 15 years to put together a draft that probably shouldn’t have otherwise been necessary by this time.

Always chasing rainbows and coming up short, the Browns have languished for all the reasons that this particular draft highlighted.  Faulty draft strategies, raging egos, bad trades, major miscalculations all have conspired for years to keep this team firmly entrenched in the bottom tier of the league.  Browns teams for the last 15 years have lacked cohesive, strong offensive or defensive lines and had near zero depth at any position.  So even when a player with some skill somehow landed in their laps, the inevitable injury revealed the kind of gaping holes that are the hallmark of all bad teams.

Filling several holes shouldn’t have been this hard for this long.

Forget about the actual players the Browns drafted for a moment.  Few if any fans can comment intelligently on even Danny Shelton, let alone Charles Gaines or Hayes Pullard.  Focus instead on the configuration of the draft.  Notice the patterns.  This draft was constructed like most teams are supposed to be constructed.  It was built from the inside out.  That may be easy to do in a sense for a team like Cleveland that has so many overarching needs.  Yet it still takes some discipline to do the right thing when it’s oh so easy to do the flashy thing when the person calling the shots walks in loaded with draft picks and oozing ego.

Credit then should go to general manager Ray Farmer on that aspect of the draft.  Whether he chose the right players is not something that’s going to be known any time soon.  Given Farmer’s history, there’s every reason to question his player evaluations.  But at least you can’t complain about the approach.

And yet as the Browns enter next season, they’re forced to answer the same lingering question they’ve been forced to answer for most of its 2.0 existence: do they have a quarterback on whom the team can rely?  The answer is likely the same as it’s ever been.  Probably not.

What struck me about the post-draft press conference that Farmer and head coach Mike Pettine held was not what they had to say about who they drafted but what they had to say about who they didn’t.  Pettine, in one of the stranger answers I’ve ever heard, said that the team is actively working to “try to minimize the importance of the quarterback.”  Good luck with that.

That statement makes some sense in a Trent Dilfer kind of way and if I were Pettine I suppose I’d say the same thing.  It’s been shown to work that if the defense is stronger than any other in the league, the offense can afford to be merely serviceable.  That’s the formula the Baltimore Ravens used to ride Dilfer to and through a Super Bowl.  But it’s not easily replicated for the most obvious of reasons: you have to feature an intimidating and dominating defense.  

The Cleveland Browns aren’t close to being either.  One draft isn’t going to turn this Browns’ defense into the second-coming of the Ray Lewi-led Ravens defense and besides this offense isn’t even merely serviceable even if it was.

Josh McCown, who looks to be the Browns’ starter next season by default, if for no other reason, is the quintessential NFL journeyman.  When he starts for the Browns in September, it will be his 14th season.  He really has only been a starter for two of those seasons and neither one of those were particularly successful for his team.  Indeed he was available to be signed mainly because as Tampa Bay’s starter last season he went 1-10.

When Dilfer signed with the Ravens, he was in just his 7th season.  Although you can easily make the case that he too was a journeyman, that’s mostly informed by the back end of his career and not his career to that point.  In 5 of the seasons before he joined Baltimore, he was the team’s starter and had some measure of his success, certainly more than McCown can claim. 

So when the Ravens asked Dilfer to mostly not throw up on himself so that its defense could intimidate and dominate, there was every reason to think that it was a job Dilfer could handle.  And even if he couldn’t, he had a strong running game featuring Jamal Lewis in his prime and an up and coming Priest Holmes.  The only deep threat the Ravens had was Qadry Ismail, the kind of receiver that the Browns seems to feature these days, but they did have Shannon Sharpe, one of the top tight ends in the game.  Dilfer, a player with plenty of games already under his belt, was the near perfect player for a team trying to “minimize” the importance of the quarterback.

The same cannot be said for McCown.  He isn’t joining a team with a dominant defense and there simply isn’t enough on offense to allow the Browns to “minimize” all of McCown’s shortcomings. The team neither features a strong running game or even a serviceable passing game.  It lost its only decent tight end in the offseason and while Brian Hartline is a nice signing, that’s all he is.  The team didn’t suddenly get better because of Hartline.  His presence mostly allows Farmer to credibly claim that the team hasn’t regressed in its receiving game.

The Browns may be minimizing the importance of quarterback because it really has no other choice.  Pettine and Farmer can talk about how they like where they stand at that position but it rings even hollower than Brian Kelly’s claim that his quarterback situation at Notre Dame is superior to that of Ohio State’s.

What both Farmer and Pettine well know is that the NFL isn’t a league where a team can be successful minimizing the most important position on the team.  It’s like the body saying it’s going to minimize the importance of the heart.  If this year’s draft ends up being as successful as the Browns hope it is, it will highlight exactly the flaw in their current thinking.  The Browns could conceivably get to 8-8 and maybe even 9-7 with better defense and better offensive line play and depth, but it simply cannot make the leap into the upper tier of this league without a quarterback that causes opponents to worry or at least scheme against.

This team may not need Tom Brady but it sure as heck is going to need more than Josh McCown to be successful.  Perhaps though if the team can find a way to climb out of the hole it’s dug for itself with so many prior lousy drafts then perhaps they will be able to convince a quarterback of more merit and a receiver in his relative prime to join the team for the next phase of its journey.

The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Johnny Freakin' Football Edition

It’s always nice when a team like the Cleveland Browns gets the player it really wants in the NFL draft.  Who knew that player was Justin Gilbert?

Bouncing around the first round like he was a combination of Butch Davis and Eric Mangini, Browns general manager Ray Farmer certainly made things interesting for the fan base.  And when Farmer traded back up to only then draft Gilbert you could hear the loud sucking sound throughout Northeast Ohio.  Fans once again felt their usual abandonment as another general manager used the 8^th pick in the draft to select the 16^th best player.

But things ultimately broke Farmer’s way and through another bounce he was able to grab Johnny Freakin’ Football with the most cursed slot of the draft for quarterbacks, 22^nd.  That was the home of such previous notables as Brady Quinn and Brandon Weeden, and also J.P. Losman. 

When the dust cleared, the Browns had a new cornerback and a new, potentially franchising shifting quarterback in Manziel.  For all the jumping around Farmer did it’s hard not to shake the notion that simply staying put could have, likely would have, resulted in the exact same picks.  The advantage, and this is actually significant, is that for all that movement the Browns not only ended up where they would have any way without it but they essentially stole Buffalo’s first pick in next year’s draft for what amounts to a couple of extra later round picks.  It was a mild version of the movie Draft Day.

In that context, Farmer had a good, if lucky, night on Thursday and, frankly, it’s about time someone associated with the Browns had a lucky night.  It wouldn’t surprise at this point if the other shoe dropped and owner Jimmy Haslam found himself indicted on Friday.  The Gods never give to Cleveland what they can’t otherwise extract at a higher cost.

There’s a lot to like about Manziel.  Most of it is intangible and if there is one thing that most NFL general managers and even coaches hate is taking a player whose intangible qualities are greater than his physical attributes.  It’s exactly the reason that Jacksonville drafted Blake Bortles instead of Manziel.  Bortles is built like Ben Roethlisberger and is better looking.  Jacksonville went all in on that combination and we’ll see whether it was justified or whether Bortles will be the kind of guy who, in two years, is trolling for backup spots in Dallas like Weeden.

There’s no way to know Manziel’s real upside as a NFL quarterback until he gets under center week after week.  Weeden never lost the deer-in-the-headlights look.  Tim Couch had his spirit broken.  The game just moved too fast for Brady Quinn and Colt McCoy. 

In some ways, many actually, Manziel reminds me of Brian Sipe, another relatively weak armed, undersized quarterback whose greater gifts were mental.  There are ways to overcome a lack of size in the NFL and Manziel certainly carries himself as the kind of player who can overcome his lack of size.  Drew Brees was in a similar position.  If Manziel even ends up as a better version of Sipe then the pick will have been justified, particularly in context of all the other blown first round picks over the years.

But the dark cloud hanging over Johnny Football is whether he ends up as more of a Mike Phipps.  There’s an old story about Phipps that former Browns head coach Blanton Collier liked to tell.  When Phipps was drafted, Collier, who had retired, was brought back as a consultant to help school Phipps and get him ready for the NFL.  Collier was an offensive genius with a knack for quarterbacks.  He was everything that Mike Holmgren wanted to be.

Collier worked Phipps out and gave him the benefit of hour after hour of classroom instruction.  When the schooling ended several days later, Collier asked to looked at the notepad he had given Phipps at the beginning of their sessions.  Collier wanted to review the notes Phipps had taken.  When Collier opened the notebook, it was blank.  Phipps hadn’t written a thing.  It was at that moment, with Phipps still a long way from playing his first game, that Collier knew the Browns had made a mistake.

Which way will Manziel go?  Will he be an engaged student or the know-it-all jock with the attention span of a puppy?  There’s no good way to know before the draft because it can’t be measured.  Jon Gruden’s quarterback school is hardly a benchmark.  It’s a made for television farce that by design offers little insight about the player while extolling the perceived genius of Gruden.  Manziel’s heart will get measured from about this point forward as head coach Mike Pettine and offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan figure out just what they got in Manziel.

The other thing about Manziel, and this is hardly news but still remains worth mentioning, is that his lack of size and lack of build is still a detriment in a league of physical freaks.  Manziel may be able to move around better than, say, Bortles, but he won’t be able to absorb the same kind of hits.  In other words, the chances of Manziel coming out of any season without at least one separated shoulder seems remote.  Pray that it’s his non-throwing shoulder.

Manziel proved himself to be a playmaker in college, not just once but several times over.  If there’s one thing that the Browns have lacked for most of their 2.0 existence is playmakers of any kind.  Manziel seems to have a knack for stepping in shit and coming out smelling like a rose.  For most of the Browns 2.0 existence when a player’s stepped in shit he rarely can get his foot dislodged let alone get the stink out of his jersey.

As for the drafting of Gilbert, I’m skeptical.  It was a reach and in exactly the most awful way possible.  Pettine said that Gilbert was the best corner for the Browns’ scheme.  Uh oh.  When a team as perennially awful as the Browns and with more holes to fill than a city crew filling potholes on Cleveland’s east side focuses less on picking the best player available and more on filling the roles imagined by a rookie head coach that no one wanted initially, everyone and I mean everyone should see that for the red flag that it is.

Does that mean Gilbert was a mistake?  That can’t be judged specifically.  It’s more the process of his selection that should worry the fans.

Farmer now enters the second day of the draft knowing that he did well on the first part of a multi-part exam.  But he can’t coast.  The rest of the exam awaits.  The reason the Browns are the Browns isn’t just that they made horrific first round selections.  It’s because they also made awful selections in most other parts of previous drafts as well.

Coaches like to say that defense wins championships, but that’s only half right.  What matters just as much if not more in the NFL is depth.  It’s great to have a shut down corner like Joe Haden, for example, but when he was out the drop off was precipitous.  No team can have two deep Pro Bowlers at any position but what’s hindered the Browns even more than a lack of a quarterback is the fact that the fall off between its starters and its backups is probably greater than that of any team in the league.  Indeed, most of the Browns’ starters would be the backups on other teams.  When a starter goes down in Cleveland they’re filling it with a guy that wouldn’t likely be on most teams’ rosters.

Let’s see how the rest of the draft turns out.  It’s off to an interesting, intriguing start.  And let’s recognize, too, how genuinely nice it was to see Browns fans celebrate the drafting of Manziel particularly after it looked like the worst thing in the world had just happened to them, they weren’t getting what they wanted.  But remember that if not getting what you want is the worst thing in the world, the second worst is getting what you wanted.  Now that’s a theme Browns fans should be able to rally around.

The Best Player Available

With the NFL draft looming like another rain cloud over an Ohio spring day, fans in these parts are still wondering what to think. The hard core among them have read every draft preview written by anyone with access to a keyboard and a web site. They've scoured all of the various mock drafts for insight. They've debated their buddies over beers. And yet until someone representing the Cleveland Browns shoves an index card in front of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell next Thursday night, there is no way of really knowing how to fill in the blank that follows the statement “with the 6th pick in the 2011 NFL draft, the Cleveland Browns select....”

If waiting is the hardest part, it's also just about the best thing about the draft. Anticipation, speculation, tea-leaf reading, call it what you want but the NFL knows full well that what attracts people to their made-for-television NFL draft spectacle, now spread over 3 days, is the anticipation.

And no matter what actually happens, it never lives up to the hype—just like Christmas.

Browns' general manager Tom Heckert gave the traditional pre-draft press conference a few days ago where he was as purposely vague as the plot to a M. Knight Shyamalan film. I think Marla Ridenour from the Akron Beacon Journal aptly captured the proceedings when she admitted how absurd it was for her to listen back to Heckert's chuckle trying to discern meaning in it when he laughingly suggested he didn't share the same perception as many others about North Carolina defensive end Robert Quinn and Auburn defensive tackle Nick Fairley.

That's what these things come down to and yet we know that it was never Heckert's intent to really offer any insight into the Browns' thinking about the draft. That's not a criticism, either. No good could come from being forthcoming and that's the point. Heckert is no different then any team's general manager. Draft plans are treated by NFL teams like Coca-Cola executives treat theformula for its soft drink.

But that doesn't mean that Heckert's press conference was a total waste of time. For example, I really believe him that the team will be following a “best available player” philosophy because, as he frankly noted, the team has holes just about everywhere. Outside of left tackle, there isn't a top player in the draft that couldn't help this team.

As obvious as a point Heckert made, it was also refreshing. It's not that the Browns' don't have some decent players on the roster, they do. But so many of the players they shove into starting roles are more suited for and would be playing back up positions on really good NFL teams. In a nutshell, that's why the Browns continue to struggle.

The conventional wisdom emerging is that despite the talent deficit on this team the Browns' biggest need is at receiver. Most mock drafts have the Browns filling that need first. Heckert, of course, gave no clue unless you think he was employing a little reverse psychology in suggesting that he's well satisfied with the Browns' current crop of receivers.

Maybe Heckert was doing just that but then I think back to last season when he said the same thing and then went about proving that point by essentially not bringing in any receivers to compete with the rather pedestrian group the Browns currently have on the roster.

Last season should have convinced Heckert that a significant upgrade is needed in that group, but perhaps not as the most pressing need. It just doesn't feel like Heckert will go in that direction. Indeed if you ask 10 people, be it fans or personnel experts from other teams, you're likely to get 10 different opinions on the Browns' biggest need.

In some ways though it's just that kind of divergent opinion that makes the draft so much fun in the first place. With a plethora of gaping needs but no consensus on which pothole should get filled first, the Browns can virtually go in any direction and delight one group of fans and tick off another.

As much fun as this all can be, one of the least pleasant side bars to the run up to the draft is the real damage it can do to the reputation to a prospective player. In the rush that teams have to disguise their intentions, they have no problem using their various “unnamed sources” to trash a player they may secretly covet.

This year's victims seem to be Ryan Mallett, about whom various unconfirmed suspicions about his character are flying about, and Da'Quan Bowers, the Clemson defensive end, about whom various unconfirmed reports on the condition of his knee are likewise flying about.

Heckert didn't address Mallett, probably because there is no reason to deflect attention away from a player the Browns aren't going to draft anyway. But he did address Bowers and contributed to the mess by saying that the team believes Bowers' “knee is going to be all right.”

That's code, of course, for saying that the knee is still a problem. If that's the case, then so be it but it's puzzling why Heckert would couch it in the vein that team doctors have examined Bowers “a hundred times” and are lukewarm in their assessment. Maybe Heckert believes Bowers is likely to be the best available player but he doesn't want to repeat the Montario Hardesty scenario of last year. Maybe it's just another way of telling other teams that the Browns remain interested in hopes that someone will grab Bowers before the Browns have to make a tough decision about him.

Either way, though, it's Bowers' future that's being bandied about like a shuttlecock in a backyard game of badminton and you can't help but feel a little sorry for him. If nothing else, it's going to cost Bowers some money either way.

But if you remain convinced that there is some value in trying to figure out if Heckert was really offering any clues as to the team's draft plans and assuming that his discussion about receivers and Bowers were some indication of his real thoughts, then perhaps the most meaningful statement he gave was with respect to how he believes teams are constructed.

“Quarterbacks are No. 1 and then, I think you go left tackle, defensive end, corners; I think those are the groups,” Heckert said. “You can’t hide corners; you can’t hide left tackles and if you can’t get to the quarterback, you’re in trouble. That’s just league-wide.”

That too may be stating the obvious but on the other hand, understanding that philosophy is about the only way to understand why Heckert makes the decisions he does. The issue then is how exactly does Heckert execute on that philosophy and when. He tends to like undersized defensive ends which he thinks can be had later in the draft when other teams aren't looking. If that's the case, then it would hardly surprise if the Browns start off with another cornerback.

Thus, by simple process of elimination the Browns end up drafting Patrick Peterson, the LSU corner with the 6th pick of the draft. It helps, too, that a compelling case can be made that Peterson would be the best available player at that moment. I'd tell you to write it in stone, but anyone writing anything in stone regarding the NFL draft does so at his own peril.

There will be many that disagree with that analysis, of course, but that's also the point. The fans still have something to talk about. As soon as the draft ends another round of debate begins anew, the draft's winners and losers. What makes that both a sublime and ridiculous exercise is the speed at which those curbside analyses are made without even any games having even been played.

Unfortunately, with the the other rain cloud looming over the NFL at the moment in the form of the serious labor problems the league is facing, those curbside opinions may be all we have to debate for the next several months. Even if Peterson is the one for the Browns, there is every chance right now that it will be a long time before the fans have any real idea whether or not the pick even made sense.

Lingering Items--Cautionary Tale Edition

The NFL draft is still nearly 3 weeks away, which can only mean one thing: 100 more iterations Tony Grossi's mock draft. Catch the excitement.

Not to pick on Grossi too much, but this really is the problem with the NFL offseason at the moment. The labor issues are complex and the only thing really happening at the moment. Most beat writers like Grossi don't have the inclination to understand them and use the excuse that the public doesn’t care as a way of masking their own laziness.

They just repeat the line about billionaires fighting with millionaires to shorthand the entire discussion without every pausing to think that the more money at stake the more complex the issues.

So they just shy away from the difficult and give us any number of mind numbing mock drafts, some copy editor slaps a headline on it and voila!, news.

Just Friday morning, Grossi submitted his 7th (7th!) mock draft on an unsuspecting public. Because I tend to have the attention span of a puppy when it comes to this sort of thing, I give it all the attention it deserves, which is very little.

First of all, this is just crystal ball gazing taken to high art. The fact that someone like Mel Kiper, Jr. chose to make a living out of it doesn’t somehow elevate it from alchemy to chemistry nor does it mean that every beat reporter with an internet connection suddenly because a quasi-expert like Kiper.

Second, did I mention it’s Grossi’s 7th (7th!) iteration of a mock draft? That means that when he has a hole to fill in the PD’s ever shrinking sports section in the next several days, out will come mock drafts versions 8 and 9. Sooner or later he’s bound to get something right.

On the scale of problems plaguing just the sports world, the proliferation of meaningless NFL mock drafts ranks just below Gloria James’ temper. In other words, the fact that the PD uses such things as a proxy for real news or analysis is relatively harmless, at least in the short term.

But the problem is exactly that: the PD and newspapers like it use such things as a proxy for real news. They are cost conscious, like every employer these days, but they have completely abdicated any responsibility for covering the real stories of the NFL to those on the national scene that apparently do it better in favor of having their local hack twiddle his thumbs, read a few magazines, and draw up mock drafts.

Maybe it doesn't occur to those running the PD and other newspapers why they continue to fall short in the public's imagination, but perhaps it has something to do with no longer being an outlet for actual sports news, at least the kind of actual sports news that's been ferreted out organically.

Reporters like Grossi can only give the newspaper what they’re willing to pay for and at this juncture it looks like they aren’t willing to pay for much, so in some sense he may not be at fault. But in other ways, he and his ilk are part of the problem because they shy away from the more complex in favor of the inane. Just because his employers are tight with a buck isn't an excuse for being tight with one's own creativity.

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Speaking of the media, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban took to his blog (blogmarverick.com) recently to advocate for a new world order when it comes to media access to his and other teams. He won't get away with it in the short term, but the object of his ire are internet reporters who get bonuses from their employers based on page views for their stories. In a completely related development, USA Today announced this past week that it will start paying its reporters those bonuses.

Cuban's point is that at this juncture the electronic media in particular has taken on a paparazzi-like persona. No longer satisfied to ask the usual boring questions to athletes who give the same boring answers to questions like “how do you feel about losing this game?”, these reporters, Cuban claims, lie in wait in the locker room hoping to get a player in a vulnerable moment and then ask an embarrassing question or respond to a rumor. The intent is to get the player to adversely react, make that the story, throw it up on a web site immediately and bang the page views on the internet site increase exponentially. Advertisers pay based on page views, so it all makes sense.

I have no doubt that this kind of thing happens all the time. And while Cuban, an early adopter of almost any technology, rightly sees the trend that's developing, his inability to put it into historical perspective is clouding his judgment.

Any form of paid media, whether it's newspapers, television stations, radios or internet sites, needs readers to survive. The good outlets try to gain an economic advantage by employing good journalists. Others try to gain their advantage by employing the outrageous. Al Gore and the internet certainly didn't invent that or their employers' compensation systems.

Cuban's solution is to keep all of the local media around and limit or deny access to those purely internet reporters who are incented toward the outrageous in order to enhance page views and get their bonuses. What Cuban fails to understand is that the local media is similarly incented. The local print reporters see their material land on their newspapers' internet sites where the value of their work is likewise judged by page views. Same for local television reporters.

Cuban's barely disguised motive is to limit access to his team, theorizing that the team and each player has access to things like Twitter and Facebook and thus can get their own story out without the need for reporters. That's true in the same way the government has access to the same outlets and likewise could make the case that it could more easy get out its message without interference from the press.

But limiting access is never the answer. There are always stories to be told and leads to pursue and if a few obnoxious jerks posing as reporters make players, coaches and management a little uncomfortable at times, well that's the price to be paid for a free society.

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The sad end to the transcendent career of Manny Ramirez is now at hand and while he was one of the best pure hitters in the game, his legacy will be that of a drug-using enigma.

It's really not a surprise that Ramirez would have violated baseball's drug policy again because Ramirez has proven several times over that he doesn't even have the sense that God gave a light bulb. I have this image of some shady drug dealing “trainer” telling Ramirez that he won't get caught and Ramirez swallowing that line like a dog swallows kibble, three times over.

What's so disappointing though is that Ramirez at some point several years ago reached the conclusion that he couldn't survive on his natural hitting skills any longer and that he needed artificial enhancements to stay in the game. That's simply a thought process I'll never understand.

I know that Ramirez is a fool whose deepest thought may be whether to get the steak or the salmon at dinner but his case still stands for the proposition of why steroids and other performance enhancing drugs remain part of the national conversation.

To watch Ramirez in his youth take the sweetest swing in the major leagues and consistently hit for average and power was a sight to behold. To watch Ramirez in his later years stroll through baseball as a clueless beach bum with a swing long since unhinged from its moorings was pathetic. If nothing else, it was the drugs more than age that took its toll on Ramirez and probably far sooner than it should have.

It's hard to know exactly why Ramirez, in his mid to late 30s, turned to steroids to get himself back on track. The chance of him talking about it publicly is nil. And though he did get caught, three times, I suspect that he'll still serve as a role model for every other player looking to get an edge. They'll surmise that all they need to do differently is be more careful than Ramirez. And given how Ramirez carries himself, there isn't a person alive who doesn't think he could be more careful or clever than Ramirez.

I have no idea whether Ramirez will ever get to the Hall of Fame, I just know he shouldn't. He certainly has the numbers. But when his name comes up for the first time on a Hall of Fame ballot 5 years from now, he'll be just as radioactive as Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire and will deserve to be. There's just no way of knowing how much of Ramirez's career accomplishments were the result of the artificial enhancements he used. Since that will never change, here's hoping that he never does garner enough support for election to the Hall of Fame and that in time he just becomes another footnote, a once potentially great player who threw it all away.

The Three-Cone Shuffle

For any sports fan looking to be vexed, this would be the time. For unless you are an abject college hoops bracketologist (which, by the way, is one of the dumbest made up words ever) there is so little to inform or entertain you at the moment in the world of sports. The NFL, of course, knows this and that’s why the Combine, wrapping up Tuesday, seems like such big news.

I hate the NFL Combine because it’s a mostly worthless endeavor that’s taken more seriously these days than pediatric AIDS. The NFL, of course, is at the center of this farce by staging it in a way that heightens its importance while hiding its irrelevance. This annual festival devoted to all manner of poking, prodding, measuring and ciphering is the kind of fraud that in another context might get someone arrested.

Many of these participating players, mostly students in name only, are put through a battery of mental and physical challenges as a kind of hazing ritual designed to test whether or not they are NFL worthy. Most of them aren’t, at least for the long term. Statistics back it up. At most, only a handful are staring a potentially long-term NFL careers, just don’t tell them that.

When the Combine was a sleepy little endeavor of general managers and scouts and a few bored sports writers, it was harmless and easily ignored, like Dancing with the Stars. But now it’s an Event, a carryover of sorts from the Super Bowl, with 24/7 coverage by the NFL Network. I’ve never been so glad to be a Time Warner customer because they wisely haven’t succumbed to the outsized demands of the NFL noodniks pricing their cable-only product. As a result, I’m never even tempted to flip over to see Group 3 of the offensive linemen do bench presses followed by the vertical jump.

The other problem with the Combine is that makes every Bill from Brunswick think they are draft expert, although in fairness to every Bill from Brunswick, Mel Kiper, Jr. used to be you. The reason this is frustrating has everything to do with altering a person’s expectations when it comes to the draft.

Suddenly they become experts on who the Browns should draft in the third round because they saw this player or that run a 4.2 40-yard dash on the telly-vision. Then when that player isn’t drafted, all manner of disappointment ensues.

And yet these folks aren’t even the worst offenders. That’s reserved for the local media types that trek to Indianapolis in search of The Truth. No particular offense to Tony Grossi of the Plain Dealer, but about the only thing he and his ilk know about any of these college players is what they’ve read in a magazine, heard on ESPN and gleaned from the Combine.

If these sports writers are doing their jobs properly, then they wouldn’t have had time until recently to even begin to contemplate the college game. The odds that any of them have followed college football closely enough to offer an informed impression on the differences between Nick Fairly vs. Marcell Dareus are slight.

Yet from the Grossis of the world we are offered any number of iterations of their mock drafts based on nothing more their casual fan’s knowledge of the college game and its players.

What’s even more amusing is their use of the empirical to back up what are essentially curbside opinions. Grossi offered up the results of various drills that defensive linemen ran at the Combine on Monday. It says, for example, that Fairley finished 14th in the 3-cone drill with a time of 7.14 seconds. I assume that says something about Fairley’s agility in the same way it says something about a dog’s agility when he runs through a line of pylons at a show. But until they put 3 cones on a football field and award points for who runs around them the fastest, it offers virtually nothing for the average fan to suggest why Fairley would be the right choice for the Browns with the 6th pick in the draft.

I’ll take it as a given that the annual meat market that is the Combine is something that NFL scouts and general managers find useful come draft day, though at this point it’s a premise worth challenging. For starters, it’s not an open cattle call. Players are invited based on their reputations. Even then some players don’t fully work out on the advice of their agents, preferring to work out for teams privately under better controlled conditions. Then of course there are those players nursing injuries that can’t perform fully at the moment. As a result, even the comparisons that come out of the Combine are essentially meaningless.

When you put that all together, it’s hard to see how useful the Combine really is in the overall player picking exercise. At this point it’s almost as if it’s conducted not because it’s meaningful but because it keeps the NFL brand in front of fans during a lengthy off-season. And because we have a compliant local and national media starved for any NFL-based news, we’re socialized to the notion that what happens at the Combine is directly related to whether or not a team has a successful draft.

Let’s return to the real world for a moment. If any team is using it as anything more than supplemental material to the more useful information gathered from watching a player perform on the field, then that team is probably failing at the draft. I’m looking at you, Cleveland Browns.

The Browns have made any number of draft mistakes in the last 10 years. By almost any measure, they aren’t very good at it. Perhaps some of that may have been caused by an overreliance of what took place at the Combine, but I suspect it’s more related to the simple fact that they have had a series of boobs making personnel judgments.

Who in their right mind would draft both Brian Robiskie and Mohamed Massaquoi in the second round? Whatever contributions those two have made thus far and whatever else they may make down the road, nothing will obscure the fact that neither was worthy of a second round pick. There are receivers on the roster that Mangini mostly buried who likely could have contributed at about the same level (which isn’t much) just as there are probably at least a dozen others, from undrafted free agents to relatively accomplished veterans looking to hang on for another season or two, that also could have accomplished the same thing.

But let’s not pick on Mangini exclusively. Phil Savage, his predecessor in the personnel picking business, was almost just as bad. Savage traded for and then squandered a first round pick by drafting Brady Quinn. Then virtually every player he drafted in the second round was a bust. And let’s not pick on just Mangini and Savage either. Starting with Dwight Clark and continuing through Mangini, the Browns have been notable for what amounts to the stock market equivalent of buying high and selling low.

Yet I’m more optimistic about the current regime’s ability to pick players and that’s because of Colt McCoy. He’s exactly the kind of player that creates a bunch of negativity at the Combine and causes teams to take a pass. But Mike Holmgren and Tom Heckert looked beyond that exercise in misinformation and saw a player who, you know, actually performed incredibly well over a long college career with a big-time program. Indeed, it’s a measure of their ability as evaluators that they could actually commit to McCoy as their starter next season and no one is much questioning the wisdom of that decision.

If you’re bored and the Combine scratches some sort of itch, then fine. But what’s happening there won’t make any difference to whether or not the Browns get better. The only way they get better is finding players who can actually perform on the field and not just in the 3-cone drill.

Monetize This...

Here is one time being a Time Warner customer is a benefit. No access to the NFL Network.

Because of an on-going pissing match with the NFL over the value of its in-house network, Time Warner cable customers have been spared any temptation to lose valuable minutes and hours that they’ll never get back by watching the NFL Network instead of doing almost anything else.

The problem isn’t the programming, per se. Rather the problem stems from the fact that the network’s very existence encourages the NFL to exploit any and every aspect of its operations. Meanwhile, the NFL’s other partners, like ESPN, feel the heat that an in-house network with a built-in advantage creates and respond accordingly. The outcome is a nearly incoherent yet endless bombardment of programming that provides plenty of analysis with little if any actual information.

Between ESPN and the NFL Network, more hours have been devoted to answering the question about Tim Tebow’s future than had been given to understanding the Apollo Moon Walk, the Nixon/Watergate scandal and the recent health care reform debate, combined.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but far less of one than half of those made by a growing phalanx of so-called analysts whose only qualification seems to have been their singular ability to retire from the NFL before suffering one too many concussions. As for Mel Kiper, Jr., about the only thing worth admiring is his singular ability to turn nerdism and bad hair into a full time, fairly lucrative vocation.

What these two networks, as well as their wannabe little brothers at networks like Sports Time Ohio, really have done is find a way to monetize conversations previously reserved for the local bars. And yet it’s almost the least offensive thing they do.

The most offensive would be, of course, the so-called NFL schedule show on ESPN Tuesday night. If it didn’t exist you’d think I was making it up. The NFL is too stately of an operation to merely release its schedule anymore like every other professional sports league. It needs a grand entrance complete with even more meaningless analysis.

Virtually any conclusion one might want to reach about their team’s schedule can’t be gleaned in late April. It is often less important who a team plays or where than it is when and when isn’t just a function of the time of year. Some teams are quick starters others take time to find their stride.

A few seasons ago the Cleveland Browns opened against the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys came out of training camp clicking and the Browns were absolutely no match for them. Yet several weeks later those same Cowboys were mostly a mess and much less formidable.

Then there’s always the difficulty in predicting the difficulty of next year’s schedule based on the previous season’s records of the teams you’ll be playing. Sure, you can pretty much conclude that the Browns will win maybe two of their 6 division games but that’s just an annoying constant. But will Kansas City again be the dregs of the league given the significant upgrades they’ve made in their personnel and coaching staff? Will New Orleans again play like they own the league?

Each season tends to take on its own personality and it often is far different from that of the previous season. All of this combines to tell me that irrespective of how much the NFL likes to exploit its product, the average fan would know just as much now if the league had simply released the schedule to the media like it used to do.

Falling somewhere between draft previews and schedule releases on the distraction schedule is the draft itself. In true NFL fashion, an event that was already more boring than a Browns preseason game against the Lions has been made even more so by dragging it out over three days instead of two.

You think there is dead time in the average hour of American Idol? Wait until the NFL draft is conducted over three days starting on Thursday. The first round, with the 15 minutes allotted to each team to make a decision they’ve been pondering for months, lasts twice as long as The English Patient, heretofore the benchmark of tedium.

It starts at 7:30 p.m. which means that somewhere around midnight the last of the first round will finish up. For those precious few that haven’t fallen asleep yet, both ESPN and the NFL Network promise to increase the dosage on their broadcast sleeping pills by spending all remaining moments until Friday evening analyzing the “winners” and “losers” of that first round, as if that were even possible.

Perhaps to garner more attention for the even less scintillating second and third rounds, ESPN is broadcasting them on Friday night. If you think watching your team draft a non-descript offensive tackle in the first round fails to quicken the pulse wait until your team spends the next two rounds finding hidden gems like Mohamad Massaquoi and Chaun Thompson.

Then, of course, its on to Saturday’s run-up to the real point of it all, finding Mr. Irrelevant a.k.a. the last player drafted. With just 7 rounds, Mr. Irrelevant isn’t nearly as Irrelevant as he used to be, yet his chances of sticking in the NFL are only slightly better than Jerry Rice’s chances of actually becoming a competitive professional golfer or, stated differently, exactly the same as Michael Jordan’s chances were of becoming a competitive professional baseball player.

What the NFL seems to have absolutely no concern over is the saturation of their product. There can never be too much of the NFL, according to commission Roger Goodell. That’s why we get made-for-TV events like the announcement of the schedule, not to mention “reality” shows like Hard Knocks on HBO, a really bizarre concept when you consider that professional sports has always been the ultimate reality show.

I’d like to think we’ve reached the outer limits of the NFL’s hubris and the public’s ability to fund it, but I know better. What I don’t know is where the NFL takes this next.

If the NFL wanted to have a show that went in depth on the finances of each team, that might be something actually worth watching. If the NFL could partner with MSNBC on weekends and follow the legal exploits of dirt bags like Ben Roethlisberger as they try to wriggle out of legal jams by throwing money at desperate college girls, that might be worth watching as well. Heck, it would be great programming if they filmed Goodell’s meetings with troubled players like Roethlisberger or Santonio Holmes.

I suspect, though, that none of that is forthcoming. Instead the logical extension of the NFL’s march toward world domination is a longer season featuring more teams and a Super Bowl that’s played at the end of March. That way the off-season would really be about 6-weeks long.

In a way, that would be a welcome change. Anything to limit further the broadcast time afforded to Mel Kiper, Jr. can only be a positive.

Lingering Items--Draft Edition

The first casualty in the run-up to the NFL’s annual draft is the truth. With so many media outlets gunning for a competitive edge over each other, it’s no wonder that rumors float out from unnamed sources at about the same frequency as an Indians’ batter strikes out.

Whether or not any of these so-called rumors are true is almost beside the point. What’s far more fascinating is to watch amateur propagandists exploit gullible reporters to the point where the Plain Dealer, for example, simultaneously reported that the Browns were ready to get hitched to Texas Tech wide receiver Michael Crabtree and that they were so turned off by his diva attitude that they were looking elsewhere for receivers. Go figure.

The shadowy team officials that are often cited as the basis for these rumors are simply following a well-worn script by this point. Knowing the voracious appetite reporters have for easy information, these so-called team officials, which probably run the gamut from the kid cataloguing video tapes to the guy emptying the trash, are part of each team’s plan to float out enough misinformation to make sure no one knows their plans.

It has two purposes. First, it keeps other teams from finalizing their plans. If a team drafting below Cleveland really wants Crabtree, it might consider either trading with Cleveland or someone above them to ensure they get their man. When that happens, the desperate team usually overpays. If you’re the Browns in that scenario, that’s a good thing. Don’t get your hopes up.

But the second reason this happens, and a reason that is as least as important as the first, is that it provides the kind of cover these team officials need to keep them from offending whoever it is they do end up drafting. “Clifford Charlton? He was always number one on our draft board.” These are the kinds of things you usually hear from teams like the Browns after they just polished off another disastrous draft.

While not giving into the very tempting proposition to analyze each and every rumor concerning the Browns, the one that still makes me scratch my head is the one putting Mark Sanchez squarely in the cross hairs. Under this scenario, the Browns would move Brady Quinn to make room for Sanchez and in the process gain additional draft picks.

As I’ve said previously, of the two quarterbacks on the Browns’ roster, Quinn has the most trade value. But the underlying premise of the rumors is that Sanchez is already a better quarterback than Quinn. To which I then ask: based on what? Both Quinn and Sanchez sport the right pedigree. Quinn has seen limited action in the NFL but there is enough to know that he belongs. Sanchez is still a leap in that regard, even if it isn’t a tremendous leap.

But more broadly, what exactly is the fascination with Sanchez, at least as compared to Quinn? Is it just a matter of a new regime putting its own stamp on the franchise by ushering out the previous administration’s signature acquisition? I suppose we’ll know the rehearsed answer to all of that if this does indeed take place. Right now, I’m not convinced.

**

The other significant rumor about the Browns, and maybe it’s related, is the possible trade of receiver Braylon Edwards to the New York Giants. To a certain extent, the genesis of this rumor simply stems from the fact that the Giants have a spot open for a new prima donna. The last one they had, Plaxico Burress, not only shot off his mouth one too many times but also nearly shot his own leg off.

Right now, that deal is supposedly dead, or alive, depending on whether you want to monitor the ramblings of Fox Sports or ESPN. Whether this, too, is mostly smoke and mirrors probably doesn’t matter. When it comes to Edwards, if he’s not gone sooner he will be later.

If you think Jay Cutler got his panties twisted up in a knot about being the subject of trade rumors, wait until an Edwards trade doesn’t happen. He’ll make Cutler seem positively statesmanlike by comparison. If the Browns come out of the draft and Edwards is still on the team, they’ll be facing a far bigger issue than they did with Kellen Winslow.

With Winslow, the issue was always money. Edwards, of course, will say it’s about respect or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Rule #1 in pro sports: the word “respect” is pronounced “muhn-ee.” However characterized, Edwards will be a problem and that will be long before he drops his first pass of the season somewhere around the 14:22 mark of the first quarter of the team’s first game, assuming the Browns win the coin toss.

Frankly, I just don’t see how Edwards can survive with the Browns another year, a conclusion that new head coach Eric Mangini probably has reached as well. Whether he’s moved on draft day or not, he’ll be moved. It’s just a question of when.

**

With all the rumors about Edwards bouncing about like another dropped pass, it was somewhat amusing to listen to ESPN’s Colin Cowherd extol the virtues of Edwards and question the Browns’ sanity. Cowherd is a contrarian to begin with so the fact that he is zagging when everyone else is zigging is mostly expected. It’s just that his arguments were so ridiculous it made me long for the days when I used to argue with my daughter when she was 6 years old.

Basically, Cowherd said that Edwards’ dropped passes were no big deal. I guess that’s an easy conclusion to make from the comfort of a hermitically sealed studio in Bristol, Connecticut. If you were, say, Derek Anderson, a shoulder shrug and a “stuff happens” pat on the back to Edwards gets a little harder to do after the fifth drop in a third straight game.

There was more. Cowherd likened Edwards’ drops to Kobe Bryant only hitting 50% of his shots, suggesting that nobody in their right mind would get rid of Bryant under those circumstances. Take your time and mull that around a bit. Ready to shoot the fish in the barrel?

First of all, if Edwards were actually dropping 50% of his passes, no one would need worry about the trade market. He’d be out of the league, if he ever got there in the first place, and trying his hand at broadcasting, settling for doing color commentary for a local junior college. Second, if Bryant only took 6 shots a game and missed 3, no one would even know his name. He wouldn’t be in the NBA. He’d be playing in some church league on Sunday nights. Bryant actually averaged a little more than 20 shots a game and made around 10. That’s a significant difference. Moreover his presence on the court, his ability to get rebounds, dish out assists and play defense makes his contributions far more than the sum of his missed shots.

Edwards, on the other hand, does little else. He is an extremely mediocre blocker (and there I’m being generous) and that’s when there’s a play in his direction. When the play is away from him he does virtually nothing but run a meaningless pattern. Obviously he doesn’t play defense. Thus, the sum of his contributions is two-fold, his presence as an offensive threat and his ability to actually make plays. When he can’t catch the ball, he ceases to be effective in either department. Thus where Bryant can and does contribute every second he’s on the floor, Edwards does not.

The broader point to all of this, though, is that comparing Edwards to Bryant on any level is ridiculous. Bryant is one of the top two basketball players on the planet. Edwards is one of the football players on the planet. The other main point Cowherd misses is Edwards’ attitude and presence. If Mangini and company were indeed put off by Crabtree and his diva like attitude, wait until Edwards starts hanging around the Berea complex on a regular basis after the draft. A receiver, like a cornerback, needs to have a certain swagger. Sooner or later, though, he is going to have to back it up. Edwards takes that concept and turns it on its ear. His attitude is accomplishments notwithstanding

On nearly a daily basis for the last 10 years, fans have had reason to question the sanity of Browns management. Trading Edwards, no matter what it yields, will never be one of them.

**

As you watch this week’s NFL draft, the question to ponder is, which phrase scares you more, “with the 5th pick the Cleveland Browns take…” or “We have a trade, the Cleveland Browns have sent…”?