No Such Thing As a Bad Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lingering Items--Branding Edition

The Cleveland Browns’ Johnny Football is the new Johnny Paycheck, having just signed a 4-year $8 million contract with just over $4 million of it guaranteed.  That means we’re about 4 months away from someone, Manziel’s agent for example, looking to redo it on the heels of a couple of completed passes, one of which was for a touchdown.

But on the plus side we’re probably mere weeks, maybe days, away from Johnny Paycheck doing something completely stupid and over the top with his bonus money.  Think Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson character in The Jerk after he became famous, just gaudier.

The last time I visited the status of Cleveland’s premier party boy, Manziel, he was an unsigned gallivant building brand awareness as this generation’s Joe Namath, but with an Instagram account.  In the intervening weeks about the only thing that’s changed, other than a relatively modest rookie contract based on his relatively modest draft status is that his head coach, Mike Pettine, named Brian Hoyer the starting quarterback heading into training camp.

Ok, another thing changed.  Slowly, methodically, the players are aligning behind Hoyer to the exclusion of Manziel, lineman Paul Krueger being one, former Browns’ quarterback Brady Quinn being another. Neither were particularly negative but the first shots across the bow by players who have been there.

Krueger criticized by his constant positive references to Brian Hoyer.  It was telling.  Quinn was more direct, rightly noting that others in the locker room tend to look to the quarterback and how he conducts his business and right now most of Johnny Paycheck’s business is of the drinking, partying and carrying on variety.

Manziel will try the patience of his fellow players, the coaching staff and the fans on a daily basis.  He already is.  Every time a player or Pettine has to respond to a media inquiry about Johnny Paycheck is a minute that Pettine could have spent on almost anything else.  This is a franchise, a coaching staff, a roster that can’t afford any wasted minutes and Manziel has used up any reasonable allocation already.

The arc of these sorts of things is always the same.  An immature kid with too much money pushes the limits of his new found status.  At first it seems reckless but in a fun, vicarious sort of way.  Think Manziel on a floating fake swan, for example.  Over time it goes from amusing to bemusing to vexing as losses mount and interceptions, fumbles and injuries mount.

Eventually there’s a Come-to-Jesus moment where the bad boy, sans eye wink, tries to earnestly convince the fans that he’s reformed his hard partying ways before they got truly out of hand.  Finally there’s the real Come-to-Jesus moment where the career is in jeopardy and rapid maturity is no longer an interesting concept. 

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Manziel will follow this rather predictable arc.  He’s well into phase 1 with as he constantly reminds those who ask that he’s young, single and what’s the harm?  There is none until there is some and there will be some.

The only real question is how long it takes to get through this arc with Manziel.  He may think he’s working hard when he’s not otherwise playing hard but the truth has a way of revealing itself either way.  You can’t wing a NFL career.  You either take it seriously or it spits you out prematurely.

Training camp doesn’t open for another 5 weeks.  That means 5 more weeks of Manziel in borderline embarrassing situations and 5 more weeks of wondering whether this guy is hell bent on partying himself out of the league before he ever sees an actual field.

Manziel’s a young guy and should have his fun.  But he’s not a college guy anymore.  He’s taken his talents to the professional level and eventually needs to act that way.  He seems to have modeled himself after the New England Patriot’s Rob Gronkowski.  That hasn’t been working out too well for Gronk these days as he suffers through injuries one season after another. 

It’s a legitimate question and hope that Johnny Paycheck can stay on the field more than Gronkowski.  But the more immediate question is when he’ll see that field in the first place.  Each moment spent prostrate in an inflatable swan is another minute he’s losing ground to Hoyer.

**
With the NBA draft just over a week away, it remains fascinating, in a dysfunctional Cleveland Browns sort of way, that the Cavs still don’t have a head coach.  For the moment they seem to be following the rubric of the Browns, meaning they are interviewing anyone with a pulse in order to hire someone who wasn’t on anyone’s radar.  Or else they’ll hire a retread.  Dan Gilbert, the Cavs’ owner, has more than sufficiently demonstrated a mercurial almost random streak when it comes to presiding over his investment.

At this point there seems to be no use in hiring a coach before the draft.  Depending on who general manager David Griffin drafts, the potential pool of coaching candidates could greatly increase or shrink precipitously.

There are probably two absolute head shaking aspects to what’s happening to the Cavs.  First, Griffin seemed to be at best a reluctant choice by Gilbert to remain as general manager once Chris Grant was fired.  From that tenuous platform Griffin has parlayed himself into temporarily the most powerful man in the franchise.  With no coach from which to gain input on the draft, the Cavs’ future literally rests on his shoulders.  That’s fine as far as it goes, it’s just that you’d like to think the future would have been entrusted to someone in whom Gilbert had unconditional faith.

Second, if the current model for sustained NBA success is the San Antonio Spurs, the Cavs’ approach couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to it.  The turnover in the front office and coaching staff is the most obvious example but truthfully everything else does flow from that, just as it has with the Browns.

The NBA remains the most difficult sport in which to turn a franchise around.  You need a nucleus as both the Spurs and the Heat demonstrated.  But the difference really is the other 8 or 9 players that fill out the roster.  The Heat lost to the Spurs definitively because most of the roster after the big 3 has simply been cobbled together based mostly on salary and luxury cap considerations.  The Spurs have always been the most methodical team in the league, making sure that every spot had a defined role with a player specifically chosen for that role.

The Cavs right now have a shaky nucleus at best and an almost embarrassing array of players who fit together as precisely as the pieces of 10 separate jigsaw puzzles would if you put them all in one box and shook it.

Never has a franchise been given such gifts by the NBA gods these last several years and while it would be difficult to say that those gifts have been squandered completely it isn’t difficult to say that they’ve been misused.  A team with a more stable ownership and front office would have had a more methodical approach to ensuring that all these gifts were complementary.  Of course if the Cavs had that kind of franchise then they wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.

**

There’s an interesting legal battle brewing at the most mundane of places in the federal government—the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  In a move that seems to have caught, certainly, the Washington Redskins and, likely as certainly, NFL headquarters off guard, the Patent Office invalidated the Redskins’ various trademarks as having been improvidently granted in the first place because they perpetuate racism.

That decision will be held in abeyance while the Redskins appeal, but make no mistake that the death knell on the most racist name in sports continues to sound ever louder.

It is honestly difficult to construct a compelling argument to support Dan Snyder’s dogged insistence on keeping the Redskins’ name.  He’s left with arguing tradition and sounds just as silly as those who argue for abolishing gay marriage. 

Times change as do one’s sensibilities.  The Redskins’ name has always been offensive.  What’s changed is the populace’s sensitivities to it and that’s not a bad thing.  Separate water fountains for whites and blacks were once commonplace and accepted aided by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1896.  Times did change then as did sensibilities and this ultimately was reflected a little more than a half century later when the Supreme Court outlawed it in its seminal Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

The point is that tradition is a flimsy argument because the only real tradition the Redskins name is perpetuating is overt racism.  If/when the Patent and Trademark Office’s ruling is upheld in court, the Redskins will have no choice.  The issue becomes economic and there’s nothing that will change a buffoon like Snyder’s mine more quickly than the lost money from not being able to commercially exploit the name Redskins or, stated differently, watching others do that with no legal recourse.

The more difficult question that’s now getting attention has to do with the Cleveland Indians.  There’s nothing blatantly racist about the name or what that name symbolizes.  A challenge to the Patent and Trademark Office probably wouldn’t be successful if the intent was to rid the team of the trademark “Indians.”

The real issue is the trademark Chief Wahoo, a clownish almost disturbing caricature of an Indian.  The toothy grin, the bright red skin.  Like the name Redskins, the real truth is that American Indians always saw Chief Wahoo as a racist symbol, just as African-Americans saw the Little Black Sambo character as racist.  The only thing that’s changed is that people are starting to better understand what they mean.

To a certain extent the Indians have been de-emphasizing the Chief Wahoo symbol for the last several years and I’m certain that the Patent and Trademark Office’s ruling in the Redskins matter will accelerate this thinking.  If it didn’t, it should.  If the Indians end up in the Patent and Trademark Office with a similar challenge to a patently offensive symbol they’ll get a similar result.

It would be nice to think that the Indians owners would show some leadership and courage on the issue and declare immediately that the Chief Wahoo symbol is now in the past and won’t be used again to market the team.  We all should now call on them to do it.

I don’t think it will happen.  But I do believe the Dolans are more sympathetic to the issue than Dan Snyder is to his issue.  That means fans will see continue to see less and less of Chief Wahoo until the point where he’s disappeared altogether, not officially necessarily but effectively.  Once the team voluntarily takes any economic clout out of the symbol, its use becomes irrelevant.  The only real issue with this approach is that by not definitively eliminating it now, they leave open the possibility of future owners of the team taking a different approach.

Let’s avoid the circus.  Just do the right thing now and move on.  Chief Wahoo, it’s time to report to the front office and bring your playbook.