History Is Not On His Side

At this point it seems like a question of when and not if, as in when will Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam clean house once again?

There is simply  no way a knee-jerk owner like Haslam tolerates regression, right?  Well, that’s probably true.  Still the dilemma he faces is a tad challenging to resolve, assuming you’re willing to give Haslam some credit for not being a total reactionary.

The mental gymnastics Haslam must be going through since watching this supposedly better version of the Browns get embarrassed nearly every week havsto be exhausting.  Haslam can’t like what he sees any more than any fans like what they see.  But the strong evidence tells him and you that the key to long term success in the NFL (and most businesses, actually) is stability, particularly at the top.

So does he stay the course out of the need to create stability within the league’s most unstable franchise or does he once again turn over the apple cart in the name of finding something or someone who can turn it back upright and get it going in the right direction?  With great money comes great responsibility.  The only thing worth gambling on is that whatever decision he makes will be wrong because, Cleveland.

The NFL out of necessity and union rules, treats most players as fungible commodities, a balance that takes into account absolute value, value about or below the potential replacement and salary cap impacts when deciding in any given season which players stay and which go.  Indeed teams turn over 25-30% of their rosters each year. 

The team’s that can perform the evaluation tasks well do so with good management that stays in place from year to year.  The New England Patriots are the gold standard.  The teams that perform those tasks poorly often are unstable franchises who hire poor talent evaluators and mediocre coaches.  The Browns are that gold standard.

While Haslam should prize stability but that only matters when you have the right folks in place at the top.  The Browns don’t and never do.  Let’s look at the last 15 years for the clues.

 Randy Lerner seemed to face a housecleaning dilemma every year and history has more than proven that in every case he actually fostered regression by hanging on to coaches and general managers who clearly were not suited for the job.  His biggest fault was that he couldn’t tell the difference between a Cadillac and a Camry.  As long as he had someone driving him around I guess it didn’t matter.

Since the Browns returned in 1999 only one fired head coach of the Browns went on to be a head coach again.  That would be Romeo Crennel who, incidentally, still has the longest tenure as a Browns head coach in the 2.0 ERA.  Crennel was an awful head coach overseeing typically awful Browns personnel.  He won 6 games his first season, 4 his next.  He should have been fired then as it led to what came next.  Perhaps his major accomplishment was to win 10 games in his third season, which made it look like Lerner was a genius even though the Browns are one of the few teams in NFL history to have won 10 games and not make the playoffs.  More to the point though is that while the NFL is a bottom line league, those 10 wins were soft.  Fans and history will recall that the Browns had a historically easy schedule that entire season, a point that was proven the following season when a Browns team supposedly on the come sank back to Crennel’s set point of 4 wins.  He was fired and instead of being two years into a new regime and direction the Browns were set back by those same two years.

And while Crennel did find a head coaching job again, that shouldn’t alter Haslam’s view.  After getting fired by the Browns Crennel ended up in Kansas City as a defensive coordinator, a job for which he was uniquely qualified and successful.  He became head coach when the Chiefs fired Todd Haley.  Crennel continued into the next season as well, his only full year as a head coach the second time around.  He promptly won 4 games with a Kansas City team many also thought was on the come and was fired. (Indeed that Chiefs team was on the come.  Andy Reid stepped in the next year and promptly won 11 games with essentially the same personnel.)

After that you have Butch Davis who never got another head coaching gig in the NFL but did land in college at North Carolina and was fired as part of the stench of an extensive academic cheating scandal that led to the Browns ultimately drafting Greg Little, but that’s another failed story for another day.

Then there are the various general managers all with the same awful track record and not a one of them hired thereafter as a general manager anywhere else.  That list includes Dwight Clark, Butch Davis (served as his own GM), Phil Savage, George Kokinis (although he was a mere puppet for the subordinate that hired him, Eric Mangini, who also hasn’t worked again as a head coach), Tom Heckert, Mike Lombardi and now Ray Farmer.

The point here is that these aren’t just trends to be interpreted.  The Browns have an unblemished record of hiring awful general managers and head coaches and every time they held on to one or the other longer than they should have it set the franchise back even further.  Crennel is an obvious example but no bigger than Mike Holmgren holding on to Eric Mangini despite the fact that he literally couldn’t stand him.

So as Halsam finds himself on the precipice of having to figure out when housecleaning should commence, the history he need rely on is not that of the wonderfully ethereal concept of stability but that of a franchise he owns that has been 100% wrong for 16 straight years.

I’ve already and repeatedly chronicled general manager Ray Farmer’s shortcomings.  His talent evaluation skills and philosophies are so misguided and inept, the results on the field can fairly be said to be inevitable.  Holding on to him is worse than holding on to Phil Savage and on par with holding on to Dwight Clark.   And yet to place all the blame on Farmer is to ignore Pettine’s massive shortcomings as a head coach. Those, too, are becoming more pronounced as the weeks roll by and here the parallels with Crennel are eerie.

In a sense, the first four games of the season, played against teams of similar caliber, provided a nice experiment where you can control certain variables to determine where the problems really exist. The debacle against the Jets, for example, highlighted the difference a coach can make on a bad team.  The Jets were a mess last season, similar to the Browns.  Yet week one the Jets, without any significant upgrades in personnel, came out well prepared and more than ready to play.  The Browns looked like they had just entered the second week of training camp and were essentially pushed around the field.  The game set a tone for both teams.  You wouldn’t be wrong to note that one of the hallmarks of Crennel’s teams each week were their lack of preparation.  There seemed to be little sense of a game plan or even a general direction.  To lose the number of games Crennel has consistently lost in his head coaching career takes the near perfect convergence of awful talent and coaching.

Switch over to Sunday’s loss to the middling San Diego Chargers.  So much of that loss stems from exactly what Pettine doesn’t bring to this team.  If Pettine is really as hard-nosed as we’ve been told, then his biggest failing comes from not instilling a similar mindset in his team.  That’s not his biggest failing.

As a side note “hard-nosed” is one of those grand football euphemisms, like “blue collar,” that’s supposed to conjure up an image of a team that relies less on smarts and more on brawn and work ethic to get the task of winning accomplished.  It’s a meaningless euphemism.  Less talented teams can and sometimes do succeed by the sheer force of their work ethic and tenacity.  But that’s rarely true in the NFL where personnel is remarkably similar team to team.  Put it this way and maybe exclude Cleveland in this sentence but if players at that level weren’t supremely talented, mentally, physically and emotionally, they would have never made it to the NFL in the first place.

Now what isn’t a euphemism at all and where teams often do reflect their head coach is in discipline and attention to detail.  One of the reasons Crennel took so long to become a head coach and then failed was his inability to bring the necessary attention and detail to the big picture.  Strong-willed miscreants like Braylon Edwards ran all over Crennel and it spilled onto the playing field in the form of one dismal penalty-laden performance after another.  The Browns’ failures in Crennel’s last season can most fairly be said to stem directly from Crennel’s loose grip on the reins of his team.

Pettine’s teams lack the kind of discipline those supposedly connote the hard-nosed team.  In Pettine’s year and a half tenure his teams have ranked near the top in the number of penalties per game, according to the website www.NFLPenalties.com  This ranking doesn’t even factor in penalties committed, only those accepted by the opposition. 

After 4 games the Browns are averaging nearly 9 penalties a game.   What’s as interesting is that the Browns also have one of the highest ratio of pre-snap penalties to overall penalties in the league under Pettine (and, frankly, basically every other coach before Pettine in the Browns 2.0 era).  That speaks to a revolving door of quarterbacks certainly and differing pre snap cadences.  But it also speaks to a lack of talent as its often overmatched offensive linemen seek to get a jump on their defensive counterparts.

Laying all of this at Pettine’s feet probably isn’t fair.  Much blame goes to the guy who employs him and supplied him with the players, and that would be Farmer. His handiwork was well on display against the Raiders a few weeks back.  That game showed the value of good drafting.  Amari Cooper and Derek Carr were excellent draft picks, particularly when compared to Johnny Manziel and Justin Gilbert.  The Browns could have had either or both and chose neither.  Farmer didn’t like Carr and seemingly hates all receivers.  That’s in essence why the Browns are still the Browns.

Pettine and Farmer are on borrowed time as it is.  Haslam may very well have already decided to clean house and now is just wrestling with whether it should be in season or the day after the season ends. Timing is tricky and keep in mind that midseason replacements kind of feel good for a minute but also tend to piss off season ticket holders who, in Cleveland anyway, like to hold on to the illusion that these games matter at least until the 9^th or 10^th game of the season.

It’s also possible that Haslam really is wrestling with another kind of dilemma.  He knows that if he holds on to Farmer and Pettine he’ll be trying to defy history that is absolute.  On the other hand, if he respects that history he runs head first into another absolute: he has no chance of getting the next decisions right, either. Ultimately, that’s probably what’s keeping him up most nights, the notion that buying the Browns may have been the dumbest idea he’s had since he set up a bonus program for the sales force at Pilot Flying J.

The Only Thing Worse Than Losing...

The Cleveland Browns on Sunday did the football equivalent of passing a kidney stone in dominating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-10. That stone, jagged and huge, had been stuck for over a decade.  Yet as it passed, the sweet relief lasted about as long as it took a reporter to finally discover that quarterback Brian Hoyer is a free agent after the season.

Now, instead of feeling satisfied for at least a few minutes, fans are fretting over the status of a quarterback who was mostly an afterthought just a few months ago and what it means for the high profile savior-in-waiting, Johnny Manziel.  In other words, this is exactly what it’s like to be a fan of Cleveland sports.

I suppose it won’t be long until another reporter starts asking general manager Ray Farmer, should the Browns continue winning, about the wisdom of stockpiling picks for next year’s draft if the Browns end up with a lower draft pick.  In Cleveland it seems the only thing worse than losing is winning.

It really is a testament to the unique paranoia in Cleveland that no good win goes unpunished.  The status of Hoyer’s contract on a team that sits at 3-2 and the bulk of its season still in front of them shouldn’t even register a blip on fans’ collective consciences at the moment.

The Browns are 5 games into the season and find themselves at 3-2.  That’s better than most predicted and with the next 3 games against teams with 1 combined win among them, there is some reason to think that 8 games into the season the Browns could find themselves with 6 wins.

But to get there would require a 5-game winning streak.  This is a team that hasn’t won 5 games in a season more than twice in a dozen years and has not won 5 in a row in 20 years!  The roster is young with some talent.  It’s also thin and getting thinner with two key injuries just this past week.  To think it can run the immediate table in front of them is dreaming.

In that context Hoyer’s contract status is hardly a story and his unwillingness to address it doesn’t make it a story.  The premise of the question, as essentially concocted in the head of a Bleacher Report reporter, is that Hoyer has let people know that he won’t sign long term in Cleveland if Johnny Manziel is still on the roster.

The question, as we say in the law business, assumes facts not in evidence.  The reporter never specifically attributes Hoyer’s alleged comments to anyone in particular, just people in general. That’s probably because the reporter just made it up in order to advance a point that isn’t yet ripe to be made but what the heck it creates anxiety and where there’s anxiety there’s also buzz.  So let’s give some credit.  The Bleacher Report got its click bait just as did Crain’s Cleveland, The Plain Dealer and The Beacon Journal, all of whom reported what was reported elsewhere, which is that this isn’t even something Hoyer has thought about.

The larger point though is that 5 games into the season it’s silly to even begin pondering the Browns’ quarterback situation next year.  The odds are high that Hoyer will get injured this year, not just because he got injured last year, but because that’s what happens to quarterbacks in the NFL.  But yea, it’s also because Hoyer had a serious knee injury last year and it would surprise exactly no one if the repaired knee can’t withstand the rigors of a full season.

The Browns more or less fell into Hoyer the same way they fell into their head coach, Mike Pettine.  It’s not as if anyone thought even last year that Hoyer had a viable career as a NFL starter just like Pettine wasn’t thought to be a viable head coaching candidate.  And yet each, given a chance, has shown that they may have been underestimated.

There is no question that Hoyer has a certain “it” factor about him that most if not all of the others that have come before him did not.   Where the Brandon Weedens of the world always seemed to be adding water to a grease fire, Hoyer doesn’t get nearly that rattled.  His ability to help keep his team in games, particularly the first Pittsburgh game and the comeback against Tennessee, speaks volumes about his ability to lead the offense. Players will follow whoever leads them.  Too often in Cleveland that’s been no one in particular.

Hoyer may very well be a long term solution for the Browns, though it’s a bit premature to render a verdict..  He’s 29 years old and for the benefit of Mike Holmgren it’s worth noting that he’s 2 years younger than Weeden.  So there is still plenty of runway left in Hoyer’s career should the Browns eventually reach a conclusion about his long term worth.

But it’s not as if NFL executives and fans haven’t been fooled by previous flashes in the pan.  Do the names Scott Mitchell and Kelly Holcomb mean anything to anyone?  How about Derek Anderson?

Indeed Anderson is a particularly recent example of why getting too excited too early can be dangerous.

In 2007 Anderson threw for nearly 3800 yards.  He threw for 29 touchdowns against 19 interceptions.  His 29 touchdowns were just 1 less than Brian Sipe’s franchise record of 30.  As Anderson was having the season of a lifetime, the savior-in-waiting was Brady Quinn, who had been the team’s number one pick entering the season.  As Anderson continued to pile up the wins and enhance his own stats, fans became less interested in Quinn and more interested in Anderson’s contract status since he could be a free agent at season’s end.  Is any of this sounding familiar?

We know how former general manager Phil Savage handled it.  He signed Anderson to a multi-year multi-million dollar, albeit relatively club friendly, deal.  At the time Savage’s move was viewed as savvy.  It gave him the option to then trade Anderson before the draft in order to recoup the draft pick he gave up to get Quinn initially.

But Savage dithered, as was his wont.  Despite teams needing a starter and despite both Anderson and Quinn being at the zenith of their trade value, Savage held on to both.  The Browns’ draft suffered, which itself isn’t unusual.  But then both Anderson and Quinn proved to be less than Savage had anticipated and the Browns were once again in search of a new quarterback once Anderson was cut, a search that hasn’t exactly concluded even with the emergence of Hoyer.

Right now the Browns have a good problem with a dozen ways to resolve it, none of which require action now.  Let the situation play itself out.  Let’s not have Farmer make a long term decision about Hoyer based on a relatively small sample and for God’s sake don’t make a long term decision about Manziel without any sample.

Hoyer has shown himself to be the glue holding the offense together, but the team’s early success isn’t the product of any one person.  At least as much credit, if not more, could go to Kyle Shanahan.  His approach has seemed to rejuvenate, for example, the offensive line.  His dogged insistence on establishing a running game in a passing league has proven that some adages remain just as true as ever: the run does set up the pass.  Credit also could go to receivers like Jordan Cameron, someone whose next contract should rightly be rich and lengthy.  And credit could go to Farmer for making some good decisions at running back, including the signing of Ben Tate.

As much as it’s true that Hoyer is playing well and as much of a great story he is at the moment, what this team really needs to do is keep the bigger picture in mind.  It really does appear that it’s building a team that can compete weekly.  Five games in that appears to be the case.  But it is only five games in. The one thing that could stop that progress is knee jerk decisions made in the heat of the moment.

Hoyer’s contract isn’t a story right now and may never be so relax.  The Browns are on a wild ride at the moment and for once it has more thrill than folly.  Enjoy it because as should be more than apparent to all, there’s no telling if or when it might come around again.

Lingering Items--Shakespeare Edition

Apparently the NFL has run out of head coach candidates. How else to explain the Kansas City Chiefs hiring Romeo Crennel as its next head coach?

Before answering that question, it’s probably worth asking why it’s even necessary for anyone in this corner of the world to contemplate the question.

It’s not except out of abject curiosity considering Crennel’s tenure in Cleveland. Crennel had one good year here.

It was 2007 and the Browns won 10 games. In typical Browns fashion, they didn’t make the playoffs, one of the few 10-win teams ever to not make the playoffs. That 2007 season was transcendent nonetheless. The Browns were riding high from the draft after grabbing Joe Thomas as an anchor left tackle and then seeing Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn fall to them late in the first round due to a weird confluence of events. At the time, Charlie Frye was the team’s starter and Derek Anderson was the back up, albeit a very tentative back up. He had a big arm but little experience and was floundering in the Ravens organization until general manager Phil Savage grabbed him on his way out of Baltimore.

The season opened in rather typical fashion, with the Browns getting thumped by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Frye had a season opening debut that was such a disaster that he was benched before halftime. Crennel took responsibility for that, as if he could avoid it. A few days later Savage traded Frye to Seattle for a 6th round pick. It suddenly elevated Anderson to starter, a position most fans also thought was simply a placeholder until Quinn found his sea legs. Indeed, had Quinn reported to camp on time instead of stupidly holding out, he almost certainly would have been the starter instead of Anderson and both Quinn's and Anderson's trajectories may have been forever changed. But missteps like that have defined Quinn’s mostly inert career.

Then a funny thing happened. Anderson caught fire in a way that was in many ways far more unreal then anything either Tim Tebow or Cam Newton have done this past season. Tebow and Newton were well known commodities. Anderson could have walked through any mall in Cleveland at noon on a Sunday in December and no one would have noticed. The Browns under Anderson didn’t go on a specific tear. Their longest win streak was 3 games. But Anderson was terrific, putting together a season of historical significance. And while the Browns tied the Steelers for the division lead, they lost the tie breaker as the Steelers, not surprisingly, swept the season series. Then the Browns lost out on a wild card when the Indianapolis Colts tanked the last game of the season against the Tennessee Titans. It was a large measure of satisfaction when the Titans lost to San Diego in the first round of the playoffs and the Colts, coming off a 13-3 season and with great Super Bowl hopes, also lost to the Chargers.

Things looked so good for Crennel at the moment and for Savage, the general manager who stoutly stood behind Crennel when the wheels were falling off in 2006, that owner Randy Lerner gave both new contracts.1  

1 If you want to know why a hold out inevitably follows a player’s first break out season, it’s because of owners like Lerner. Neither Crennel’s nor Savage’s contract was up. But buoyed by one year of success and disregarding one year of failure, Lerner acted like he had just won the lottery and decided to blow all the winnings on a flying car, which would have been a much better investment then giving either Crennel or Savage new, more lucrative and longer term deals that neither had quite yet earned. Lerner had to swallow both contracts after a disastrous 2008 season, thus continuing the pattern of throwing good money after bad when he Butch Davis quit and later perfected when he bought Aston Villa. He may be an idiot with money but wouldn’t you like to be one of his kids? Better still, someone he likes enough to hire?

But the 2007 season ended up being far more smoke and mirrors then substance. Those passes Anderson completed in 2007 became overthrown interceptions the next and Braylon Edwards, off of his one good season, became an intolerable pain in the ass in the locker room that Crennel simply couldn’t control. As other players watched Edwards do what he wanted without consequence (remember the trip to the Ohio State/Michigan game that caused Edwards to miss a team meeting on the night before a game?), other players acted similarly. Each week you could literally watch parts fall off the car as it careened down the highway with no one at the steering wheel.

The season ended at 4-12, just like Crennel’s first season, with the 10-6 season sandwiched in between. What characterized Crennel’s tenure most, though, was his massive disorganization. A lifelong assistant suddenly thrust into the spotlight, Crennel was gentle in his demeanor and approach, treating the players like visiting grandkids and he the goodtime grandpa. The problem was that the grandkids were an unruly mess and there were no parents to send them back to at the end of the day. The inmates were running the asylum and tried to keep the status quo by constantly praising the warden as the greatest guy around.

I’m surprised Crennel has gotten a second chance though in context, maybe not so much. He worked with Scott Pioli, Kansas City’s general manager, in New England. But this won’t end up any better for Crennel then it did in Cleveland. Crennel may have learned some lessons in the last few years, but he’s never going to be a successful head coach. His niche is as an assistant, someone that the players can occasionally confide in when they feel they’re being picked on by the head coach. He’s simply too good natured to draw firm lines with the various malcontents that populate NFL locker rooms from time to time. Stil, I envy Crennel a bit. Securing the Kansas City job is like winning the lottery but not because he’s a head coach again. More so because it will give him a chance in the next year or two to retire quietly on the contract that the Kansas City owner will have to eat for having greenlighted this hire in the first place.

**

Although many in the media have been writing the obituary of the Pittsburgh Steelers for years, this time they may be right. When the playoff season closes after this season, the award for the worst performance will undoubtedly be handed to those Steelers.

First of all, the Denver Broncos aren’t a very good team irrespective of what miracles Tim Tebow and Jesus are able to accomplish this year. The Broncos play in the worst division in the NFL at the moment and basically by finishing 8-8 won it by default. (Fascinating, though, isn’t it, that three teams in the division finished 8-8 and the fourth 7-9?

That’s the kind of mediocre parity that would have given Paul Tagliabue a chubby.) The Steelers on the other hand looked to be on the upswing. They finished 12-4, which was tied them with the Ravens for the second best record in the conference. But if there is such a thing as a soft 12-4, these Steelers accomplished it.

This past Sunday they were exposed for the aging mess that they’ve been building toward for several seasons. All it took was a few key injuries to the several octogenarians on the team to underscore this fact. Ben Roethlisberger will recover from the gimpy ankle he suffered against the Browns but he’s not the biggest problem anyway. The Steelers are old on offense and old on defense. Their best players all are on the back sides of their careers.

The bigger problem though is that the Steelers, who for years seemed to always find the right replacements, may have made a major miscalculation by letting this group get old together. Where they had been deft in cutting ties to players at just the right moment, this time they let it ride for a few more years and lost the opportunity to do what they had done nearly better then any other—draft well and work those players in quickly.

No one who watched the Steelers’ wretched offensive line on Monday came away thinking that they are poised for a quick rebound. Indeed, four of the front seven on the offensive line, indeed half the offense, are at least 29 years old. In NFL dog years, that’s old. The situation is even worse on defense where 7 of the starters are at least 32 years old. It’s now clear why James Harrison resorts to thug-like antics such as the cheap shot on Tebow Sunday. He’s 33 years old and that’s the only way he can make his presence felt. I don’t see the Steelers taking any sort of Browns-like nose dive to the bottom of the conference, but neither do I see them being an elite team in the near-term either. The great year they just had, from a record standpoint, will just serve to delay their repairs as they suffer the purgatory that’s created when you limp into the playoffs and then end up with only a lousy draft position to show for the effort.

**

I wonder if Reggie McKenzie, the new general manager for the Oakland Raiders, learned something from how poorly Mike Holmgren handled the Eric Mangini situation.

Emboldened by the death of Barnabas-in-a-turtleneck Al Davis and being the first person to hold the GM title for the Raiders, McKenzie decided that head coach Hue Jackson wasn’t his type of coach and canned him after only a year at the helm. It is either that McKenzie didn’t think Jackson had the right stuff to be a head coach or that he felt Jackson had bungled key personnel decisions, like acquiring Carson Palmer for a first and second round draft pick. Either would have been enough. Both sins put him squarely in the Mangini camp.

Whereas Holmgren kept Mangini and wasted an entire season in the process, something Holmgren now reluctantly admits in the same way that I reluctantly admit I watch the Cavs, McKenzie decided that would be a ridiculous approach and sent Jackson off to contemplate his next coaching job.

The move isn’t going to make McKenzie popular with the fraternity that is NFL head coaches past and present but it is the right thing, if the Browns are any example. But ultimately it’s the right thing for the Raiders. By almost every measure imaginable, the Browns latest facelift was delayed at least 12 months, and actually longer when you factor in the impact of the lockout, by Holmgren’s incessant need to look like a good guy to his coaching brethren. That’s why the Browns find themselves, at best, stuck in the lowest ring of purgatory now and for probably another season or two, and the Raiders will find themselves much closer to the playoffs next year.

**
With the playoffs in full bloom and this weekend representing the single best weekend in professional football, this week’s question to ponder: Why is it so difficult for the NFL to simply guarantee each team one possession in overtime?

Staying the Course, Again

If you treat press conferences conducted by Cleveland Browns president Mike Holmgren as performance art, then his latest body of work, on display as it was Thursday, didn't quite measure up to the provocative performance of a few weeks back. Thursday he was calm, collected and all together non-specific. It’s the kind of performance anyone could have turned in.

It paled in comparison to the star turn he made the last time he took to the podium spitting, spewing and basically blaming the media for being nattering nabobs of negativism who won't be getting any extra Browns playoff tickets from him. Like any example of performance art, it made you think even if that thought was “what the f _ _ _?”

But if you treat a Holmgren press conference as an opportunity to learn when exactly the Browns will quit wandering through the NFL like they’re one of the Lost Tribes of Israel then it was a major disappointment. Holmgren took about 75 minutes to say what can be summed up in 3 words “stay the course.”

Actually, I have no great problem with Holmgren's message, mainly because he's right. It’s just that he’s not the first or only Cleveland Browns’ executive to espouse that view. Just the latest. Maybe I should consider renaming this blog to "Stay the Course, Again."

It’s rather defeating to reminisce about such an inglorious past, but if one of the great truths in the NFL is stay the course, then the other great truth is that those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

In late November, 2006, with the Browns under the unsteady leadership of Romeo Crennel, a serial good guy but an undisciplined mess of a head coach, and reeling once again, general manager Phil Savage stepped to the podium to proclaim his faith in Crennel and to declare, wait for it, that the Browns would be staying the course.

Savage, like a country lawyer, made an impassioned argument for staying the course, pointing out that the really good teams and franchises got that way through stability. He then talked about Frank Beamer at Virginia Tech and how fans wanted him out after his first season and by staying the course things worked out well. He talked about Brian Billick at Baltimore and how fans wanted him out and yet he went on to win a Super Bowl before he, too, was fired. He then talked about Bill Cowher to presumably make the point about how good things happen when you stick with one horse.

When that 2006 season ended, the Browns sat where they sit today—4-12. And yet, in the short term, Savage was right. The next season the Browns won 10 games even though they didn’t make the playoffs, a very rare occurrence in the NFL for any 10-win team. The problem? They really weren’t on the right course.

The next season demonstrated that the previous was achieved mostly through smoke, mirrors, an easy schedule and one transcendent season by Derek Anderson, who then fell off the map. The Browns quickly regressed the next two seasons when their talent didn’t match the assessment they had made of it. Crennel was canned, so was Savage and it was time again for a new course.

That next course lasted about a half season after Lerner impulsively hired Eric Mangini and then watched him lay waste to the franchise in near record time. Lerner quickly brought in Holmgren to chart still another course, which is where the franchise finds itself today.

But the back story to why all that occurred lies in the course the Browns were staying under Savage. Four months after Savage’s impassioned “stay the course” plea Lerner visited various newsrooms around the state to essentially make the same pitch. It wasn’t so much that he was making the case to keep Savage and Crennel as he was that Crennel and Savage needed much more time to see their plan through because the cupboard was bare when they arrived.

Lerner talked about how a good NFL team needs about 35 core players and at that time, early 2007, the Browns only had 18. In other words, there was much work to be done and it could only get done by, wait for it, staying the course.

The problem was that when things all came crashing down it turned out that Lerner (and Savage, by proxy) had missed the mark badly on the state of the team. Not only did it not have 18 core players, not even close, but they hadn’t made any meaningful progress in adding to the mix.

Here is the list of players from 2007 that Lerner claimed were core to the Browns’ development as a upper tier franchise if only the course would be stayed: “I have (Joe) Jurevicius, (Orpheus) Roye, Kellen Winslow, Braylon Edwards, Kamerion Wimbley, Sean Jones, Brodney Pool, Eric [Steinbach], Jamal Lewis, Andra Davis, Charlie Frye, D'Qwell Jackson, Leigh Bodden, Josh Cribbs for special teams certainly if not other, Steve Heiden, and emerging players like Leon Williams, Lawrence Vickers, Jerome Harrison, Travis Wilson.”

Remember, that’s 2007, just 4 years ago. Only 3 current Browns’ players remain with the team: Steinbach (injured all season), Jackson and Cribbs. Arguably all 3 remain in the “core” category. But the rest of the list is mostly laughable, especially the inclusion of players like Jones, Lewis, Davis, Frye, Williams, Harrison and Wilson.

Yet that’s the course that Lerner wanted to stay, at least until he fired Savage. It illustrates mostly the disconnect between theory and reality. The Browns’ cupboard wasn’t bare. There was no cupboard in the first place. It was a team with a random assortment of players that couldn’t be counted on to accomplish much of anything, so it didn’t. Had the team actually been further along, as implied by Lerner, it would be paying dividends today and fans wouldn’t be getting another earful of stay the course messages from the latest architect.

So while I have no great quibble with Holmgren’s message, it really was delivered in a vacuous way and without any real understanding of why it tends to fall on deaf ears. Far better than Holmgren, Browns fans know their history. They know what they’ve been promised and they know when they’ve been let down.

It would have been would have been instructive to hear Holmgren’s or general manager Tom Heckert’s view on how many core players the Browns need, how many they currently have and who they are as the context for staying the course they’re on. But Holmgren was too busy dodging specifics for earnest eye-brow furling instead.

In truth, the Browns do have more core players now then they had in 2007, but the number is still south of 10 and that, ultimately, is the crux of the problem. I’m not sure that any NFL franchise can ever have or even needs 35 core players. But they certainly need at least 20 and can’t win more than a handful of games when it’s less then 10. When you consider that the Browns aren’t even in double digits at the moment, you start to appreciate the enormity of the task at hand.

So it all boils down to the most operative question: “what course?” To Holmgren and Heckert, that course is the one that sees them gathering draft choices like game tickets at Chucky Cheese and making them count. It means eschewing any sort of quick fix through free agency. It means giving the players on board, at least those that are worth the effort, the time to grow. That’s all well and good if they’re right about what they have at the moment. They may be but too much history suggest otherwise.

Still, if this is what fans are being force fed and Holmgren and Heckert are really committed to building methodically, then they are absolutely right about one thing: they can’t blow the upcoming draft. They have gathered together a number of picks and need to hit on nearly every one if this franchise is really going to take a significant, permanent step forward in the next few years.

If they don’t then it will be time for Lerner to hire his next genius and set his next course and time for the rest of us to once again find another team to root for in the playoffs.

Singing From Different Hymnals

For the second straight Tuesday, Cleveland Browns head coach Eric Mangini had to explain a crushing defeat against an arguably inferior opponent. For the second straight week he also had to defend his record against a growing chorus of disbelievers by saying that he believes the Browns are headed in the right direction.

Forget about all those who are claiming that Mangini needed to win X number of the season's last 4 games to retain his job. The only real questions that will matter to team president Mike Holmgren is whether or not the Browns are indeed headed in the right direction and whether or not Mangini is the guy who can drive them the furthest down that path.

That the Browns seem headed in the right direction seemed pretty obvious until two weeks ago. Almost everything about this year's team after 12 weeks was far better than everything about last season's team after 12 games. For starters, consider just the record. The Browns last year were 1-11. this year's version was 5-7. Beyond just that most visceral difference was a boat load of statistics on both sides of the ball. More touchdowns, better running, less points given up, far closer games, take your pick.

But the last two games against two other league doormats in Buffalo and Cincinnati have changed the perceptions about the direction of this team measurably. The games have been close, certainly, but anyone watching knows that the Browns have been handled in both games. The same cliches that were true 50 years ago about football are just as true today. Games tend to be won or lost along the offensive and defensive lines and in the last two games the Browns have lost those battles to teams that collectively had less wins than they did. It's been demoralizing.

It's also a disturbing trend certainly but it's more disturbing only if you think that progress or decline is a straight line process in the first place. It never is.

Mangini called the last two games hiccups, meaning that he doesn't believe they are really representative of where this team is headed. What Holmgren needs to figure out first is whether or not that's true. If they are as Mangini suggests, then far more representative of this team in his view is the way the team played against New Orleans and New England.

But surely that can't be true either for if it were this Browns team would be a playoff contender and I think that if there is one thing everyone can agree on it's that this team is not a playoff contender.

So let's just say that neither of those two game stretches represents the real Browns and erase them from the record and evaluate this team on a 12 game basis, which seems the kind of reasonable approach Holmgren might employ. That means that heading into games against Pittsburgh and Baltimore, two teams that need to keep winning, the team is 3-7, which really fits this team like a glove anyway.

When a team sits at 3-7 it really is hard to say which direction it's headed in and that's why, to a certain extent, Mangini's pleas in that regard tend to fall on deaf ears. There were times, certainly, when everyone felt that former general manager Phil Savage had this team headed in the right direction, too, and for many of the same reasons.

Savage decided to rebuild the offensive line and drafted Joe Thomas and signed Eric Steinbach, the two stalwarts of the offensive line still. He seemed to pull of a draft coup by getting Brady Quinn late in the first round after he already had drafted Thomas. Savage also went about trying to upgrade the receiving corps by complementing Braylon Edwards with Donte Stallworth. Savage also pulled off trades to bolster the defensive line, trades that seemed to make most people optimistic if not giddy. The linebacking corps remained a weak spot as did the defensive backfield, particularly on the corners. But then the team Savage took over had so many holes that they all couldn't be filled at once.

The larger point is, though, that there was a time when Savage could rightly claim the team was headed in the right direction and it didn't just seem plausible, it seemed true. As it turned out, of course, Savage wasn't really headed in any particular direction. A scout at heart, he was collecting players like they were bubble gum cards but the approach lacked cohesion. Savage also entrusted his collection to a coach with absolutely no ability to make any sense out of it so whatever Savage accomplished ended up looking even more disjointed anyway.

This is all to suggest that some of the telltale signs that Mangini points to as indicative of a team headed in the right direction are things we've all seen before. That doesn't mean that Mangini's view isn't any less or more plausible or any more or less true than what we heard from Savage. It does mean that Mangini, like Savage, is solidly vested in his way of doing things so it follows naturally that Mangini is going to defend what he's done.

The task for Holmgren is to wade through the sea of self-interest and try to make sense of it all. It won't be easy. That's because as confusing as last season may have been, particularly in the way it ended, this season has done little to add clarity.

When Holmgren rode into town last season, the team was out of control. Holmgren was given free reign to fix it all, yesterday. That didn't seem like a good sign for Mangini. But then a funny thing happened on the way to Holmgren's trying to make sense of it all. The team inexplicably rallied around Mangini at his darkest hour and went on to win the season's final four games. If it all left the fans scratching their heads, imagine how confusing it must have been to Holmgren.

This season hasn't gotten any easier. There have been times, stretches actually, where the direction seemed clear and you could find few if any who didn't think it was right, just like Savage in the early years. But then there have been times, stretches as well, where the direction seems as muddled as anything that Savage brought to the table. Even if you discount the last two games, it's not as if the Browns were trending positively before that. The wins against Miami and Carolina seemed gifted more than anything else and in each you could clearly see that what has plagued the team recently was a product of what was developing then. The offensive game plan was growing stagnant and the defense was getting pushed around.

In other words, at exactly the point where the direction should be its clearest, the Browns seem as confusing as ever. In the last two weeks Mangini, Colt McCoy and Peyton Hillis all offered that the team seems to lack focus or energy. This isn't some media-created controversy but the honest observations from those closest to the situation.

That will get noticed by Holmgren, certainly because it goes exactly to where this team is headed. It's one thing to abide a team that's less talented as you work to improve it. It's another to abide a team that has stopped working hard as the season plays out its string.

But even if Holmgren is convinced that the Browns, despite recent signs, are headed in the right direction, the next question and perhaps the key to Mangini's future is whether or not Holmgren thinks Mangini is the guy to get them the furthest down that path. If anything, this question seems like the easiest to answer, at least from afar.

There has never been a sense that Mangini is Holmgren's kind of guy on a number of levels, from the way Mangini handles his quarterbacks to the way he handles his offense, to the way he handles the media. It's not so much anything that Holmgren has actually said but more so what he hasn't said. Though he kept Mangini around for the 2010 season, Holmgren has never once stood up and said “this is my guy.” There's been no impassioned defense of the coach or his way of doing things. It's been a lot of sitting back and observing and dropping phrases like “I'm not sure what the offense is trying to do” and “I'll evaluate it all come season's end.”

If Holmgren is going to keep Mangini after what's amounted to about a 20-game audition, then it will be because he's absolutely convinced that Mangini shares his vision. But there are just too many signs suggesting that isn't the case. In the end, if Mangini goes it won't be because he lost to Buffalo and Cincinnati. It will be because Holmgren finally recognizes the awesome responsibility he undertook when he signed on with Randy Lerner in the first place and realizes that the only way to attack that responsibility is with guys singing from your hymnal. Whatever else you might say or think about Mangini, it's always been clear that he is most comfortable standing in his own pew singing his own songs.

Just Another Opener

It’s opening week for the Cleveland Browns and though there are plenty of fans excited about that prospect there are probably more that no longer know what to think. This is what it’s like when you know before the season opens that your team won’t be playing for a championship.

It’s not that the Browns are hopeless at the moment. Indeed this is a team that looks to be one of the more improved teams in the league, if not in results than at least in direction. But that’s not much of a consolation prize to fans in a town who have borne witness to a very dispiriting baseball season and are about to bear witness to a basketball season where a .500 record will be considered an accomplishment.

Personally, I’m tired of adjusting expectations in order to figure out a way to make these hometown teams look successful. At some point the Indians, the Browns and the Cavaliers are going to have to find a way to adjust their expectations instead and figure out how to actually be successful and be truly worth of the fans that support them.

They all talk a good game, of course. Indians president-in-waiting, Mark Shapiro, has nothing if not the gift of gab. But he’s done nothing to articulate a coherent plan for returning the team to a level of success the fans tasted in the late ‘90s, mainly because that plan depended on money and his plan depends on everything but.

Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert is well financed and has a knack for success. But he’s facing major headwinds. His team lost its most valuable asset and at the moment it seems incomprehensible to think that a player with anything approaching that level of talent will find his way to Cleveland outside of a magic ping pong ball.

But this is football season so for the moment we can cast aside those depressing scenarios for another, hopefully brighter, one.

We’ve heard from Browns president Mike Holmgren, as decent of a man as exists in the game, talk passionately about restoring a once proud tradition. Holmgren has done mostly right by his words, bringing in Tom Heckert, for example, to be his general manager.

And yet all of us, from Holmgren to Heckert to Eric Mangini to the guy cleaning the lint guards at the local Laundromat know that fixing what ails this franchise isn’t a one-year job. That’s the problem.

Holmgren and Heckert know there isn’t enough talent on this team. That message came through loud and clear in the first roster Heckert put together and in what he said afterward. It came through loud and clear in the amount of roster turnover that there’s been just since Mangini got here. Finally, it came through loud and clear in its almost shocking lack of homegrown players.

Heckert and Holmgren are realists, which is oddly refreshing. They know that it will take several drafts to get them to a respectable level. The problem that they face is that the NFL, like every other sports league, is an endless spin cycle in which anything can go wrong at almost any time. Fix one area of the team and a leak will spring from another.

When Phil Savage was handed the job as general manager, he too took a long and realistic look at the roster with owner Randy Lerner and determined that there were very few core players on it. He then went about trying to fix that problem and made some good decisions in the process, not unlike what Heckert and Holmgren are doing now. And yet, not even two years removed from Savage and the Browns are essentially reworking pretty much everything he did.

That may be an indictment of sorts on Savage certainly but it’s also an acknowledgement that professional athletes are so much more than the sum of their parts. You can have a young player grade out at the top on every conceivable metric and still not possess the internal wiring to make all of that talent work at the right time.

You can consider Matt Leinart as the current poster child for all that can go wrong when selecting your next franchise savior. He’s big, has a decent arm, and played in a program that should have prepared him well for his vocation.

What Leinart lacked was something that can never be measured, an “it” factor that is the dividing line between potential and realization. Maybe his being cut by the Arizona Cardinals will be the wake-up call he needs. Likely it will not.

The problem for Arizona though goes much deeper. Where once they saw a key building block around whom they were trying to build a team now all they see is a series of make-shift moves in hopes that the damage done to the franchise for being wrong won’t be too great. It will.

That’s the problem with the Browns. Brady Quinn didn’t work out and either did Derek Anderson. Who’s to say that once the defense is fixed the offense won’t need an overhaul? Jake Delhomme is in the last years of a decent career but Seneca Wallace ultimately is unproven and the league is literally littered with back up quarterbacks from big time programs like Texas who aren’t good enough to start.

Holmgren’s sobering assessment when he took over was that this team didn’t get this way over night and it won’t get better over night. They are the product of 10 years of poor personnel decisions, literally creating a roster with more holes to fill than time to fill it.

Every team has holes and it’s an unattainable goal to think that any team, whether it’s the Browns or the New England Patriots, will enter a season where there isn’t at least one visible flaw.

But where the Browns fall short right now is the sheer amount of visible flaws. The trick for Heckert will be to get as many fixed as quickly as possible before new, longer term issues develop. But that won’t be now, which gets us back to this season.

Does it really matter if the Browns finish 7-9 vs. 6-10 or even 5-11? Not really. What matters far more are the kinds of moves the team makes during the season in order to shore up its gaping holes. If Heckert can find another Matt Roth or two on the scrap pile, that’s one or two less problems come season’s end.

So as the Browns enter a season that offers little hope for redemption on the field, Browns fans enter another season in which hope is their only friend. That’s fine and it beats many of the alternatives, but as a method of operation it’s getting a little tiresome.

There’s more reasons than not to believe that the present regime will eventually bring a few rays of sunshine our way. Let’s just hope we don’t die of frostbite in the meantime.

A Bitter Goodbye

Talk about a noisy withdrawal.

Former Cleveland Browns quarterback Derek Anderson was sent packing by the team on Tuesday and he let the door hit him in the ass on the way out. In an email to the Lake County News-Herald, Anderson unloaded a few years worth of frustration by dumping not on the team that won’t be paying him nearly $10 million for the 2010 season but the fans who suffered through one awful performance after another for the last two seasons.

Anderson has since apologized, more or less. He claims he was just frustated. I'd call it bitterness. Either way it's a minor debate. His statement though stems from his supposedly getting cheered when he was injured in a November 2008 game against Indianapolis. Give the guy this, he can throw verbal zingers as hard as he throws a football. Unfortunately, though, it comes with pretty much the same completion rate.

Since Anderson has no appreciation for context I’ll set it. It was a home game on the last Sunday in November. The season was already mostly lost as the Browns entered the game with a 4-7 record. Brady Quinn, who had been starting after head coach Romeo Crennel had finally, mercifully had pulled the plug on Anderson, had been injured. Nonetheless, Crennel had anointed Quinn his starter and said it would remain that way for the upcoming 2009 season.

But with Quinn now injured, Anderson had still another opportunity to change Crennel’s mind. The Colts were a good team, but not necessarily great that seasons and the Browns were playing them close on this particular Sunday, mainly because Peyton Manning was very average, at best, on this day He had thrown two interceptions and fumbled twice. The Colts were gifting the game to the Browns and yet Anderson, in what became a very disturbing pattern, couldn’t get the offense in a position to capitalize.

There were 10 minutes remaining and the Browns were nonetheless clinging to a 6-3 lead, a lead that shoulda coulda been much larger. Anderson dropped back to pass and lost his grip on the ball. Colts defensive end Robert Mathis picked it up and, in the words of Chris Berman, rumbled, bumbled and stumbled 37 yards for the game’s only touchdown.

It was an exquisite metaphor for all of the team’s and Anderson’s struggles that season. The Browns lost the game, their second straight and the second straight in which they couldn’t score a touchdown. The fans were frustrated. They had a right to be.


When Anderson then went down near the end of the game with an injury, some fans cheered. But what Anderson still apparently fails to appreciate is that the smattering of cheers wasn’t for his injury but because that appeared to be the only way Crennel would make still another quarterback change. The fans had watched Anderson fall all over himself for nearly two straight games, playing one ineffective series after another, and had seen enough.

Maybe Anderson has blocked all of that context out of his mind, but the fans haven’t. A season that promised so much had spiraled out of control on the wings of a selfish, undisciplined receiver in Braylon Edwards who figured if he just showed up he’d be great; the worst free agent signing ever in the form of Donte Stallworth who milked a quadriceps injury for most of the season; and, a quarterback in Anderson who simply couldn’t perform under the weight of the expectations created by his 2007 season.

There were more culprits responsible for that lost season, of course, like Crennel. But Anderson was as much to blame as anyone when he couldn’t marshal the leadership skills his position requires to help right a ship that was drifting aimlessly from almost the first pre-season game forward.

It’s interesting that Anderson in his email blast admitted that “at times I wasn’t great” but he’d have been far more honest with himself if he would have eliminated the words “at times” from his email. Anderson’s cause wasn’t helped much by the loads surrounding him like Edwards and Stallworth, but Anderson also struggled mightily with both his decision making and his accuracy, particularly on short passes.

No one will ever be able to take from Anderson the one great season he’s had in the NFL. For Browns fans, it was a season for the ages and, in truth, one of the greatest seasons ever by a Browns’ quarterback. And while performing at that level is difficult enough, the harder work comes in following it up. Anderson, like Edwards, simply couldn’t do it and, like Edwards, that’s on him.

It’s refreshing to hear (or read, in this case) a player speak his mind, even if he is misguided. Fans and media clamor for it after being fed a near non-stop diet of pabulum by athletes who have been taught to make inane and safe statements. But if an athlete is going to expose himself like that, he at least ought to get the key facts right.

It’s interesting that Anderson spared from his wrath the massive mismanagement by the Browns, from the owner to the coaches, for the impact that may have had on his career. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense. The team enriched him well beyond what his talent deserved. When former general manager Phil Savage picked Anderson off the Baltimore scrap heap and brought him to Cleveland, it literally made the guy’s career.

Indeed, but for Savage deciding sometime around the first series of the first game of the 2007 season that Charlie Frye wasn’t a viable NFL starter Anderson would have found himself carrying a clip board until the inevitable injury to Frye gave him an opportunity halfway through another lost season. Then, at season’s end, the Browns would have simply cast Anderson adrift as an unrestricted free agent after drafting Quinn.

Anderson, to his credit, took advantage of the opportunities 2007 presented and was able to then parlay his impending free agency into a multi-million dollar contract. Good for him. But the down side of his club friendly contract was the deferral of a bonus of a nearly $2 million bonus until 2010. Clauses like that always serve as off ramps for teams to get out of relationships that just aren’t working out. This one clearly wasn’t.

It’s understandable that Anderson might be a tad angry about missing out on that $2 million bonus, not to mention the nearly $8 million salary he would have been paid for 2010. But he’d garner much more respect if he instead had simply acknowledge that he didn’t come close to earning either payment.

Now Anderson finds himself looking for another team and there will be one for him. Anderson is the near perfect backup, like Kelly Holcomb. In small doses and when expectations are slight, he occasionally can perform. He crumbles when the stakes are raised and as a result he’s just not anyone’s solution as a long-term starter.

At the rate that starting quarterbacks get injured, a viable backup is essential. As long as Anderson recognizes that this is his destiny, he’ll make decent money from a variety of teams over the next several years. If he thinks he still deserves to start then he’s likely to carry an unhealthy grudge for the rest of what will end up being a much shorter career.

The real pity in all of this is what it’s done to the Browns’ quarterback situation. Anderson’s 2007 season certainly presented the Browns with a dilemma since they had just drafted Quinn as the starter-in-waiting. Savage’s sin in all of this was not the contract he gave Anderson (it was club friendly) but the fact that he didn’t parlay Anderson’s season or Quinn’s lofty draft status into a decent trade opportunity. That set the team back as much as anything.

Instead Savage dithered and it ultimately led to where the Browns are now seriously considering Seneca Wallace, eh gads, as their starter.

As for Anderson, I wonder when reality will set in. As he said in his email exit “I hope and pray I’m playing when my team comes to town and roll them.” That could happen of course but if he’s playing, then his team is in trouble because it will already be down one key starter.

The 2009 Cleveland Browns Retrospective--Intallment #1

Note: The Cleveland Browns 2009 season was one for the ages. It could be summed up in as little as one word “oy” or 100 million. I’ve opted for somewhere between the two. It may be that all of you, or most anyway, are so tired of this past season that you’d rather have your toe nails pulled than read another word about it. Believe me, I understand. But for those brave few willing to go along on one final journey with me, just know that I appreciate your courage and have tried to make it worth your while.


Part I. This is the Part Where the Browns Franchise Finds Itself Walking Alone, in the Middle of a Storm, on a Road to Nowhere, Again.

There are probably a million or more ways to look at the Cleveland Browns’ 2009 season and probably even more conclusions that could be drawn. But one thing that is undeniable. It’s been a long, strange trip indeed.

I promised to write a book about the season, and that might come in time. But I thought the best thing to do first was to try and make some sense of what we all just experienced. I wanted to follow the journey, really, that new club president Mike Holmgren had to take to get himself up to speed before deciding whether or not to keep head coach Eric Mangini.

In more ways than not, the 2009 season was worse than the 2008 season, although it’s a pretty close call. The Browns entered the 2008 with lofty expectations from the national media and ended up crashing and burning on the heels of 4 years of abject mismanagement on and off the field.

That was a season that had Braylon Edwards as its poster child. A Pro Bowler in 2007, Edwards developed the swagger and entitlement mentality reminiscent of most of today’s professional athletes. But Edwards never did develop the professionalism he actually needed to sustain his one good season. Instead he was lackadaisical in approach and it showed on the field in the form of one dropped pass after another. It was the story of the entire team, actually.

Edwards’ failures fairly summed up the end of the road for Romeo Crennel and Phil Savage, but I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. The story of the 2009 season actually starts with Crennel and Savage still in charge, sort of.

A lot about placing the 2009 season in context depends on when you think last season ended. For me, it was December 28, 2008. That was when the Browns played their last game of the Phil Savage/Romeo Crennel era and it ended, exquisitely, with a 31-0 pasting at the hands of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the team’s most hated rival.

In that game the Browns set the NFL’s record for longest streak without scoring an offensive touchdown and also had the dubious distinction of being the first Browns’ team to be shut out in consecutive games.

In my recap of that game I noted that by hitting what looked like rock bottom (and it was, but for that year only) in that manner they did, the Browns guaranteed that their fans would be dealt a steady diet of Kevin Harland and Rich Gannon as announcers for 2009. It’s exactly what they got, with the occasional Randy Cross thrown in for good measure.

The loss to the Steelers and the dispirited way that season ended raised the most obvious question, where do the Browns go from here? The worry then, fully justified soon thereafter, was that owner Randy Lerner hadn’t managed to get anything right yet and was now putting himself of overseeing the next makeover. Would it end well? How could it?

As it turned out, Savage’s fate was already sealed before the kickoff of that woeful Pittsburgh game. Lerner had fired him prior to the game but didn’t bother to tell anyone until after, apparently not sensing the irony in claiming that Savage’s termination was due, in part, to poor communication skills.

The mistake Lerner had made in Savage was a common one for Lerner. When hiring based on established track records was called for, Lerner instead opted for hope. Lerner figured Savage could fit comfortably into the general manager’s job simply because he had sat at the feet of Ozzie Newsome in Baltimore. What Lerner never realized was that Savage was more comfortable with stats than people. Newsome probably is still laughing at that miscalculation and thanking God during every waking moment that he left for Baltimore when Modell did.

Savage left a legacy of some decent draft choices (virtually every key contributor for the Browns this season, for example, was brought in by Savage) and a bevy of botched ones as well. Ultimately, it was Savage’s inability to be a steady, calming influence and face of the organization that was his undoing. He had embarrassed Lerner and the Browns in nearly consecutive weeks with his handling of the news of Kellen Winslow’s staph infection and compounded the problem first by issuing a perfunctory apology and then by sending a profane email in response to one written by a disgruntled Browns fan fed up with what he had been seeing on the field. Again, his apology was perfunctory, as if he’d done nothing wrong in the first place.

As for Crennel, the shoe dropped on him after the final game. In typical Lerner fashion it was through a written statement and again without any appreciation for irony in that he claimed he fired Savage a day earlier, in part, due to his lack of leadership skills.

Crennel was a very decent man. Approachable and serious minded, Crennel treated the players like men and found himself being rewarded in the same way parents are rewarded for trusting that their 17-year old won’t break into the liquor cabinet while they’re away for the weekend. His teams lacked discipline of almost every sort and his tenure can be summed up in perhaps the two words that described the team’s most common penalty, “false start.”

Lerner’s first thought in trying to replace Crennel was a good one, Bill Cowher. But Cowher told Lerner before that fateful Pittsburgh game that he didn’t plan to coach in 2009 and stuck to his word. Lerner found himself thus at a crossroads. Having failed by hiring a lifelong assistant like Crennel, Lerner could either find someone who had head coaching experience or someone who had head coaching ability. Naturally, he opted for the former when he needed to opt for the latter.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, too. Certainly Lerner’s first task surely would be to find a general manager before tackling the issue of who might be the Browns’ next head coach. That’s the right order, isn’t it?

As it turned out, it wasn’t the right order at all. Shortly after the 2008 season ended, the New York Jets apparently did Lerner the biggest favor of all and fired Eric Mangini as its head coach. Mangini was given the nickname of Mangenius when he took a 4-12 Jets team and turned it into a 10-6 playoff team in his first season.

But that nickname quickly faded when the Jets reverted back to form the following season at 4-12 and then, in Mangini’s last season, started 8-3 and then lost its last 5 games to miss the playoffs. It was time, general manager Mike Tannebaum said, to move where all teams eventually need to move to, destination new direction. That’s pretty damning stuff, actually, just 3 years into the direction they were on with Mangini.

For Lerner, Mangini had the two attributes he most coveted: a connection with Bill Belichick and head coaching experience. That was the sum total of the due diligence he performed. But that may not have been even Lerner’s biggest mistake. That would be reserved for letting Mangini pick his new boss, which he did in the form of George Kokinis, the former Baltimore Ravens pro personnel director.

On the surface it sounded like Kokinis was Savage redux, right down to the resume. But that wasn’t exactly true. As a pro personnel director, Kokinis’ focus was on current players in the league, not college players. In other words, he wouldn’t be much help in the draft.

Putting aside the problem with letting the subordinate hire his own boss, Kokinis was an odd selection because the Browns’ biggest trouble area was the draft. What we didn’t know at the time was that Mangini hired Kokinis specifically because he lacked that skill. It let Mangini wander free around the draft. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, too. I’ve got to stop doing that.

Mangini’s official hiring came on January 9, 2009 and marked the first time, probably, that any NFL team had elevated its former ball boy to head coach. Lerner, of course, didn’t announce the decision personally. That task fell to Mike Kennan, the club’s president, a title Kennan would relinquish once Holmgren was hired.

The courtship of Mangini was quick, particularly so considering that no other team looking for a head coach at the time had even given Mangini a second thought. At his introductory press conference Mangini said all the right and usual things. But the proof, as I noted then, would be in whether he does the right things. Call it foreshadowing. But even greater foreshadowing came in the form of a question posed by the Jets fan who ran the FireEricMangini.com website: who in their right mind would replace one ex-Patriot flop with another ex-Patriot flop? Destiny, thy name is Lerner.

Part II. This is the Part Where Mangini Settles In and Others Suddenly Become Unsettled

After the hiring of Mangini and Kokinis, the rest of January was relatively quiet, unless you happened to work in the Browns’ front office. Blaming the economy, Lerner approved the layoff of 15 employees, including the public relations staff. Meanwhile, there were a host of castoffs able to ride out the economy in slightly better fashion in the form of Lerner castoffs still owed millions, castoffs like Carmen Policy, Butch Davis, Phil Savage and Romeo Crennel.

Maybe these 15 layoffs were part of a tanking economy. But to say that they weren’t in part the result of a makeover being overseen by Mangini would be wrong.

At the time Lerner was having staffers clean out their desks, he was allowing Mangini to have the Berea complex physically overhauled at a considerable cost. Of all the changes that occurred, the one that caused the most controversy, though, was his painting over a mural of Browns’ legends. Some saw it as Mangini purposely trying to break with the past. Others saw it as Mangini wanting to let everyone know who was calling the shots. They were both right.

Meanwhile, Mangini was keeping many of Crennel’s assistants dangling, insisting that they be held to the letter of their contracts while preventing them from interviewing elsewhere. Part of that was because he hadn’t yet finalized his own staff. Part of it, maybe the bigger part of it, was the simple fact that it was saving the Browns money. Per league rules, if the Browns fired the coaches before their contracts were completed and the coaches found other employment elsewhere at a lower salary, the Browns would be on the hook for the difference. A coach that resigns, however, has no such luck.

At the very least, it set a tone. In retrospect, it was the beginning of a number of blunders Mangini would make that made him one of the most unpopular hires in Browns’ history, at least for the first 3 months of the regular season, anyway.

As February dawned, Mangini gave his first full press conference. It was a virtuoso performance as he talked often and said nothing. He mentioned the mural and how that was all one big misunderstanding and said a few nice things about D’Qwell Jackson and Josh Cribbs, but not much else. Actually it was unclear why Mangini had the press conference in the first place, unless it was to set the ground rules with the media for what was to come. It did and Mangini never got the media back on his side for the rest of the season.

Kokinis wasn’t much better. A few weeks after the Mangini press conference came Kokinis to publicly declare that he and Mangini were on the same page without ever giving anyone a clue what page that actually was. As it turned out, they didn’t know themselves.

But one thing was clear from the Kokinis press conference. Mangini had placed him on a short leash. Kokinis wouldn’t discuss, for example, whether the Browns planned on placing the franchise tag on safety Sean Jones, about their only free agent worth trying to keep. Likewise, he wouldn’t discuss his thinking on Derek Anderson other than to say “you really have to fit Derek within the whole structure of the whole football team.” It’s still one of my favorite quotes ever because it precisely captures the guise of saying something while actually saying nothing at all. But to Kokinis’ credit, it was exactly what Mangini wanted him to say.

Someone who was far less shy in talking substantively was Scott Pioli, the new general manager in Kansas City. Talking freely at the combine in Indianapolis, Pioli went on to praise in almost over-the-top fashion Detroit’s hiring of Jim Schwartz as head coach. It wasn’t just that this was praise at the exclusion of Cleveland’s near simultaneous hiring of Mangini so much as it was insight on why Pioli wouldn’t take the general manager’s job in Cleveland.

Pioli and Mangini are like oil and water at this point owing mostly to Mangin’s role in the whole Spygate affair while Pioli was in New England. But more to the point, speculation is that Pioli wanted Lerner to consider hiring Schwartz in Cleveland as part of the package of bringing Pioli in but Lerner instead was fixated on Mangini. It was the deal killer of all deal killers.

As for Mangini and Kokinis at the combine, they were their usual insightful selves. The Browns were either interested in a running back or maybe it was a defensive end. They were going to keep Anderson or maybe trade him. They’d consider moving Josh Cribbs to safety or maybe running back. What the two didn’t realize is that the only ones interested in the Browns’ plans were their fans. The rest of the league and billions worldwide could have cared less.

Already getting off on the wrong foot with the fans, the media and the holdovers from the front office, Mangini decided to go for the grand slam by taking on the players. In the most highly publicized snub since Don Knotts wasn’t nominated as best actor for his role in The Incredible Mr. Limpett, Mangini ignored the hulking Shaun Rogers at a charity function in late February, claiming he just didn’t see him.

Mangini’s explanation wasn’t believable because the two almost literally bumped shoulders in their bids to ignore each other. Rogers claimed he felt disrespected but what was really going on behind the scenes was that Rogers (and other players) had gotten a letter from Mangini a few days earlier that they would be required to report for the team’s upcoming workouts in mid-March at their playing weight.

Rogers, who struggles with weight issues and never met a Boston crème pie he could resist, felt disrespected because he always answered the bell during the season.

To some, Rogers was just acting out his nickname of Big Baby. As it turned out, it was just another misstep by Mangini; a failure to understand the pulse of his new team.

Meanwhile, in an effort to reclaim some of the draft picks lost by the previous regime, Mangini (or was it Kokinis?) traded Kellen Winslow, Jr. to Tampa Bay for a second round pick in the coming draft and a fifth round pick in 2010. Ultimately, it was a trade of mutual convenience. Winslow wanted his contract renegotiated and Mangini wanted draft picks. Tampa Bay was the willing dupe.

In some sense, Winslow was missed. Mostly, though, he wasn’t. Winslow wasn’t happy with the Browns for a number of reasons and wanted a fresh start elsewhere. Whatever skills Winslow still has, they aren’t ever going to be what his college potential promised due mostly to injuries. A team rebuilding didn’t need someone like Winslow. Of course either did Tampa Bay but they went on to re-do his contract anyway, making him about $20 million richer. Meanwhile, somewhere Josh Cribbs steamed.

When the NFL’s mid-winter meetings hit in early March, the Browns were mostly bystanders. That was a good thing. It was a refreshing assessment that signing a high-priced free agent wasn’t what this team needed. There were just too many holes and not enough cap space to go around. It was something that Savage never really understood as he went about throwing money at the likes of Donte Stallworth the season before.

Lingering Items--Cover Up Edition

For all of the shortcomings that former Cleveland Browns’ general manager Phil Savage had, one thing he seemed to understand was the special bond between the fans and the players, particularly Browns fans. To that end, he went about trying to bring in players with a local connection; players who understood exactly what the Browns-Steelers rivalry meant.

One of those was certainly Joe Jurevicius, an unabashed Browns fan well before he ever became a pro football player himself. A local product through and through, except for that unfortunate stint at Penn State, Jurevicius represented everything Cleveland fans like in their players. He was loyal, hardworking, and not afraid to get his jersey dirty. He took on the unglamorous assignments that are so critical to moving the ball down field and has the body scars to prove it. When he made one clutch third-down catch after another, every fan celebrated with him as he thrust his arm forward as if he was the referee signaling for a first down. More than anything else, he was a winner.

Jurevicius, as fans well know by now, went under the knife for relatively routine arthroscopic surgery on his right knee after the 2007 season. But complications, mostly stemming from a staph infection he contracted, put him out of service for the entire 2008 season. He was released after the season and whether he’ll ever play again is questionable.

Though no longer on the team, Jurevicius still has the chance to help the Browns through the lawsuit he filed last week against his old team, the Cleveland Clinic and team physicians. It’s unlikely that the Browns and their lawyers see it that way, but by bringing the lawsuit Jurevicius hopes to, in part, expose what he no doubt believes is a cover-up by the Browns’ organization over the last few years with regard to staph infections suffered by the players. If he’s successful, it can only help the Browns in the long run. Sometimes the only way to help is with a sledgehammer.

In the suit, Jurevicius alleges that the Browns, despite representations to the contrary, did not properly maintain, disinfect or clean their therapy devices making it likely that he and, by proxy other players,would get a staph infection.

The particulars of Jurevicius’ lawsuit aren’t nearly as interesting as what is likely to come next. Since much of the lawsuit is premised on Browns officials, including Savage and former head coach Romeo Creennel allegedly misleading Jurevicius about the precautions the team had taken to rid its facility of staph, those same officials are going to find themselves on the hot seat having to answer difficult questions about what they knew and when they knew it.

Savage, in particular, undoubtedly will be the focus of some particularly grueling questioning by Jurevicius’ lawyers as topic one for them is going to be Savage’s bungling last year of Kellen Winslow’s medical situation, an incident that as much as anything led to Savage’s firing. Savage supposedly did everything he could to keep Winslow from revealing that he, too, was suffering another staph infection and then punished him for essentially going public with his concerns. Though not stated directly in the pleadings, this is the heart of the lawsuit. Savage claimed he was just trying to protect Winslow from, I guess, the media vipers. In actuality, Savage was just trying to protect Savage.

The Winslow incident, which Savage clearly tried to bury, was the first real shot across the bow of the team for their allegedly perfunctory efforts in keeping their players healthy. The Jurevicius lawsuit is the second. With a new regime in place, it will be easy for them to dismiss this lawsuit as old business. That would be a mistake.

While the old business is the Winslow incident, in a vacuum, the larger issue for Jurevicius and other players is how it plays into why, exactly, Jurevicius got staph. Did the Browns really take all the precautions they could to combat staph? Whether or not the relatively large number of staph infections by Browns’ players over the last year or two is a pattern or a coincidence will be a key to whether or not Jurevicius prevails in his lawsuit and whether or not there are other similar lawsuits in the team’s future.

But even if the lawsuit doesn’t result in any recovery for Jurevicius, it more than succeeds anyway if it brings a new-found focus on this problem Everyone involved, from the players, to the coaches to team officials are tired of dealing with this issue. But for all that weariness, it’s time for an actual solution to this problem to be found so that no more relatively minor injuries suddenly and unexpectedly transform into career-threatening injuries.

**

And the fall from grace continues.

Roger Clemens proving as inept at covering up his steroid use as he was proficient at throwing drug-induced fastballs, has taken still another whack to his flagging reputation. After being outed as a steroids user by his former trainer, Brian McNamee, during George Mitchell’s investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, Clemens loudly took the legal route to clear his name. It didn’t work.

In February, the judge hearing the lawsuit summarily dismissed it. The gist of the ruling was that McNamee, himself a target of the investigation, enjoyed immunity from such a lawsuit by virtue of his talking with governmental investigators from the Department of Justice and Mitchell. That McNamee would enjoy such immunity is Law School 101 and Clemens’ lawyers knew it. If cooperating witnesses in a governmental investigation can be sued for defamation for telling what they know, pretty soon there will be no such thing as a cooperating witness.

Not knowing when to say when, Clemens’ lawyers, no doubt at Clemens’ urging, asked the judge to reconsider the ruling. He did and slammed Clemens even harder than before, telling him sarcastically to sue the government if he really feels they overstepped theri boundaries in undertaking the investigation. He won’t.

The judge, helpfully.did tell Clemens that he could recast his defamation lawsuit by pointing not to what McNamee told the government but what he told Andy Pettitte directly. Of course, the judge said that knowing that this would require Clemens to bring Pettitte into the lawsuit, something Clemens can ill-afford. Pettitte, by truthfully coming forward, albeit after getting caught, retains his credibility and will have to again say under oath that Clemens was a drug user.

At some point Clemens may very well learn to leave well enough alone but for now it’s too late. His lawsuit may have been nothing more than an expensive exercise is public and private denial but it also served as a sharp stick in the eye to McNamee, who now plans on filing his own lawsuit. This one will be harder to dismiss.

Clemens doesn’t enjoy the immunity that McNamee had because Clemens’ statements about McNamee weren’t in the course of a governmental investigation. The only issue for the jury will be whether Clemens’ statements were defamatory. It’s a close call, given the extent of McNamee’s own wrongdoing.

But the real fireworks, just like the Jurevicius lawsuit, will be in the run up to the potential trial. Clemens will again be under oath and forced to either stick with his story thereby subjecting himself to perjury or moderate his stance into more of a Barry Bonds “I didn’t knowingly take any performance-enhancing drugs” non-denial denial.

Just don’t look for those fireworks anytime soon. Up until being replaced by South Carolina Mark Stanford, Clemens served as the textbook example of how not to handle a crisis. Eventually, though, he’ll learn his lesson and you’ll know it via the two or three line press release indicating that the parties have resolved their differences amicably.

Hopefully, then, we will have heard the last of Clemens.

**

Lost in all the mind-numbing sameness of this year’s version of the Cleveland Indians’ was general manager Mark Shapiro’s off-handed statement the other day that he hopes to right this ship in the next three years. Three years? Is there anyone alive out there?

It’s a testament to the job security that Shapiro must feel to be that blunt about his team’s prospects in the near term. The question is why isn’t anyone holding him more accountable? If Eric Mangini or George Kokinis had said that about the Browns there would have been a near riot on Mall C.

Maybe it was because Shapiro said it to a national writer that his three-year projection didn’t get much play locally. But it’s a stunning revelation nonetheless for a team that, more than many others, needs butts in the seats. Left unsaid, though, is exactly why Shapiro needs another three years or how, exactly, it will all come together in that amount of time.

My guess is that Shapiro is essentially admitting that serious organizational deficiencies in the acquisition of talent, both through free agency and in the draft, coupled with players on the current roster under long-term contracts that they can’t possibly live up to, are the culprits for his rather dismal prediction.

If the Indians were a publicly-traded company, the shareholders would revolt en masse. From a team that was relatively close to the World Series just a few years ago to have suddenly turned into baseball’s version of Delta Airlines smacks of management incompetence on a level not experienced since, well, the Browns returned to the NFL, but that’s another story.

But after learning some hard lessons after covering up Victor Martinez’s injury last season, Shapiro has embraced some level of transparency in his operations. Of course, that kind of transparency is always easier when nobody’s paying attention anyway. And if the fans’ indifference to the Indians’ latest free fall is teaching us anything, it’s that nobody really much cares anymore.

**

With Jhonny Peralta sleepwalking through another season, this week’s question to ponder: Is Peralta the least motivated player to wear a Cleveland uniform since Keith Hernandez?