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.

The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Opening Game, Pick the Year

The outcome was as inevitable as it was confounding but the journey was more interesting than usual.  The Cleveland Browns are a league doormat for many reasons not the least of which is their inability to beat division rivals or win an opening game.  So in that sense, nothing changed as the result of the outcome of Sunday’s 30-27 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

What made it more interesting than usual was the startling dichotomy behind a first half that unfolded as if the Browns would be on the business end of a 50+ point beat down and a second half that showed them to be a game if undermanned team.

Still, as head coach Mike Pettine noted, it’s a results oriented league that gives no points for moral victories and thus the Browns are, as usual, 0-1. 

This is a team, a franchise, a fan base, that needs something positive to happen.  It almost happened Sunday as the team improbably clawed its way back from a moribund 27-3 halftime deficit to tie it up late in the game.  Then of course it reverted to what it is because a team’s character shows most prominently during times of stress.  Needing a few first downs to at least get to overtime, the Browns offense instead buttoned back up, putting itself in bad positions with blown up plays that ultimately allowed Ben Roethlisberger to lead his team on one final drive that sent the Browns home with just another almost win and definite loss.

You could say that it was the defense that let this team down once again on that final drive, as it has some many times in the past.  But that only tells part of the story.  Looking as if it had no preseason in which to prepare when it yielded 27 first half points to the Steelers, the defense looked nearly formidable in the second half holding the Steelers to just those 3 critical points that ended the game.

It’s not really about dumping on this group of players for another loss because in many ways it’s not the players that failed but those above them and I don’t mean the coaching staff.  Sure Joe Haden once again demonstrated that he’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is and Justin Gilbert showed he is in desperate need of some film study.  But the defensive line, long touted as the strength of this team, showed up in the second half.  So did the linebackers.  Roethlisberger looked pretty damn ordinary for most of that second half as a result.

What continues to fail this team of course is its erstwhile and reckless approach to management.  Owner Jimmy Haslam can’t possibly think that the one and done he subjected former head coach Rob Chudzinski to had no impact on the direction of this franchise or even the outcome of this particular game.  It was monumental and not because Chudzinski was slated to be the next Bill Belichick.  It was because the impetuousness he demonstrated in first taking the words of Joe Banner and Mike Lombardi and then summarily firing them when they couldn’t deliver on any of their promises for the next coach showed the team and the world that Haslam, like Gilbert, needs plenty of seasoning.

It also put this team where it’s been too many times already—learning a new system, breaking in a new coach.  That’s some pretty high hurdles to take on in addition to the challenges that one of the league’s most stable franchises, Pittsburgh, perennially provides.

Marla Ridenour, writing in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, talked about the cloud that hangs over the team because of the Chudzinski firing and she’s right.  There’s nothing to suggest at the moment that Haslam will be any less impetuousness with Pettine when things go wrong.  Indeed would anyone be really surprised if Haslam were to fire Pettine should the team find itself winless during its bye week?  Of course not.

But we do know one thing.  Pettine isn’t a particularly impatient man or at least a man coaching like he’s on the league’s shortest leash. With just about everything going wrong in the first half, the narrative, indeed the collected wisdom within the confines of what make up the “experts” on the NFL’s pregame shows was that after one failed half it was now Johnny Manziel time.  Ridiculous on many levels but let’s start with the most basic.

Pettine is a rookie head coach.  The quickest way to cement that status is showing impatience with the fragile psyches that are the NFL’s band of quarterbacks.  If he replaced Hoyer at the end of the first half, it would have been tantamount to replacing him forever, sort of how Chris Palmer went to Tim Couch when Ty Detmer failed in that embarrassing opening season loss to, who else?, Pittsburgh in 1999 or when Romeo Crennel benched Charlie Frye near the end of the first half in the 2007 season opener against, wait for it, Pittsburgh, and went to Derek Anderson.  In other words, there was exactly this precedent in recent Browns’ past for Pettine to have benched Hoyer.

It would have been so like someone associated with the Browns to draw conclusions after one half of football in the season’s first game that perhaps that’s really why everyone was calling for Manziel.  They just kind of figured a Browns head coach, understanding the terrible history of head coaches in this town and the dreadful opening game outcomes for more than a decade, especially against Pittsburgh, would fall right in that line.

For not giving into the inevitable temptation, Pettine as much as anyone gets a Star of the Game award.

And what to make of Hoyer.  Well, for one thing, he operates better in a no-huddle format than the plodding approach employed by all of the offensive coordinators past.  So stick with it from here on in if only because it plays to the strength of the one guy that you need most at the moment.

The reason you need him most is because General Manager Ray Farmer still harbors the belief that he did address the wide receiver situation by stockpiling this team with Division II players, small fries, and undrafted free agents (many of whom not coincidentally fill all 3 slots).  Farmer claims they’re talented receivers it’s just that fans don’t know their names.  Neither does the rest of the league.

Put it this way, though, it wasn’t by accident that Hoyer kept going to tight end Jordan Cameron early on.  He’s reliable.  The others clearly haven’t shown enough even in practice for Hoyer to rely on them.

This Browns team isn’t a talented bunch.  There were flourishes on Sunday, certainly.  But what holds this team back is what has always held this team back.  A franchise if not in turmoil then at least in dissonance.  It’s hard to know exactly how far this team is away from being a legitimate contender but there are clues.  For example, more than half the roster wasn’t even with the team last year.  Another example, it still sorely lacks depth at virtually every position, making it more vulnerable than most to injuries.

It’s not even fair yet to say that this team will be interesting to watch all season.  There were good signs on Sunday but that’s all there were.  Nothing definitive will be decided next Sunday either against New Orleans.  What this team needs now is simply to show progress.  It did on Sunday, as measured from one half to the next.  The real trick comes in showing it from one game to the next.

The Numbing Sameness of it All, Again-Steelers Edition

No one understands better than a Cleveland Browns fan the need, the longing desire, the unattainable dream, to change the narrative of this moribund franchise.  As usual, that will have to wait for at least another year as the Browns finished off their latest crash into the concrete wall that is the Pittsburgh Steelers in their usual spectacularly awful fashion, losing this time by the rather generic score of 27-11 and coming out with the usual bloody nose and busted lip.

There’s a perverse comfort in the numbing sameness that the Browns are on a week by week, year by year basis but it isn't the same as actual comfort.  That comes, if at all, when someone in charge does something about not just the talent level in this organization but its heart.  There is none.  There’s just a sinkhole, ever expanding, ever widening that no one yet has found a way to fill.  It’s why there is no reservoir of emotion to call upon when needed.  There’s just an eternal canyon in this franchise filled at best with the depressing detritus of 14 years of abject futility in the form of owners, coaches, and players come and gone.  Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

There are no words left, really, to describe another Steelers victory over the Browns. How does one exactly go about explaining the same loss in a different way?  Let me try anyway.
In the 30 games these teams have played against each other in the Browns 2.0 era, the Steelers own a 25-5 record and have won 14 of the last 15, which covers nearly 8 years of abject ass kicking.  You can’t have a rivalry if one team won’t participate

Let’s try again.

The Steelers dominated the Browns once again Sunday.  That’s not news.  It’s also not news that the Steelers did so by dominating in the manner that speaks to the essence of the divide between these teams.  The Steelers, struggling in ways that an aging great franchise occasionally does, showed that when necessary it can still play with more purpose, more physicality and more heart than these Browns have ever showed.  It’s still hard to find the right tone.

Ok, focus.  Screw it.  The Browns did what the Browns do which is lose to the Steelers.  The details aren't’t particularly important but here are a few.

First in assessing the team’s performance Sunday consider giving a pass to Josh Gordon on given that he did tied a franchise record for catches in one game, 14, and set another for yards, 237.  That’s nice, it really is.  Not to diminish Gordon’s contribution though, the context is important.  The overwhelming bulk of those yards came long after the Browns and the cold, brave fans had surrendered any hope of making the game competitive.  Still since something should be celebrated once in awhile, let’s at least consider that a sober Gordon is a talent to be reckoned with.  I’d put even money that his first call after the game was to his agent asking exactly when he’d be a free agent so he could go to a team that plays on prime time more than once every two or three years.  Otherwise he has no Pro Bowls in his future.

So with Gordon as the notable exception, let no one rejoice in the mess that the Browns have now put on full display these last two weeks against division opponents.  From opening bell Sunday until the final gun came, mercifully, 4 hours later there was not one thought one could have gleaned about a positive future for this team.

Those looking to the defense as a source of burgeoning pride, look somewhere else.  For much of the season, it had been stout.  The last two weeks, when the season was at its tipping point, it failed.  Sunday the Steelers were able to do if not everything it wanted, then most of it anyway.  True the box score suggests something different.  For example, the Steelers had 85 yards rushing on 34 attempts, which is pretty much where the defense has held most teams this year.  They also had only 217 passing yards.  That’s a pretty low total overall and generally is a hook to hang on to.  It’s just that sometimes statistics don’t tell the whole story.

The Steelers came out in a no huddle offense, which strangely seemed to catch the Browns’ defense off guard.  Running back Le’Veon Bell wasn't necessarily doing any significant damage early but certainly the threat of him seemed to likewise keep the defense off balance.  That gave Ben Roethlisberger enough time to pick and poke at the rest of the defense as if he was carrying a long pole and checking the depths of a pond nearby.  There were little flicks of passes here, an occasional run, and then a deep ball.  Eventually that led to the Roethlisberger to Antonio Brown 41 yard touchdown that more than anything seemed to put the team, not just the defense, in a funk as if they had already surrendered to the cold and accepted that it would be a long, miserable day.

The Browns’ offense was its typical messy self.  There was no running game to speak of even when one ignores the 21 yards debited for the 3 sacks.  The Steelers’ Bell had “only” 80 yards total but the Browns collectively had 76, not including the lost yardage on sacks.  To put a finer point on it running back Chris Ogbonnaya had a fumble for the second straight week that set up the Steelers’ second field goal.

The passing attack was disjointed until, again, garbage time.  Prior to that, Jason Campbell gave what Jason Campbell has, twice.  Knocked out early for one play, Campbell left the second time after a shiv to the chin which led to another turnover.  It caused a concussion for Campbell and a headache for the fans who wanted to see Brandon Weeden about as much as they wanted to see an oral surgeon.  Out came Brandon Weeden, nonetheless, as there are no other alternatives on the roster.

A chorus of boos greeted Weeden unceremoniously.  He probably took it personally but shouldn't.  The fans understand Weeden’s significant limitations as much as they detest the idea of watching a movie again that they didn't much like the two or three other times they sat through.  And just like a movie on continuous loop this one turned out like every previous viewing.  Weeden gave what he had, which was a pick 6 interception and then, later, a 1 yard touchdown pass to Gordon.  Truthfully, he did nothing of note on either side of the ledger, the pick 6 was as irrelevant to the final outcome as the touchdown pass.  His crowning achievement, such as it was, was his steadfast reliance on bolstering Gordon’s stats.    Before that, Weeden was his usual ineffective self leading a team that simply doesn't believe in him.

The players who claimed disappointment afterward about the fans booing Weeden probably shouldn't be so snippy.  They see first hand what Weeden has and hasn't done and they play accordingly.  Fan reaction to that can’t be unexpected.  It’s also not like these same players have done much the last few weeks either.  When it comes to Weeden on Sunday, the best that can be said and all that really should be said is that his ineffectiveness wasn't particularly contributory to the defeat nor notable from that of all his predecessors, the vanquished dozens of quarterbacks before him who have likewise failed to stand up to the Steelers in any meaningful fashion.  Numbing sameness indeed!

It might be nice if one of these Browns-Steelers games was closely contested and perhaps the one in two weeks will be.  But even if a victory does come in Pittsburgh it will be too late to be meaningful.  The Steelers are hanging by a thread anyway having started the season 0-4 and may be out of that thread by the time they meet the Browns again.  If not, then soon anyway.  The Browns on the other hand started the season with few threads and surrendered all they had, obviously, a week ago against the Bengals. This Steelers game was for pride and perhaps that’s why a loss seemingly like all the rest still hurts more than it should.

There’s still several weeks left in the season that the front office gave up on weeks ago.  All of this makes for another cold depressing march, especially for the faithful who cared to purchase season tickets in the eternal hope that the tag line that comes with the solicitation for such tickets, “season ticket holders have priority for playoff tickets,” will for once not be another empty promise.  Not this year and maybe not ever.
This Browns franchise isn't UPS or FedEx.  It’s not even the USPS.  Deadline or obligation be damned. It doesn't ever deliver.

Lingering Items--Browns Preview Edition

At some point the Cleveland Browns had to sign a kicker.  Billy Cundiff, it’s your turn in the box.  Thankfully they signed Cundiff before Sunday’s kickoff against Miami.  But it was always iffy whether they’d get it done, wasn't it? With the Browns, where hope has been its only strategic plan for more than a decade, it’s never wise to presume anything.

When Joe Banner took over as president of the club, his hiring signaled not just the end of Mike Holmgren (thankfully) but of Phil Dawson as well.  Banner, as curmudgeonly of a sports executive as you’re ever likely to see, doesn't like old kickers, even kickers who have are 7-7 outside of 50 yards the past two seasons.  He doesn't think they’re worth whatever it is to keep them around, even on a team with an offense that tends to stall at the opponent’s 30 and relies on 50+ yard field goals like hookers rely on conventions.

That meant that Dawson wasn't going to be resigned short of agreeing to play for free and maybe that wouldn't even have done it.  Dawson had been the team’s MVP but let’s not get completely wrapped around the axle on that small fact.  It’s not as if this team was top heavy in MVP types in the first place.

So the fact that Dawson was expendable and thus expended and the Browns entered their opening week without a kicker isn't so much what grinds the average fan, though it grinds them still the same.  It’s the fact that the team’s ham handed approach to filling one of the more critical roles on a team that can’t otherwise score reveals that for however hard you might scrub the walls in Berea with the newest, bestest detergent the stench of incompetence doesn't get removed that easily.

I don’t care that Shayne Graham wasn't the answer and rookie Brandon Bogotoy was injured or whatever.  Those things happen.  But cutting them both without having another kicker on the roster?  Is that really how good, efficient, smart teams handle such things?  Would it have killed them to sign another kicker first?  Do they always have to look like boobs in how they go about making and executing personnel decisions?

And while that bit of stupidity made the new regime look like the old one and the one before that and the one before that, the real story of this team continues to be its lack of depth.  That more than anything will keep this team from progressing.

How do we know it lacks depth?  Put it this way: if you cut 7 players in order to get down to the league mandated 53 players and then go ahead and cut 7 more after that just to sign 7 cast offs from other teams it doesn’t say much about the back end of the roster, which is exactly what the Browns did last week.  It also doesn’t say much about the people making the decisions in the first place.

Isn’t all of this what fans were hoping would be avoided when Jimmy Haslam bought the team and with that swept Randy Lerner and Mike Holmgren out of town?

The Browns have 9 undrafted rookie free agents on the roster.  That may be slightly higher than most teams, but not significantly so.  Every team fills out the back end of its roster with undrafted free agents.  It’s the cheapest most efficient way to manage the salary cap.  More broadly, though, well more than half the active roster on this team is first or second year players.   That doesn’t just scream youth.  It screams lack of depth.

The Browns find themselves once again one of the youngest in the league.  The roster turnover was again massive.  There may be better starters on this team then in year’s past, but what separates teams is roster depth.  Starters get injured every game.  In order to compete you have to have experience backing those starters up.  The Browns don’t.  Again.

When you look at the current Browns’ roster, it’s fairly deep on the defensive line and that will certainly help. It has to.  The defensive backfield is thin, New York runway model thin.  That means that Ray Horton’s blitzes have to pay off because as we’ve seen in seasons past, when the defensive line can’t get pressure and the linebackers don’t blitz, Buster Skrine is only marginally better than Buster Bluth.  Joe Haden can’t do it all and T.J. Ward has to stay healthy.

The right side of the offensive line remains in flux and there is no credible running back behind Trent Richardson.  He simply has to stay healthy to mask the gaping deficiency the Browns have at quarterback.  Everyone likes Brandon Weeden’s arm.  But he’s  second tier talent at best, prone to flashes of competence and streaks of incomprehensible decision making.  Weeden’s age isn’t working in his favor, either. Behind him is Brian Hoyer?  Jason Campbell?  Does it matter?  Neither is more than a stop gap, but then again that’s their role.

See the pattern?  For whatever talent lies in the starting line up it serves only to underscore the significant drop off when it comes to the reserves.  Given all this how can anyone expect this team to win more than 5 games?  Certainly Vegas doesn’t.  The over and under for wins is 4.5, and that sounds about right.

Perhaps it will all work out one of these days.  Dumb luck suggests that at some point a winning program has to emerge.  The problem with the Browns though is that they almost purposefully eliminate the chance of luck biting them in the ass by being so dumb about their roster in the first place.


**
The other thing about the Browns lack of depth is that besides a few free agents to bolster the defense and the drafting of a now injured Barkevious Mingo, the Browns accomplished pressure little this off season, at least in terms of players.

They did, of course, switch out the entire coaching staff and instill new systems on both offense and defense, but from a personnel standpoint this season mostly hinges on the hope that last year’s hope develops.

That’s what makes the nearly unbridled optimism that many fans feel about this team so strange.  The Browns have mostly done a great job at diminishing expectations and yet the fans feel as optimistic as ever.

Part of that is due, of course, to this just being a Browns town.  The other part is the fact that the people who run the Browns are afforded a pass not given to any other team in this town, and perhaps the country.

For me, though, I’m going to trust Banner and company and assume this team is still a massive work in progress.  You simply can’t be as young and inexperienced as this team is and make plans for the playoffs.

**

In the last decade the Browns have opened at home 9 times.  They have a 1-8 record.  From a purely statistical point of view, that doesn’t given anyone much hope for a victory against Miami this Sunday.

For many teams past performance is not a good indicator of the future.  For teams like the Browns it’s a direct correlation.

Still if you’re looking for a reason, any reason, to have some optimism about the Browns vs. Dolphins, look no further than the notion that every team in the NFL has flaws and gaps. There are no perfect teams just varying degrees of imperfect teams.  It’s just that fans in Cleveland tend to know their team’s problems more intimately than, say, all the various problems plaguing Miami at the moment.

The Dolphins spent big to get receiver Mike Wallace, a speedster with a penchant for occasionally dropping important passes.  Ryan Tanehill was a surprise last year as a quarterback the Browns passed on in order to get 29 year old rookie Brandon Weeden.  But so much of the Dolphins’ success hinges on Wallace becoming the superstar his paycheck suggests and Tannehill taking the next step.  Just substitute the words “Weeden” for Tannehill and “Richardson” for Wallace and it’s hard to distinguish between the potential of the Browns and the Dolphins.

And for most of the season it will be a similar analysis.  Just for giggles, consider this year’s sexy pick, the Cincinnati Bengals.  Maybe they do take the AFC North but doesn’t that depend, really, on Andy Dalton playing even better?  Dalton is a decent quarterback but is he a top tier quarterback?  It’s hard to see the Bengals getting back to 10 wins because, ultimately, water finds its level and if there’s something we know about the Bengals it’s that they are nearly as poorly run of a franchise as the Browns.

You could go down the same road with the Ravens and the Steelers and even the Patriots but as I said, water tends to find its level.  That’s why, again, teams like the Browns, the Raiders and the Jets will end up with a steady diet of Don Criqui and Steve Tasker broadcasting their games.

**
If you want a question to ponder about the Browns, how about this: How many games will Mingo appear in this season?

The Things We Know--Week 16 Makeover Edition

To the surprise of no one, including the principals, the Cleveland Browns today fired head coach Pat Shurmur and general manager Tom Heckert and launched their by now all too common biennial makeover. Shurmur was on board for two years and Heckert three but together they combined for less wins than there are games in one regular season.

These firings hardly qualify as news.  They are more in the nature of confirmations of the inevitable.  What I wonder though is who gets stuck with the bill to pay them off on the remainder of their contracts?  I suspect it's new owner Jimmy Haslam III which puts him squarely in the same company as Randy Lerner whose ownership was defined mostly by the millions he spent paying ex coaches and front office types.  It gets difficult spending money on things that matter when so much is tied up in paying off people who don't.

To say any of this relates in any way to what took place on Sunday in the 24-10 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers would be unfair.  As Heckert noted in an interview with the Plain Dealer, he knew he was gone the minute Haslam hired Joe Banner and gave him final say over everything including the final roster.  That was a power that Heckert had and wasn't interested in relinquishing.  So Heckert's gone not because he was lousy at judging talent (he wasn't but he also wasn't nearly as good as people are now claiming either) but because his ego wouldn't allow him to let someone else have control over the roster.  That's life in these United States I suppose.

But as we delve more into the latest decline of a franchise that always seems to find new depths to plunge, let's do so in the context of Sunday's loss even if the less said about it the better.  It's not that it was a particularly embarrassing loss.  Indeed there have been much worse at the hands of the Steelers, particularly in the season's last game.  It's more that the game wasn't particularly meaningful.  Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, was on the line.  The Steelers weren't jockeying for playoff position and the Browns weren't playing for their head coach's future.  That had long been decided.  You could argue rightfully that the game had even less on the line then a typical final preseason game.

The game was chippy at times but only in the way that a neighborhood annual Turrkey Bowl game between rival factions of the same family is chippy.  There was a surface level amount of tension but it had roughly the passion of a typical bimbo/mimbo hook up on The Bachelor.  And while the Steelers covered the 11-point spot by winning 24-10, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone, including the degenerate gamblers hanging around bowling alley bars that would have put a plug nickel on the game.  Even giving the points they'd feel guilty winning the bet and generally gamblers don't feel guilty about anything. 

The overhang to the game of course was the impending unemployment of Shurmur and Heckert.  It being their last game didn't seem to inspire much in the way of play by a roster ravaged with injuries these last few weeks.  It would be convenient, at least poetically, to say that Sunday's game was a microcosm of Shurmur's tenure in Cleveland but it wouldn't be true.  The Browns lost Sunday because even though the Steelers suck they are still better than a Browns team that was starting its practice squad quarterback and a defensive back named Buster Skrine.

In fact, let's talk about the Steelers for a second instead of the Browns if only to feel good about something.  In the Browns victory over them earlier in the season you got the sense that this wasn't a typical Steelers team.  Then in the weeks that followed when the Steelers were playing like every other 6-10 team in the league that sense grew stronger.  But it wasn't until Sunday when it became clear to me how bad the Steelers are this season.  The Browns have a far superior offensive line to the point that if the Steelers had the Browns offensive line they'd probably be in the playoffs.  And let's face it the Browns offensive line isn't great, just average to above average.

Then there is Ben Rothlisberger.  I suspect he now understands what it must have been like to be Bernie Kosar in the '80s.  Watching Ataya Rubin literally push his man into Roethlisberger's lap on nearly every pass play and then seeing Roeethlisberger take lick after lick thereafter probably means a premature end to Roethlisberger's career, just like Kosar's.  Ben is big but those hits hurt and they've clearly taken a toll this season.

The Steelers have a receiving corps that should make Browns fans feel good about the receivers on their team.  Would any GM outside of true idiots like former Jets' GM Mike Tannebaum trade the Browns' receivers even up for the Steelers? Sure the Steelers have tight end Heath Miller and the Browns have, who?, Jordan Cameron and Ben Watson.  But where does it go after that?  Josh Gordon and Greg Little offer far more promise than any other receiver currently on the Steeler's roster.  That is not something I could have imagined writing earlier in the season, particularly about Little.  But Little turned it around when he decided that it was better to play a good game than talk one.  It was one of the more dramatic positive turnarounds of a player wearing a Browns uniform since the advent of Browns 2.0.

The Browns are retooling or rebooting or whatever they end up calling this latest housecleaning but the Steelers have issues they ignore at their own peril. In fact, the same goes for the Baltimore Ravens.  The Browns are laggards in a bad division but it is a bad division which in a perverse was is as good of time as any to start anew again.

So let us not dwell on the existential meaningless of the Sunday loss and instead let's dwell generally.  Shurmur was brought in because of his offensive approach.  Heckert was hired for his ability to spot talent.  Of the two Heckert was more successful but let's not confuse that with abject success.  Only twice all season did the offense score the equivalent of 4 touchdowns.  In half their games they scored enough points to add up to two touchdowns or less.  Without Phil Dawson, and particularly his uncanny ability from beyond 50 yards, the offensive output would have been even worse.

Shurmur's schemes were too often either ill-conceived or too predictable.  He was saddled with a rookie quarterback, certainly, but Shurmur did little to adjust to that circumstance.  He often ignored the running game in a misguided attempt to accelerate Brandon Weeden's development.  And Weeden did little to convince anyone that the trial by fire made sense.

But maybe Shurmur knew something the fans didn't.  Trent Richardson showed flashes of promise but was in very large measure the average back that Jim Brown assessed during the preseason.  Want proof?  It's there in abundance from Richardson's very pedestrian yards per carry stat to the almost complete absence of any run of significance.  Put it this way.  The Browns' two longest runs from scrimmage this season were both 35 yards.  One was from receiver Travis Benjamin on a reverse in the season's first game.  The other was from defensive back Ray Ventrone on a fake punt in the season's last game.  It's not time yet to declare Richardson a bust but he performed worse than pretty much any other first round pick in last year's draft and that includes Weeden.

That's the context to this latest makeover which will certainly be accompanied by the usual hope and skepticism because the franchise doesn't seem any closer to figuring it out than at any other point in the last 13 years.  Sure there is a new owner and he's far more invested emotionally and far more successful profesionally than the jammy wearing ingrate that used to occupy the owners' suite.  There's also a new CEO or president or whatever title he's going by that has a better track record than anyone wearing that title previously with this franchise.  But this franchise is cursed.  It's a black hole of a franchise where smart people go to get stupid.  If we've learned anything over the last nearly decade and a half it's that the Browns are a franchise where good ideas go to die and good players go to get injured.

Don't at all take this as a defense of the status quo.  Consistency isn't a goal unto itself.  You stay consistent if there's something to stay consistent about and nothing about Shurmur screams "stay the course."  But if I'm being entirely fair and perhaps a bit melancholy Shurmur probably is my favorite bad coach of the Browns.  Think about it.  He wasn't as outwardly incompetent as, say, Romeo Crennel.  He wasn't as visibly overwhelmed as Chris Palmer.  He was more sincere than Butch Davis and lacked the evilness of Eric Mangini.  He wasn't any more successful than any of his predecessors, which is why he's gone, but there was a certain underlying integrity about him that was admirable.

The reason Shurmur is out of a job today isn't just that he didn't win.  It's more that he demonstrated through word and mostly deed that he isn't suited to be a NFL head coach.  I think he brings value in some ways and that's why he'll always find work as a high level assistant.  But there are certain personality types that aren't suited for the corner office and Shurmur's is one of them.  You almost get the sense that he never really aspired to the role he had and was probably surprised when Mike Holmgren chose him instead of taking the job himself.  Shurmur didn't have, as Springsteen once wrote, the passion that burned in his veins.  Fans could sense it and so could the players.  He's a decent and likeable sort but the players never seemed inspired to walk through hell in gasoline-soaked underwear for him.  Why would they?  There were times when it wasn't all that clear whether Shurmur even had a pulse. 

Meanwhile, though Sunday's game wasn't particularly revealing about the future, it was enough of a lesson about the state of the franchise to scare off even the most competitive minded of head coaches-to-be.  Whoever takes the reigns next, and believe me there will be someone to take the reins next, faces a daunting challenge.  There are some decent starters to work with but there is no depth.  More to the point though is that there is a culture to overcome.  Think about how D'qwell Jackson or Dawson or even Joe Thomas and Josh Cribbs will approach the next head coach.  They've been through this so often that they have to be completely jaded to the process.  The new head coach needs first to reach those four (unless Banner dispenses with Dawson and Cribbs)  and convince them that he has a better way, a right way, a way that will result in more than 4 or 5 wins every season.  It would be easier to face a nursery full of colicky babies after not having slept in 3 days then a lockerroom of Browns players at this point.  They'll listen because they have to, which is what Shurmur found, but they aren't going to follow unless they're convinced there's a damn good reason to and unless Jackson and Dawson and Thomas and Cribbs can embrace that reason there's no reason to think anyone else will either.

Generally after another loss the head coach says that the team just has to go back and work harder and get ready for the next opponent.  After Sunday's loss, that still remains true except that the next opponent they face is the same one they've been facing and getting hammered by for years--themselves.

The Things We Know--Week 11

When you stop and ponder just for a moment the Cleveland Browns’ victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday you can’t help but ask yourself what was the most improbable thing about that 20-14 victory?

Was it simply that the Browns actually beat the Steelers after bowing down to them in such subservient fashion for the last 14 years that the victory merely pushed their winning percentage against the Steelers over that span to a virtual tie with Brent Lillibridge’s lifetime batting average? (.217 vs. .213)

Was it that the Steelers committed 8 turnovers (could have been 11), the first time any team has done that in the last 11 years?   Or was it that despite the turnovers the Browns still scored just 20 points and only won by 6?

It’s a classic half-glass full kind of victory, as George W. Bush might say.  The victory surely was pleasing in the overall sense because it was against the hated Steelers, but had it been against, say, the bumbling Oakland Raiders, the team they play next week, would people still be walking around Monday morning with a little extra bounce in their step?

Probably.  The truth of the matter is that as surely as some wins can be minimized and some losses maximized, there’s nothing that will ever diminish a Browns victory over the Steelers.  Not a creaky, barely competent third string quarterback that the Steelers trotted out on Sunday in Charlie Batch, a player that I’m sure most fans couldn’t believe was still in the league, assuming he had just faded away after being cut by the Detroit Lions 11 years ago in favor of Joey Harrington.  Not an injured Troy Polamalu out nursing either some sort of lower extremity issue or fussy hair extensions.  Not the fact that the Steelers were so bereft of offensive linemen that they inquired earlier this week about acquiring Buster Skrine and moving him over to play right tackle (ok, that’s not exactly true because even the Steelers know that Skrine is untouchable.)  And certainly not the fact that the Steelers are so thin at receiver that they turned to former Steelers wide receiver Plaxico Burress literally pulled him from a Manhattan Toys R Us “doorbusters” line on Black Friday, ill-fitted him for a uniform and then gave him the starting job.

The real reason you can’t diminish a Browns victory over the Steelers stems from the simple fact that notwithstanding every good reason to explain why the Steelers looked like the Browns circa “The Chris Palmer Years” (or “The Romeo Crennel Years” or even “The Eric Mangini Years”), the NFL is still a no excuse league.  Shit happens and you have to roll with it.  No team, no team’s fans, knows that better than the Browns.

If the Steelers want sympathy for fielding a team that apparently is so dependent on a healthy Ben Roethlisberger that the players literally shut down when he doesn’t play, they won’t get it in Cleveland.  They won’t get it in Baltimore or Cincinnati either.  Hell, they won’t get it in any self-respecting NFL town, including Pittsburgh.  If the best the Steelers could do was Charlie Batch at quarterback then I say it’s their own fault.  Seneca Wallace has been a free agent for months.

Besides, I don’t recall any teams or the fans of said teams throwing any sympathy Cleveland’s way as the Browns embarrassed themselves in one loss or another for years and the Browns are the ones usually compounding bad drafts with serious injuries in their usual quest for 4 or 5 wins a year.  So the fact that the Browns scored a victory against a team clearly being held together by off-brand adhesive tape shouldn’t be taken lightly, especially when it’s only the third win this season.

But if you want to take the victory, file it away, and then take a sobering look at the team that got it you won’t find a whole lot to really enjoy.  It’s pretty hard, for example, to end up with merely 20 points when the team you were facing gave you 8 additional possessions, often in pretty good field position.  That the Browns pulled off the trick tells you that even against a banged up Steelers defense and plenty of opportunities, scoring points is as hard as finding a critic that loved Lindsay Lohan’s turn as Elizabeth Taylor.

Quarterback Brandon Weeden continues what was always going to be an uneven rookie year.  Neither plainly bad nor objectively good, Weeden kept the team moving Sunday mostly in neutral save for a nice touchdown pass in the second quarter to tight end Jordan Cameron.  The same could be said for Trent Richardson as well as he ran the ball 29 times and still ended up with less than 100 yards rushing overall.  Indeed, his stats were the marker for why the offense still had to struggle to win the game against a team practically demanding that the Browns finally give them the spanking they deserve.

There weren’t any particularly glaring errors by head coach Pat Shurmur and credit should be given to defensive coordinator Dick Jauron for not letting the defense fall into the trap of letting a never-was-been like Batch have one final career highlight.

But as games go, it wasn’t a thing of beauty.  Then again either was Ohio State’s game against Michigan on Saturday and yet even with nothing particularly substantive riding on the outcome the Buckeyes victory was still pretty damn satisfying.  Sometimes it’s just better to take the few victories as they come and save examining the warts in greater detail until the cold light of a few days later.

**

You have to hand it to Browns’ fans though.  One low stakes, ugly win against an arch rival and suddenly nothing looks as bleak as it did just a week ago.  Now fans are talking as if this ship is finally turning.  Then again the exact same talk, even more so, followed the victory against the Bengals and then the Chargers and we know what happened next.

There’s no way of knowing whether this thing is turning until it actually turns.  When that happens it could be that the win against the Steelers will serve as a key point on the map.  But as any Browns fan knows, the Browns have had more than anyone’s fair share of false starts and shattered hopes.  You could certainly make the case here that the defensive line is surely getting more formidable and the offensive line, despite giving up 4 sacks on Sunday, is better.  Given the ages of the players on those lines, it’s fair to get a bit charged about the future.  And if you’re like most people that know anything about football, you start to realize that good teams are built from the lines out.  That’s all good.

But the Browns aren’t suddenly a 9 or 10 win season based on anything they showed against the Steelers.  Are they more like a 6 or 7 win team? That’s a better question and an affirmative answer certainly would constitute progress of sorts.  Having weathered this team for way too long, curb the enthusiasm for now, enjoy the win for what it was, and then check back in next week to see if the team can actually do what progressing teams tend to do—use one victory as the springboard to the next.

**

Sunday’s win is a pretty good lesson about why it’s so difficult to call one team’s schedule tougher than another’s.  In the NFL, it’s not merely the teams you play that make a schedule difficult.  There are two far more important variables: when you play them and, to a lesser extent, where.

Looking at the Browns’ schedule last fall, it certainly looked pretty scaring to be playing the Steelers twice in the last 6 weeks of the season.  By late November the good teams are showing their mettle and the early season pretenders are fading.  It’s usually the exact wrong time to face a team like the Steelers.

If nothing else, the Browns found the most opportune time to face the Steelers and to their credit exploited it like Donald Trump exploits his ego.  You couldn’t have seen that coming last July.  And if Roethlisberger continues to hurt and the Steelers continue to lose, then they’ll be a mostly disinterested team when the Browns face them for the last game of the season, thus giving fans a real hope that the annual holiday ass-whipping won’t take place this year.

On the other hand, there’s nothing about the remaining schedule that lays out hope for anything more than a 5 win season.  With Oakland and Kansas City next, a 3-game win streak is certainly plausible or at least not nearly as ridiculous as that concept appeared at any time prior to this past Sunday at 4:15 p.m.

Can the Browns steal another victory in there and make it six wins?  If they do that, then there may be actual progress taking place because one of those wins will have come against a legitimately decent team.

**

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Another really strange occurrence from Sunday came after the game when it was announced that Mike Holmgren will officially leave on Friday.  I’m not sure exactly why this was announced, mainly because I thought like most fans did that he already had left and had said his goodbye.

The timing of it all was strange and there may be nothing more to read into it then the announcement signified that the Browns and Holmgren reached some sort of financial settlement to get him out of the way as quickly as possible.  But since no one loves a good conspiracy more than me, my working assumption until proven otherwise is that Holmgren’s leaving now is probably the worst news Pat Shurmur and Tom Heckert have received since they found out that Joe Banner had been hired.

Within hours after the Browns play the Steelers in the final game of the year, Banner will surely announce at least Shurmur’s fate, if not Heckert’s as well.  With Holmgren pushed aside now, those two lose their biggest ally inside the Berea headquarters.  And while it’s entirely possible and maybe probable that Holmgren’s actually leaving now is nothing more than him just being told that the buffet line at Berea could no longer accommodate one more mouth to feed, there’s at least some likelihood that it’s related to the already-decided fates of Shurmur and Heckert.  Holmgren certainly wouldn’t support dumping either one and thus wouldn’t want to be seen as part of that decision making process.  Leaving now, with a little more than a month remaining in the season, gives Holmgren plausible deniability of having participated in firing two coaches in three years.

I don’t think anything about the Steelers win on Sunday signals a change of heart regarding Shurmur.  If there’s one abiding truth in professional sports is that upper management likes to make its own hires.  Mark Shapiro fired Charlie Manuel.  Holmgren fired Eric Mangini.  These things just happen.

Shurmur wasn’t Banner’s choice and never will be and his departure, couched in the usual terms of “he did a great job but we need to move in a different direction” is inevitable.  Put it this way, Banner has had plenty of time to affirm that Shurmur is just as much his guy as Holmgren’s and not only has not done so but has actually done the opposite.  He’s left Shurmur dangling with the “we’ll evaluate everything once the season ends” line.  I don’t see how an ugly win against Pittsburgh changes anything in that evaluation.

Banner could surprise everyone and make Shurmur his guy as well but that seems as unlikely as the Browns running the table the rest of the season and even if they do it probably won’t matter.  Banner was not brought in to keep the status quo and if there’s one thing Shurmur represents more than anything else, it’s the status quo.

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?