The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Cultural Overhaul Edition

If you want to know the real benefit of being the new regime for the NFL’s most pathetic franchise, it’s this: you can clear the decks of the mistakes that aren’t yours and no one will criticize.  Indeed you’ve set yourself up for praise.

That’s how it is at the moment for new Cleveland Browns general manager Ray Farmer and new head coach Mike Pettine.  In succession on Wednesday, Farmer settled most of the family business by cutting loose the two quarterbacks that started most of the team’s games last season, Brandon Weeden and Jason Campbell.   For now, the only complaints are those directed at Mike Holmgren and Tom Heckert, a long gone previous regime.

The moves weren’t unanticipated.  Nothing gives cover for making a harsh move than the absence of the knuckleheads responsible for drafting them in the first place.  Yet for those of you keeping track at home, this means that again as always the Browns officially are looking for a quarterback. Unofficially, nothing’s changed.  It also means that the books are now closed on the fate of the 2012 draft as both first round picks are no longer with the team, Trent Richardson having been traded to Indianapolis during last season.  Usually it takes a bit longer to evaluate a draft.

I’d have to do the kind of research that would really be a fitful waste of time to determine the last time a team had two picks in the first round and neither was with the team two years later.  Let’s just peg the number at zero because that’s what it probably is anyway.  (Interesting factoid:  3 times in this golden decade plus of the Browns 2.0, the team has had two draft picks in the first round.  The only non-bust of all 6 picks—Tim Couch, Courtney Brown, Joe Thomas, Brady Quinn, Trent Richardson, Brandon Weeden—has been Thomas.  Couch and Brown lasted 5 lamentable years with the Browns, Quinn 3 and Weeden and Richardson 2.  Fascinating record, isn’t it?)

That Weeden was a colossal waste of a first round pick is a given.  Weeden was a bad decision from the outset.  No one drafts a 28 year old rookie quarterback in the first round.  Check that.  No one drafts a 28 year old rookie quarterback in any round.  No one, that is, except the Browns.  The thought process at the time was that Weeden would be more mature.  That was supposed to translate, I guess, into a shorter learning curve.

If there was one thing that was clear about Weeden, though, it was that virtually nothing translated.  Whatever he studied, whatever he worked on almost didn’t matter.  Weeden had the unusually consistent inability to put thought into positive action or learn from his mistakes.  The 3 straight weeks of awful off-balanced shovel passes late in games is the testament to his trend.  In fairness, there was one mistake he did learn from and that was that he had to get off the field during pregame more quickly after having gotten trapped under the American flag being unfurled in his first game.  The fact that he got caught under the flag in the first place and the struggle to free himself from its clutches ended up being the perfect metaphor for his NFL career.

Where to place Weeden in the Parthenon that is the Browns’ colossal waste of first round picks is far more difficult for two reasons.  First, the list is long, the hall is filled.  Second, some of those picks (Couch, Browns) hung around longer than their shelf life because the regime that blew the picks hung around longer than its shelf life.  So tenure in and of itself is most irrelevant.

But let’s ponder it just for a moment anyway.  Is Weeden closer to Tim Couch or Brady Quinn?  Is he Gerald Warren or Courtney Brown?  Braylon Edwards or William Green?  Does it matter?  Not at this point.

This is of course what really ails the Browns most.  They have been systematically, almost deliberately, awful at the draft.  No matter the pedigree, no matter the resume, the paid professionals put in charge of picking from among the 10 or so best college players repeatedly guessed wrong.

This record, too, extends beyond the first round.  The Browns have been phenomenally unsuccessful in the second round as well during this 2.0 era.   Their most “successful” second round picks have been Dennis Northcutt and D’Qwell Jackson.  The least successful is a far longer list and includes the particularly golden trio, all drafted in 2009 by Eric Mangini, of Brian Robiski, Mohamed Massaquoi and David Veikune.

This is the key to why the Browns have been so awful for so long.  It’s hard to add depth when there’s no core to work with.  The inevitable undrafted free agents that fill out every team’s rosters end up holding much more prominent roles with the Browns because the supposed studs drafted as starters rarely have panned out.  No team can progress past a 4-5 win season until it can find a way to draft a player in the first or second round that can actually contribute not just immediately but for the long term as well.

All this is the history that Farmer has stacked up in his office in Berea like musty boxes in an attic or containers of yogurt in the back of the refrigerator. Someone had the idea that it was best to keep them but moved out before you could ask them why.  So the task fell to Farmer to clean the place up and that’s essentially what he did by parting with Weeden and Campbell.

Weeden may latch on to another team looking for a back up, similar to Colt McCoy, similar to Brady Quinn.  But his fate is cast.  A quarterback that fails in Cleveland doesn’t get a fresh start anywhere else.  Weeden is 30 years old now and has failed in two professional sports.  Farmer did him a favor.  It really is time for Weeden to move on to his life’s work.

So kudos to Farmer for not staying vested in a player based on his draft position.  The only way to build a new culture is to actually build the new culture and keeping players around that were responsible for the old culture can’t be part of the new equation.

Perhaps that was really the thinking behind Farmer’s free agent signings this week.  Farmer’s been active in the market but active in the same way that a person running on a treadmill is active. He likely feels better for having exercised but he’s stayed in place accomplishing that task.  Swapping out T.J. Ward for Donte Whitner and Karlos Dansby for D’Qwell Jackson doesn’t necessarily signify progress unless the real goal is cultural overhaul.  Statistically, the players are interchangeable.

Undoubtedly there are more moves to make.  The Browns seem to have swung for a few fences, particularly in the case of Darrelle Reavis, and missed.  That’s not a surprise.  The Browns are a tough sell, as their coaching search attests.  But money often does trump nearly everything else so expect a few more signings to fill in some of the gaps.  Recently signed tight end Jim Dray is an example, Running back Ben Tate , if they sign him, is another.

Teams like the Browns can’t improve through free agency alone, even when the goal is cultural. But the key to the Browns’ free agent acquisitions stem from the new attitudes in the locker room.   Guys that sign big new contracts tend to bring a new enthusiasm and perspective. 

The real trick for Farmer will be the draft.  He has plenty to work with and a fairly deep draft class.  The most difficult decision he faces is the same faced by his predecessors.  He needs to find a permanent, competent occupant for the quarterback position.  It won’t be easy.  It hasn’t been for anyone else.

The popular thought at the moment is that the Browns will place their near term faith in Brian Hoyer, sign an experienced back up, and then take a quarterback a bit later in the draft with the hope of developing him over time.  That sounds like the typical NFL executive plan, the kind of thinking Holmgren used in drafting a quarterback late every year.  I’m still waiting for that plan to work just once in this era.

The Browns don’t need to draft a quarterback for the indeterminate future.  They need to draft a quarterback who can play tomorrow.  Quarterbacks out of college are far more prepared for the NFL than they’ve ever been owing to all of the specialized coaching they’ve received over the years.  Teams, and as importantly, fans expect as much production out of a rookie quarterback as they do out of a rookie linebacker. 

If this team wants to develop a quarterback then they need to take the plunge and draft one in the first round and throw him into the mix right away.  If Hoyer proves to be the better quarterback in training camp, great.  But the notion that a blue chip quarterback will develop down the road out of the scrap heap that is the later rounds of the draft is just wishful, worthless thinking at this point.

The fans in Cleveland can tolerate plenty, obviously.  But on the list of things that will push them over the cliff number one is a front office that continues to do the same things in the same way hoping for a different result.  There’s a reason Holmgren failed here and it starts and ends with his horse and buggy approach to constructing a NFL team.  This is Farmer’s time.  He’s begun the process of changing the culture and now he needs to take it to the next step by sending the clear message that there is nothing about how the Browns previously went about doing business, be it through free agency or the draft, is worth preserving.

Putting the Adults in Charge

If you want to know how to simultaneously raise and then lower expectations, just follow the lead of Cleveland Browns president Mike Holmgren.

Intimating that Colt McCoy was the second best quarterback in this year's college draft, Holmgren talked about how fortuitous it was the McCoy fell into the team's lap in the third round. Then Holmgren proceeded to tamp down any expectations about McCoy for the upcoming season by saying rather strongly that McCoy's assignment this year is to watch and learn.

It's nice to have adults finally running the franchise.

Holmgren as much as anyone knows the team he oversees isn't a Super Bowl contender at the moment. The running game still isn't what he wants to see even taking into account Jerome Harrison's 4-game breakout at the end of last season. The offensive line is decent, perhaps the strength of the team at the moment, but that simply isn't enough reason to unnecessarily start a rookie, particularly when your receiving corps is among the worst in the league.

With that kind of mixed bag and a couple of serviceable quarterbacks on the roster to help the team get through the season anyway Holmgren was merely reflecting reality in his statement, calmly, professionally.

Of course this is April and those kinds of things are easy to say. There are a lot of turns of the globe between then and now and probably a billion bumps and bruises to be administered, meaning all that can change for reasons no one wants to contemplate.

The perfect scenario for the Browns is that Jake Delhomme remains healthy all season but that isn't likely. The Browns do have a history and it suggests that not only will Delhomme get hurt but so too will Seneca Wallace when he backs him up.

Thus it isn't all that unlikely actually that McCoy sees action eventually this season. But for now it's good to have a high-profile quarterback on the roster almost completely unburdened by high expectations. It's the right way to nurture a career.

Fans in other cities have been somewhat spoiled in recent years as rookies have come in and played decently from the start. But that scenario usually involves a good team and a coaching staff that understands how to skinny down the playbook so that the rookie isn't required to win the game, just not lose it.

Brady Quinn, the latest deposed high-profile quarterback of the Browns never really got that kind of opportunity in Cleveland. There's enough blame to go around. Quinn shouldn't have foolishly held out. Derek Anderson became a one-year wonder. Phil Savage dithered on how to handle the situation. Injuries mounted. A new staff came in ill-equipped in the art of preparing a quarterback for the season.

Nonetheless it all amounts to the simple fact that another Browns can't-miss prospect missed, which is what eventually led the Browns to McCoy.

The other object lesson, of course, is Tim Couch, who presents a near perfect road map to the destination best to avoid. Playing behind an offensive line that would have made Dan Marino jittery, Couch was repeatedly beaten like an egg in a blender. He suffered injuries from which he never fully recovered and whatever promise he may have once held was permanently extinguished.

Holmgren understands full well the lessons of these two and sees it as his mission to avoid that with McCoy. This time it should be a lot easier.

The real trick in Holmgren's ability to effectively manage McCoy's career will be Holmgren's relationship with head coach Eric Mangini. For now, Mangini is Holmgren's coach. But even Mangini knows that it's a shaky existence given the events of last season.

Too often head coaches in football and managers in baseball are prone to short term decisions when they only see their careers in the short term. When you feel like your own career is hanging in the balance the tendency is to try and win now, irrespective of the cost down the road.

Thus Holmgren's task is to build confidence not only for his quarterback-in-waiting but his dangling head coach so that this kind of scenario doesn't develop. Mangini knows that the most popular player on the roster is the back-up quarterback and when things get tough and his relationship with the fans worsens it would be easy to pander by inserting McCoy. But if Mangini knows he's not dangling himself then he'll have no reason to pander.

There's no guarantee that any of this works out but you have to like the odds given the person running the show.

And assuming it all goes according to plan, that McCoy fell to the Browns in the 3rd round will end up being the story of this draft a few years from now. McCoy has an “it” factor that should serve him well in the NFL. You can look at the stats and discount them if you want because but for a handful of games among his 40+ starts, the Texas Longhorns were going to win those games even if Amos McCoy was starting at quarterback.

But that shouldn't diminish McCoy's accomplishments. Nor should the fact that he fell into the third round suggest that NFL-types aren't sold on his abilities. NFL executives are prone to group think and once a quarterback or any other high profile player starts to fall these same executives start questioning their own research thinking that maybe someone knows something they don't.

Perhaps feeding the group think is the simple fact that this just completed draft has such an uncertain labor situation as its overhang. Simply put, players in trenches are paid less than players at the so-called skill positions. The odd trajectory of this draft may be as much a factor of teams seeing a need to preserve cash as it was teams seeing the need to fill in critical spots on their offensive and defensive lines and defensive backfields.

Holmgren did talk about making a push to get the first pick in the draft in order to draft Sam Bradford. I'm not really sure if that means Holmgren is more worried about the quarterbacks he has on the roster or more impressed with Bradford's potential. It's probably some of both.

Yet I suspect that if Holmgren really wanted Bradford on this roster he would have found a way to make that trade. The only conclusion then that I can really draw about this aborted attempt was that getting Bradford on this roster wasn't as important as filling in the gaping holes in the secondary.

Whether it actually plays out that way will always be a question in the back of fans' minds, but it's hard to second-guess Holmgren at the moment. The most enduring image of the team on the field last season is of its defensive backs constantly chasing after opponents that had just blown past them. It may have only seemed like every game featured at least one long pass or run by an opponent, mostly because it did.

Concentrating the early part of the draft, and the somewhat limited movement in free agency, in the defensive backfield was the biggest no-brainer since the NFL schedule makers wisely decided that the Browns don't need to be featured on any of its Thursday, Sunday night or Monday night games. It's good for once to see the team not blow that lay-up.

The way this season is shaping up, it clearly will be one of transition. There is a real sense of reality permeating Berea at the moment and it's starting to filter to the fans. But for once, that sense of reality isn't as foreboding as the past. It's tinged with an optimism that finally the people in charge of the draft for this team actually know what they're doing. It's a nice, if foreign, feeling.

Football in the Kingdom

For months now, Cleveland Browns fans have been sold an almost mystical vision of a process supposedly underway in Berea. With no visible progress in any aspect of its operations being apparent to the naked eye, fans are essentially told to trust the greater forces at work that they can’t see.

In this fantasy taking place under the direction of owner Randy Lerner, head coach Eric Mangini has assumed the role of Shivas Irons and a yet-unnamed football czar looking to arise from a ravine near Berea taking the form of football’s version of Seamus MacDuff. Welcome to Golf in the Kingdom, NFL-style.

One imagines a night of whiskey during the interview process that led to Mangini’s hiring, with Mangini explaining to a drunken and gullible Lerner how true gravity is only achieved through losing, then winning. Mangini’s a shaman all right.

But in this version of Football in the Kingdom, the end doesn’t result in any greater understanding and certainly doesn’t bring inner peace, not to the Lerner and certainly not to the fans. All it does is make you long for 1999.

Forget the mysticism. Forget the whiskey. Getting to the heart of the matter requires no such enhancements. After 10 years of trying, this franchise is now in worse shape than when it re-entered the league in 1999. Way to go O-hi-o.

I know, I know, people say that calling this team worse than the 1999 team is hyperbole in order to make a point about Mangini. Actually, it’s not. It’s just fact. Indeed, it’s hard to fathom that the 1999 team and the 2009 team being in the same conversation except as contrasts. And actually, that is the case but in reverse with the 2009 team being compared unfavorably with its 1999 cousin.

With probably better personnel, the 2009 Browns likely wouldn’t be favored in a matchup with their 1999 cousin. The line in Vegas would probably be 1999 Browns -5 points and an over/under of 28 points. Call Strat-O-Matic.

Here’s the proof. Compare, for example, Tim Couch with the combined efforts of Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson. Couch started 14 games and went 223-399 for 2,447 yards, 15 touchdowns and 14 interceptions. He also had 267 yards rushing and 1 touchdown. That means Couch was completing 56% of his passes, averaged slightly more than 6 yards per pass and had, relatively speaking, a respectable rating of 73.167.

Through 11 games this season, Quinn and Anderson are a combined 161-329 for 1593 yards, 7 touchdowns and 14 interceptions. Projecting that over 14 games, which is the number of games Couch started, the pair will have completed 205 passes in 419 attempts for 2028 yards with 9 touchdowns and 18 interceptions. That translates to a completion percentage of around 49%, an average of just over 4 yards per pass and a quarterback rating of 52.282.

Now, you can argue that it’s not fair to combine Quinn and Anderson because Anderson’s unparalleled awfulness is dragging down Quinn. Fair point. Using just Quinn’s numbers and projecting them over 14 games looks like this: 205-378 for 1964 yards, 11 touchdowns, 11 interceptions. It boosts the completion percentage to just over 54%, his yards per pass average is now just over 5 and his rating is 66.5. Across the board, though, he’s still worse than Couch.

This isn’t really to compare Quinn and Couch. It’s to illustrate that this offense is worse, far worse, than the 1999 version and for it you can thank Mangini and his rookie offensive coordinator, Brian Daboll.

Where this really shows up is in the receivers. There has been much talk this season that the offense really hasn’t stood a chance since trading away players like Braylon Edwards and Kellen Winslow. Maybe it was addition by subtraction for intangible reasons, but it’s hardly the reason for the apologists to give Mangini a pass on the miserable product he’s constructed.

The 1999 team started two rookies in Kevin Johnson and Darrin Chiaverini. The third receiver was Leslie Shepherd, who was in his 5th season, although Shepherd did start several games as well. Johnson, did I mention he was a rookie, had 66 catches for nearly 1000 yards and 8 touchdowns. Chiaverini had 44 catches for almost 500 yards and 4 touchdowns and Shepherd added 23 more for nearly 300 yards. The tight end on that team was the memorable Irv Smith, who was in his 6th season. At least he had 24 catches for 222 yards and 1 touchdown.

If you want to understand the lack of depth on that roster, consider the rest of the receivers on it: Damon Dunn, David Dunn, Damon Gibson and Ronnie Powell, a group arguably more pitiful than the current roster. Yet on an aggregate basis the receivers then far exceeded this year’s model.

Mangini’s team starts one rookie, Mohammed Massaquoi and, essentially a rookie wide receiver in the form of Josh Cribbs. Singularly or combined, they aren’t likely to surpass Johnson in either receptions or yards, let alone touchdowns. Combined the two have 43 receptions, which translates to about 63 for the season, and 602 yards, which translates into around 822 yards for the season. They have two touchdowns among them and that translates to 3 for the season.

At tight end, the Browns have used Robert Royal, Michael Gaines, Greg Estandia and Steve Heiden. None of them will surpass the relatively limited production of Smith in 1999. The rest of the Browns receivers, with the exception of Brian Robiskie, aren’t likely to be any more known than those who filled out the 199 roster; Ray Ventrone, Jake Allen and Mike Furrey.

What’s also worth noting is that despite being better than this year’s team, the Browns’ 1999 offense was still objectively awful. Like this year’s group, it was last in the league in virtually every meaningful metric. Yet it still averaged 2 points per game more than this year’s group. This just proves that there actually are subtle levels of awfulness.

Want to turn to the defense? The apologists can protect Mangini by pointing to the injuries the Browns have suffered on defense this year but in doing so it’s instructive to remember they already were the worst defense in the league before Shaun Rogers was lost. They were also the worst defense in the league before D’Qwell Jackson went down. They already were the worst defense before Brodney Pool came down with another concussion. In fact, they started off the year as the worst defense in the league and haven’t improved since irrespective of the combination.

The Cleveland Browns of 1999 were likewise the league’s worst defense. They were, in a sense, technically worse than the 2009 model but by a fraction, giving up 27 points per game, two more than this year. But as a measure of how offense and defense work together, note that the point differential between the Browns and its weekly competition is actually worse this year. Right now the Browns are losing games by just over 14 points a game. In 1999, it was by 13 points a game. Overall, call it at most a draw.

Again, though, the far larger point is the fact that 10 years later the Browns haven’t escaped their past despite huge advantages that the 1999 Browns didn’t have. Recall, for example, that the 1999 Browns were officially re-born in 1998 when Al Lerner was awarded the franchise. That means it had just 1 year to put in an infrastructure capable of putting some semblance of a team on the field. The consensus then is the same as now: the NFL seemed to deliberately stack the odds against the Browns in the early years of its rebirth.

That can hardly be used as an excuse any more. This year’s Browns have had a full 10 years under their belts. They’ve had all manner of advantage in those 10 years, from high draft picks to a well financed owner who could supply the cash for nearly any free agent the team coveted. And yet, 10 years later as a franchise they are in worse shape than 1999.

This franchise doesn’t need holy water or some international man of mystery to solve it’s problems nor is it going to turnaround over night, not with this owner and not with this coach anyway. What it needs is for this owner to get one decision right: his next hire. It needn’t be a closer version Shivas Irons or Seamus MacDuff then he currently has. It just needs to a competent, credible football mind who can walk in and get things done. And if his first move is to close the book on the hoodoo and voodoo of a fraud like Mangini, so much the better.