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.

The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Vikings Edition

So much about how one reacts to what was surely a stunning victory by the Cleveland Browns on Sunday depends on how full or empty he tends to look at the perpetually slightly filled glass of water the Browns keep by each fan's night table. On the one hand, who knew that Trent Richardson was such a drag on the team? Conversely, who knew Josh Gordon’s presence would give such a boost?

If one is truer than the other, then it would have to be the presence of at least one credible wide receiver in the lineup in the form of Gordon that was one of the key differences. Gordon caught 10 passes for 146 yards. He looked strong after the catch and his presence also opened up the other real receiving star of the game, tight end Jordan Cameron who in word and deed is pretty much everything Kellen Winslow, Jr. was not.

Let’s not bury Richardson though as a drag on the team. He wasn't. He just didn't perform like much of an asset at the time of the trade. And while I consider Richardson’s true value a bit more deeply days later I am stunned by the chart the Wall Street Journal ran on Monday that showed a team’s record after having spent a high pick on a running back. Generally, it’s not been impressive. Surely the Browns' record with Richardson doesn't help the cause but look at it this way. Even with Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings are only a collectively 47-44 and that’s one of the better records. Ultimately club president Joe Banner merely put into action something that is relatively backed up by the evidence: an elite running back is not nearly as important to a winning NFL team as even a decent overall running game or merely the threat.

Richardson performed for Indianapolis on Sunday as he’s done now for all the previous Sundays he’s been in the league. His yards per carry seem perpetually stuck in the 3s. He may not know the Colts’ playbook, but will that really help? How much did it help here?

So putting aside the obvious dynamic of the presence of Gordon and the absence of Richardson, let’s look instead at the other variables. Surely Brian Hoyer had something to do with the outcome. Indeed he was going to have something to do with it either way. His beautifully lofted third down throw to Cameron accounted for the margin of difference. A more opportunistic Vikings offense might have ended with far more points and put the game out of reach off of Hoyer’s three interceptions.

Still, Hoyer showed more in one game than it’s taken a season to eke out of the surely deposed Brandon Weeden. He led the team on a freakin’ legitimate two minute drill to get the winning touchdown. Good luck finding the fan who thinks Weeden has that skill.

Let us not forget, too, that in his now fifth season in the NFL, Hoyer is still two plus years younger than Weeden. So even if Weeden follows Hoyer’s NFL arc, the Browns are three seasons from seeing a quarterback in Weeden who can loft a ball when that’s what the play dictates and who can recover from spells of awfulness without letting it snowball into head slapping frustration.

Yet it would be hard to pin the victory just on Hoyer or Gordon or Cameron or on Richardson. There was boldness on the special teams to account for. Perhaps the biggest uncontrolled variable was the “us against the world” mentality that surely crept into the recesses of a gobsmacked locker room. Nothing motivates a professional like job insecurity and if Banner accomplished anything last week it was instilling a sense of job insecurity into even Joe Thomas.

Whatever weird combination of cosmic factors and mental gymnastics were responsible for the Browns falling behind in the race for next year’s number one pick doesn’t matter today. Nothing causes a Browns’ fan to forgive faster than a victory, particularly when it was so unexpected. Of course, the same thing can be said as well for a Browns’ fan capacity to overemphasize a victory and its impact on a newly rosy future.

We’re all grown ups here so let’s acknowledge that there’s no way to attach any significance to the Browns’ victory on Sunday without the context of what kind of performance breaks out in subsequent weeks. We know the context of all previous weeks and, frankly, it isn’t very good. It’s why, really, Sunday’s victory, particularly the manner in which Hoyer was able to drive a team down the field like a real NFL quarterback and get a go ahead score with less than a minute remaining, seemed unusual. Past performance, and not just the past two weeks, would certainly suggest that no one knew they had it in them.

But that they did, for at least one game. It’s funny, but the win didn't feel as much earned as it did a bonus. That’s usually true for games one where trickery is involved and that was on display early as head coach Rob Chudzinski dug into the bag of diversionary tricks and created just that, a diversion.

There was the point in the third and fourth quarter where all that had previously gone right for Hoyer was starting to go horribly wrong. The interception he threw from his own end zone on a pass that looked as if it had been thrown by a concussed Pam Oliver, was as predictable as the jokes at Sunday night’s Emmy telecast. The Vikings defense, mostly sackless in every sense of the word, was starting to tee off. Hoyer looked as if he’d accidentally stepped into the middle lane of northbound I-71 at 7:30 a.m. on a Monday.

Then just as suddenly as that all happened it all disappeared. Hoyer regained the composure that Weeden doesn’t ever look to develop and led the Browns on a terrific final drive, continually hitting the right receiver with the right pass at the right time. There have been far prettier drives in the past, just not the recent past.

Even if a win hadn’t developed, the game still would have been a breath of hardy air. The almost abject refusal to advance the ball had all but disappeared. Hoyer, passing as if he had been in Chudzinski’s offense for years, looked mostly comfortable doing so. You could tell he learned plenty watching Tom Brady. There was enough of a running game to keep the Vikings guessing a little.

Most of all, though, there wasn't any point at which you felt as if you were watching a particularly unfortunate episode of Masterpiece Theater. There were actually multiple occasions on which Browns were exciting to watch. Most of last season and the first two games this season were overwhelming in their cringe worthiness. You may not have known what exactly was coming next but you pretty much knew what the outcome of what came next would be. This past Sunday was different. There was no point where I felt the calling to nod off.

And that pretty much sums up the low expectations I usually have for the Browns. If they aren’t boring, I’m thrilled. So yes, the game was a thrill.

The wins, so infrequent as they are, are generally meaningless. They stay with you about as long as a mouthful of cotton candy does. But what does linger is the overall numbing effect of the incredibly bland flavor of football the Browns tend to play. So when they play counter to type, like Charlize Theron in Monster, you notice and in a good way.

Typically, Monday rolled around and Chudzinski, settled in like every Browns coach in the 2.0 era, refused to name Hoyer the starter for next week. He'll do so by mid week I'm guessing. Just as typically, the Browns got the overall mission of 2014 draft positioning wrong by getting it right and now have fallen behind even the Pittsburgh Steelers in the race to number one draft pick. Yet they did so in a way that asserts that when most cylinders click there’s reason to watch well into the fourth quarter. Ultimately that’s all the fans have been demanding for four or five regimes now.

The Numbing Sameness of it All, Again--Trade Edition

You get the sense from listening to Cleveland Browns president Joe Banner that this year’s regular season is just one big inconvenience. Banner hasn't liked the make up of this team since he arrived and those pesky games, like this week's against Minnesota, keep getting in the way of his grand scheme to remake the team in his own crabby image.

Banner said that the first time he talked to the Indianapolis Colts about Trent Richardson was on Tuesday. But when he pressed whether Mikey called Jimmy or Jimmy called Mikey he deliberately avoided answering. He might as well have just admitted it. General Manager Mike Lombardi saw that the Colts needed a running back and made the call. That the Colts bit in the manner they did probably shocked Lombardi even more than the day Banner reached across the table to Lombardi, hand extended, and said "you're hired."

But let's be honest about a few things. Neither Banner, Lombardi, Rob Chudzinski nor Norv Turner much liked Richardson. He was traded because he had more value at the moment than the player they like even less, Brandon Weeden.

It’s not like the Browns’ record this season hinges appreciably on whether Richardson or even Weeden is on the roster. This is a deeply flawed team that had at best only a realistic shot at a handful of wins even before Richardson was traded and Weeden banged his thumb.

To understand this trade it’s best to remember that the only place where it really matters whether you won four games or two is when establishing next year’s draft order. Banner wanted to enhance his chances of getting next year’s very first pick and this trade, coupled with Weeden's injury, presented a particularly enticing hedge. Either the Browns get it through straight out incompetence, the most likely path, or through a package of picks. That’s what Banner and Lombardi are betting on. It’s a suckers bet.
Where did it all turn bad for Richardson in Cleveland? Probably about the time new owner Jimmy Haslam hired Joe Banner to be the club’s president. Banner has some very specific ideas on where players should or shouldn’t be drafted and what they should or shouldn’t be paid. It’s why Phil Dawson is gone, for example. There isn’t a chance in hell that Banner would have drafted Richardson with the fourth pick in last year’s draft and if possible even less of a chance he’d have traded three picks to move up one spot to draft him third.
I can only imagine the assessment that Banner must have given Haslam about last year’s draft and the boneheaded move the incredibly incapable Mike Holmgren made to gut the draft to get Richardson. And that was before Banner gave Haslam an earful about the abject stupidity that is drafting a 29 year old rookie quarterback.
But if there was a linchpin to the urgency of moving Richardson it probably came during the team’s first drive against the Ravens last Sunday. Weeden had just hit tight end Jordan Cameron for a 53-yard gain that put the ball at the Ravens’ 7 yard line. That’s the point at which you give it to your number one running back, the third pick in last year’s draft and let him show what he’s made of. Chud and Turd did just that, giving Richardson two shots at the end zone. He gained three yards on the first and one on the next. Weeden then through ineffectively to Davone Bess on third down before settling for the Billy Cundiff field goal.
Richardson’s career in Cleveland was over right then. The inability to score at that moment likely convinced Banner and Lombardi that Richardson lacked the strength or explosiveness to grind out 7 yards against a Ravens defense that is a shadow of its Super Bowl self. It’s hard to argue the point.
One of the bigger surprises, at least to me, has been the fan reaction. My sense is that it’s not so much that the fans were wholly vested in Richardson. It’s that the trade gave them a hook on which to hang their building anger at a franchise that has abused them for over a decade.
Banner is right that he has to earn the fan’s trust and given his nature is certainly comfortable with waiting the 12+ months, at least, that it will take before any aspect of this trade can be objectively analyzed. What Banner doesn’t quite get yet is that the fans don’t have that same comfort. While Banner was in Philadelphia, the fans here were buying Courtney Brown and Tim Couch jerseys.
The fans intellectually understand the Browns’ thinking behind the trade. What they don’t understand is why this franchise keeps taking a dump in their punchbowls the minute they set it out for the party. Fans have barely had time to build their hopes for a season that was bound to collapse anyway. Raising the white flag so early in the season in such an unmistakable way is just unsettling. They really wanted their 1-5 start before settling into several months of real bitching. It’s the arc and rhythm of every Browns season and to have it disturb this quickly messes with one’s equilibrium.
You have to admire Banner’s stones in taking the heat at Wednesday night’s press conference just as you have to admire his stony willingness to be very nonspecific about how this trade will make the Browns better. After all, there’s still the little matter of using the pick effectively. We know that the Browns 2.0 have whiffed on every first round pick except Joe Thomas. With that kind of history there’s no reason for the fans to believe, let alone believe with certainty, that this trade will in fact make the Browns better.
On the other hand, it doesn’t make them worse. They’ve scored one meaningless touchdown this season with Richardson on the roster. The only thing this does, really, is mostly close the books on what was an awful draft class. They’ll be completely closed when Weeden is gone, which he too most assuredly is.
Lost in the shuffle of yesterday’s trade was the earlier press conference on Wednesday when Chud announced that Brian Hoyer would be this week’s starter. Chud was asked whether Weeden will return to the lineup as the starter once he’s healthy. Chud danced around it like Banner dancing around who called whom, refusing to make that commitment despite numerous opportunities to do so. If Weeden does return as a starter it’s because Hoyer craps his pants as a starter or gets injured. Weeden will find himself in the offseason competing with the likes of Colt McCoy for a backup gig somewhere.
If you’re looking for the real head scratcher in this deal, ask yourself why Indianapolis was willing to give up a first round pick for anyone. That kind of trade doesn’t happen in the NFL. The Colts’ Jim Irsay never got past Richardson’s pedigree when evaluating the trade. I can’t think of running back in the entire league I’d give up a first round pick for so yea, while we’re at it, let’s give Lombardi some credit for lacking the shame it must have taken to even ask the Colts for a first round pick. He probably had to get their confirmation in writing when the Colts jumped because hearing them say “yes” had to convince Lombardi that his hearing must be failing.
If there’s a real loser in this trade it’s probably Chud. Irrespective of the underlying circumstances, he’ll catch the brunt of what will surely be a one or two win season. The Browns could improve next season with all the picks they’ve gathered but is that a four or five game improvement? Even so that would amount to a two year losing record for Chud, which is all the shelf life coaches get in Cleveland.
Goodbye, Trent. You weren’t ever good enough or bad enough to get all that emotional about. In that way, you were the perfect Cleveland Brown. With the trade Banner is on his way to achieving that same status.

Posted with Blogsy

The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Ravens Edition

The real trick when writing about the Cleveland Browns is how to extricate yourself from the numbing sameness of it all, again in order to force the fingers to push keys as you struggle to say something, anything remotely new. Watching the Browns lose to the Baltimore Ravens Sunday was to essentially watch the tape from the previous week’s debacle against Miami and try to invent a new angle. It was cruel but not unusual.

Sure there were differences, subtle at best, between the two games. The overarching themes were exactly the same. No greater lessons were learned about this wretched team. Just initial impressions solidly confirmed.

Brandon Weeden is still an awful quarterback. He does enough to make a case for employment as a permanent long term NFL backup though I remain wholly unconvinced that he’s the kind of second stringer that you wouldn’t mind seeing play once in awhile. He’s actually the kind of backup that should play behind guys like Aaron Rodgers or Peyton Manning, quarterbacks not typically prone to injuries. If Weeden’s in charge, dread is hovering.

Weeden had a statistically insignificant day in the sense that he completed a fair amount of passes for a fair amount of yards and didn’t suffer the indignity of adding to his burgeoning wrong-sided touchdowns to interceptions ratio. Where he wasn’t insignificant though was in making plays that absolutely had to be made if this offense will ever be thought of as anything other than incompetent.

How a professional quarterback, a first rounder at that, could absolutely whiff on a cupcake throw to a running back who had nothing but green grass and high tides in front of him in Chris Ogbonnaya is nearly beyond comprehension.

Does Weeden simply not listen to his coaching staff when they implore him weekly to develop touch and occasionally do something other than try to throw the ball through a brick wall on every pass? Is he uncoachable or simply untalented?

The kind of miss on the Ogbonnaya disaster captures in a simple sequence exactly what’s wrong with Weeden. He seems intellectually to understand the throw that’s supposed to be made, just as he seems intellectually to understand generally the nature and flow of the offensive schemes that Rob “Chud” Shurmur has designed. What he can’t do except in the least pressurized situations is turn intellect into execution.

The sum total of a quarterback’s existence, from high school to the pros is to make that pass. Sure there is a lot of moving pieces and parts to the position. Reading defenses is important. So is remembering the snap count. Ultimately, though, when the team needs its quarterback most is when a big play beckons. The line of demarcation between the good and the also ran is the ability to make that play.

What makes Monday’s key failure so distressing, so utterly soul drenching, is that the miss to Ogbonnaya affirmed that Weeden hasn't improved one iota from last season to now. There has been no second year upgrade in ability. The numbing sameness of it all, again.

But because this is Cleveland and because it’s the Browns, the starving fan base clings to any glimmer of progress even as it takes to the airwaves to vent a perpetually full well of anger. So in that vein we look to the insignificant improvement in Weeden's passing stats as we look to the other contributory factors as to why the Browns loss. There are always other contributors. Let’s face it, it’s not like the Browns are merely one player away.

You could start with the back up running back that is Ogbonnaya and criticize him for not having the sufficient skills to catch a fastball barehanded, even if he was only expect the soft toss that would have been more than adequate to make the play. All true and yet let’s remember his role. He’s the back up running back on a really bad team. Where exactly do you think that puts him in the ranking of the 1600 or so active players in the NFL today? Doesn't that just emphasize why a supposedly pedigreed quarterback like Weeden has to make a better throw?

Then there’s the usual culprit of the offensive line, especially the right side of the line. Mitchell Schwartz and Oniel Cousins may be the two worst offensive linemen in a generation and they are playing next to each other. You could leave a stick of butter sitting on the counter and then microwave a knife for 5 minutes and that knife would still find more resistance cutting through that stick of butter than opposing defensive linemen find from the Browns’ right side.

It would appear as though the Browns have no other options but Schwartz and Cousins at the moment but that can’t possibly be true because there is no one worse. I suppose the Browns could sign others who’d play just as bad. Indeed that’s exactly what I’d expect them to do. They have a track record. But go ahead and sign others anyway. The Browns have no particular strategy that doesn't start with the word “if…” so signing anyone else, and I mean anyone else, would be reflect both the crapshoot nature of this franchise and could just work. Hell yea it could. Go buy some tickets now.

And where would this team be without the scary talent of Greg Little? Actually they’d still be 0-2 but that’s beside the point. Little is a really, really unique receiver if by unique one means he can’t catch. To call Little a receiver isn’t to just insult the Larry Fitzgeralds of the world. It’s also an insult to the Fair Hookers of the world.

You can’t even make the case that Little is Braylon Edwards without the attitude. Little has plenty of attitude. It’s why he was available to the Browns in the first place, another reclamation project of the old regime. At least on that rare occasion Edwards would actually make a catch that was difficult. Little hasn't even reached that level of maddening inconsistency, except of course with his driving ability. Little once again and despite previous assurances gathered in a bunch more motor vehicle violations early Monday morning, most notably driving on the license that was suspended for all the other infractions he had. He’s awful and deserves to be benched and then cut.

The play calling was again suspect with Trent Richardson carrying only a slightly higher level workload in a game that, like last week, was close for three quarters. The Chud and Turd monster aren’t keen on Richardson; that much is clear. Yet there’s no one else on the roster and if nothing else the threat of a commitment to use your number one pick from last season on a consistent basis could take some heat off of Weeden. If anyone could use less heat, it’s Weeden.

What was perhaps more confusing about the play calling though was the formations used. All off season fans were told that Weeden was a shotgun quarterback and having him play behind center was akin to having Bruce Springsteen play a banjo. Indeed, last season Pat Shurmur rarely had Weeden play out of the shotgun formation. This season is somewhat a different story but not nearly as much as fans were sold, if the first two games are any indication.

Sunday Weeden was in the shotgun for 34 plays and behind center for 23. Against Miami, if you disregard the final series for a moment when the Browns were scurrying to score to make the final score respectable, it was a nearly identical 31 times in the shotgun and 24 plays behind center.

What is instructive is that in actuality when the Browns are running their “regular” offense, you know the one that you see for most of the game as compared to the equally inept version that rears its ugly head just before the half or at the very end of games, Chud and Turd are as likely to put Weeden behind center as they are in the shotgun.

If Weeden’s strength as a quarterback lies mostly from the shotgun (and we’re taking a huge leap here that he has particular strengths as a quarterback) then why aren’t Chud and Turd taking greater advantage of it? They seem to prefer the shotgun formation when the team has to score and is pressed for time, such as near the end of each half of the game. Why isn’t that good enough the rest of the time, particularly when you have a fairly immobile quarterback playing behind a porous offensive line who needs all the head start he can muster before getting pounded once again?

The Browns’ offense may be a work in progress but it’s perfectly unclear what it’s progressing to. Chud and Turd don’t really know what to do with Weeden and their play calling is the best reflection of that. In other words, Weeden wasn't Chud and Turd’s first choice to play quarterback. For all intents, Weeden is to quarterback on this team as Schwartz and Cousins are to the right side of the offensive line on this team.

But these are really all the details that don’t amount to much difference. The Browns lost this week in very much the same way they lost last week and likely the same way they’ll lose next week. But they have sent a message to their fans and the league. Nothing’s changed in Cleveland including the numbing sameness of it all, again.

Browns: The Numbing Sameness of it All

In the numbing sameness that serves as Cleveland Browns openers, or the Cleveland Browns generally, the only good news was reserved for the delusional.  The rest of the AFC North also lost the first week and thus, technically, the Browns lost no ground except, I suppose, in the wild card race.  So there’s that.

The popular spin following Sunday’s route at the hands of a very, very average Miami Dolphins team was that the defense played well until it was worn down by the amount of time it had to spend on the field on an otherwise beautiful, low humidity first day of the season.  Don’t buy it.

Miami has a boat load of offensive problems and still managed to score 23 points, which isn't much when measured against conventional NFL standards but was 13 more than the Browns could muster.  When you have Buster Skrine in your secondary, your defense can never truly play well.  As Don Criqui said during the touchdown pass from quarterback Ryan Tannehill to a wide open Brian Hartline, “the receiver there was able to get separation from Skrine.”  Get used to hearing that, often.  Skrine is barely a legitimate nickel back on an average team.  That he starts for the Browns is the alpha and omega of the team’s myriad of problems.  It lacks players who can make plays (Joe Haden and T.J. Ward come immediately to mind.  There are others.) It lacks depth.  It lacks heart.  It lacks.

As for the Browns offense, which in its awfulness and mismanagement almost made me forget what was happening when the defense was on the field, Sunday proved yet again that until the Browns find a quarterback fans should not tire of being wrong about blaming the defensive breakdowns on the fact that the defense is on the field too much. The offense is that horrible to contemplate.

What the hell were Tom Heckert and Mike Holmgren really thinking when they drafted Weeden anyway?  He’s old by NFL veteran standards, let alone rookie or second year player standards.  And that’s the least of his issues.  If the only requirement to play quarterback in the NFL was the possession of a strong arm, why not resurrect Akili Smith?  For that matter, why didn't offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski just go with his gut and re-sign Derek Anderson?

The best that can be said about Weeden is that he’s not a coach killer.  That is, he’s not the kind of player whose raw athletic skills and occasional flashes of brilliance commit a coach imprudently to spending day and night trying to devise a way to harness that potential into consistent performance until, at least, the coach finds himself out of a job due to poor judgment.

Instead Weeden is simply a middling talent, another in a long line of back up quarterbacks that the Browns have spent the better part of 12 years developing.  He is occasionally strong armed and accurate.  More often he’s strong armed and inaccurate, befuddled by the simplest of defensive schemes and panicked by a blitzing defensive back.

It was said that Weeden was ill suited for the West Coast offense run by former head coach Pat Shurmur and that given Chudzinski’s and offensive coordinator Norv Turner’s track record, this would be a break out year.  It was likewise said the Weeden operates best out of the shotgun, like he did in college.  Both could still be true but I’m skeptical.  Nothing Weeden did in the preseason, including his awful performance in the  third preseason game, or as it’s now officially known, “The Only Preseason Game That Counts,” or in Sunday’s game even hints at significantly better things to come.

Team president Joe Banner, who has spent his entire tenure thus far diminishing anyone’s expectations about the fortunes of his team to the point where it would be easier if he just wore a shirt that says “We Suck. Quit Asking,” said that the new offense is a work in progress and will evolve over the course of the season.  The question is, will Weeden be a part of that evolution?

This isn't a call so much for either back up Brian Hoyer or Jason Campbell so much as it is a reminder that there’s no reason not to play either one or all 3, in the same game, in the same quarter, even in the same drive.  Weeden is no more an established starter than either of Hoyer or Campbell and isn't likely ever to be so what would be the harm?  Or the difference?

There are probably a hundred reasons that the coaching staff can come up with to justify their misplaced confidence in Weeden and to rationalize what was abundantly clear to everyone else.  The right side of the offensive line, with Oniel Cousins and Mitchell Schwartz, was simply incompetent.  Greg Little still channels the decaying ghost of Braylon Edwards as he celebrates routine catches, lets balls go off his fingertips and into defensive backs not named Joe Haden or T.J. Ward hands on difficult ones.  Josh Gordon, in absentia, was talked about as if he was Terrell Owens in his prime.  He may be the team’s number one receiver, but that’s more by default than actual accomplishment.  And of course there’s the bizarre play calling that makes weirdly insufficient use of their best weapon, Trent Richardson.

Chudzinski may claim that the game dictated more passing because they were playing from behind, but that’s just Chudzinski covering for Chudzinski (and Turner). The strong impression was that the Chud and Turd show was hell bent on proving the skeptics wrong about Weeden by forcing a game plan for which the he and the rest of the offense were ill suited to execute.

Consider the evidence.  With just three minutes gone in the fourth quarter, Miami held a 13-10 lead.  They then went on a 5 minute plus drive that extended the lead to 20-10 on a one yard touchdown run.  At that point and only at that point could the case be fairly made that passing was the first, best and only real option.

To that point, though, Weeden had already thrown 35 passes!  Richardson had run a mere 13 times!  I’m using exclamation points because anyone reading this, just as I was writing this, should be both amazed and confused!  Thirty-five freakin’ passes for a team with a wildly inconsistent quarterback and an embarrassing selection of receivers.  It’s pure bullshit, frankly, that the game dictated that kind of massive imbalance between the pass and the run and for Chud to suggest otherwise is disingenuous.  The truth is that Chud and Turd wanted to show how smart they were for believing in Weeden and all they actually accomplished was confirming how ill suited Weeden is to be a starting NFL quarterback.

The NFL can be a difficult game to navigate but it’s not nearly as difficult as its practitioners often imagine.  Richardson looked to be running well early on so naturally Chud and Turd abandoned it like their predecessors.  Look, everyone wants an explosive offense, one that can score on every possession.  That isn't the Browns and doesn't look to be anytime soon.  What’s wrong with shortening the game a bit by running Richardson until it’s nearly beyond question that it isn't working?  If you want to take pressure off a struggling quarterback and a defense that doesn't seen to have the conditioning to withstand even its first game, running the ball would seem the best option.

It’s true that the Browns aren't going to get appreciably better overall until they make better decisions about the talent they choose to employ.  It’s also true that this team won’t get appreciably better until the coaching staff stops thinking they’re the smartest guys in the room.  When you're number one pick is a supposedly elite running back, then just run the damn ball.

Meanwhile fans set giddy by irrational preseason exuberance unaccompanied by any objective reason for it are left with the deadening feeling of collapsed expectations and an anxiety-ridden future.

What do the Browns do with their quarterback situation?  They've been a laughingstock for years with the revolving door that is that position.  But until it’s definitively or at least more positively solved it’s questionable whether the Browns can ever be even a mere playoff team.

The Baltimore Ravens, the Browns’ next opponents, won a Super Bowl with Trent Dilfer so it’s possible that a strong enough running game and a strong enough defense can paper over the team’s glaring quarterback issues and get to a point where at least it’s not so damn hilarious and depressing to ponder the playoffs.

But even if Chud and Turd go against their collective wont and become more run-oriented in their approach, eventually this team will have to find its own version of Joe Flacco.

Look, there’s reason for hope.  There always is.  It’s just hard to find obscured as it is by the numbing sameness of a team that knows not of success but only of unrelenting disappointment.  It’s going to be another long season.

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 15

Much about what you get out of the holiday season depends on what you believe in.  It's a bit like the last line of I Believe in Father Christmas by Emerson, Lake & Palmer where Greg Lake sings “the Christmas we get we deserve.”   The Cleveland Browns got beaten down 34-12 on Sunday by the Denver Broncos and there's no question they got exactly out of that game what they deserved.

The team played just as a team who knows its head coach is on the way out tends to play, indifferent, distracted and dispirited.  We know this because we've seen it out of various forms of this team just about every other year at season's end.  To be fair and perhaps in a show of strength and faith for the players that stopped listening to him about 10 minutes after Jimmy Haslam III took over officially as owner and Joe Banner took over as president, its head coach, Pat Shurmur, coached Sunday's game like someone who knows that he'll soon be looking to latch on somewhere else next season as a quarterbacks coach.  For the second straight week the offensive looked untethered, random, clueless and confused.

Every year when I watch the Browns play out the string of another failed season my mind starts to drift to the pity I feel for players like Phil Dawson and D'Qwell Jackson.  Like the fans, they have been through so much crap with this franchise that it makes you wonder why they do it.  But week after week, year after year, through every next savior and every next great plan, they just stick to their assignments, don't make waves and get their work done. The money is good in professional sports and it sure beats regular work but it still takes a special type to grind through season after season with the Browns and come out smiling at the end.

Peyton Manning, playing as if he has finally found both his sea legs and his second wind, carved up the Browns' secondary from literally the first play of the game until the Broncos essentially took mercy on them early in the 4th quarter and stopped passing the ball.  By then the Broncos had 31 points and were still able to add 3 more thanks to a defense that couldn't stop the run even though they knew what was coming next.  Meanwhile, Shurmur was in full panic mode from the outset once again treating first round pick Trent Richardson like a decoy while entrusting the increasingly erratic Brandon Weeden to find open receivers downfield. It worked every bit as well as it did the previous week.

If Richardson was pissed last week because of the lack of carries, he must be apoplectic today with his 9 carries.  What's more, and as last week, Richardson seemed to be running hard early.  He amassed a number of nice runs and still couldn't find his way into the offensive flow that Shurmur had in mind.  Shurmur at this point has hitched his star to Weeden and it's proved to be about as bad a choice as he's made all season and it's not like there haven't been a hundred other bad choices by Shurmur to choose from.  Anyway, Richardson ended the game getting hurt when the game was long out of reach, which is another reason on the ever expanding list that new club president Joe Banner keeps in his pocket entitled “What Was Pat Shurmur Thinking?”

I thought I knew this team and yet its capacity to surprise is mystifying to me.  On the one hand, the outcomes, particularly at this time of year, are utterly predictable, like the plot of any episode of any version of Law & Order.  On the other hand, the ineptness, the abject idiocy employed to get to the outcome is never less than fascinating.

The Browns' first offensive series, which started about 3 minutes into the game or, said differently, about 2 minutes and 50 seconds after Manning schooled the Browns in how to run an offense, perfectly captured everything you'd want to know or think about this team.  It had the ebb and flow of the entire season, really.  It was turgid often, interesting sometimes and self-defeating at exactly the wrong times.  The aforementioned Richardson had two early carries, one for 8 yards, the other for 7 while Weeden was doing his usual routine of running through his progressions with the panic of a 16 year old  in driver's training class surveying a four way stop for the first time.  Like the 16 year old hesitant to enter traffic, Weeden was hesitant to try anything more then the outlet pass.  Once in awhile those short  passes turned into decent gains but ultimately the drive fizzled when the Browns had it first and goal at the Broncos 8 yard line and just as quickly found themselves at the 13 yard line because of another friggin' false start penalty.  Phil Dawson eventually was called on to kick a routine field goal to make it seem as though the Browns still had a chance in a 7-3 ball game.

Manning then came right back running essentially the same series as he did the first time the Broncos had the ball and ended up with the same result, another touchdown.  At this point I figured that the Broncos could score 50 points by halftime if they wanted and I'm sure they could have.  That they didn't shouldn't be viewed as any sort of moral victory by the Browns.  They were handled from the opening series on and were never in the game.

After the Broncos took the 14-3 lead, things settled down a bit and then the Browns avoided near total disaster when Manning was intercepted in the end zone by Usama Young just as the Broncos were looking to take a 21-3 lead at the half.  So with the game still technically well within reach, the Browns needed to come out in the second half with a plan.  For the second straight week they had none.  I'm not sure exactly what Shurmur and his coaches talk about at halftime but it doesn't seem to be football related.  The Browns added a 53 yard Dawson field goal, which was notable and which I'll discuss in a moment, and then Manning followed it up with another touchdown and at that point the game was over, completely unequivocally read at the meat thermometer over.

That's the point where Weeden went down on a relatively light sack and left the game and Colt McCoy came in, got sacked right out of the gate and then the Browns punted.  I don't want to dismiss the viciousness of professional football, especially as I watch it from the comfort of a heated home where the biggest threat to my safety is a potential short in a string of Christmas tree lights.  But the sack that put Weeden out of the game seemed almost benign.  I'm not questioning his resolve.  He's been beaten pretty thoroughly throughout the season.  It was of no great concern anyway.  Weeden was a robust 12-19 for 104 yards at that point and wasn't about to get any better.  McCoy played lousy, but it's not like he had much of a chance.  He did put together a late touchdown drive that ended with a nice little pass to Greg Little.  But even that couldn't be celebrated fully.  With the score 31-6, Shurmur oddly had the Browns attempt a two-point conversion that failed.  Nice coda, there, Pat.

As I said at the outset, though, the manner in which the Browns get to where they inevitably should be is probably the most entertaining aspect of a game that was less entertaining than “rap week” on The Voice.  Here I pick on Weeden again but more to illustrate the absurdity of it all.  In the Browns' first drive of the second half, you know, the one where they had to come out strong so that they could remain in the game, Weeden actually got the team down to the Broncos 28 yard line.  From there he had Josh Gordon wide open near the goal line, about 25 or so yards downfield.  Weeden short-armed the pass and it ended about 5 yards short of the target.

At that particular moment I had the radio broadcast on as well and Doug Dieken said, seriously, that this was the end of the field where the wind was blowing pretty hard.  That would be some mighty wind, Doug.  I understand that part of the business of the home team broadcasting crew is to find the rainbows and silver linings in the perpetual storm clouds that envelope the Stadium, but even this was a bit much even for Dieken's partner, Jimmy Donovan, who wasn't buying it.  That Weeden missed another open receiver at just the exact moment that could have put the Browns back in the game isn't anything new.  It's been going on all season.  But what was particularly delicious and delightful was what came next.  On third down, Weeden got sacked for 7 yards. On fourth down Dawson calmly almost routinely nailed a 53-yard field goal that would have been good from 63 yards.  It made Dieken look ridiculous for his prior comment while elevating the sympathy factor for Dawson even higher.  That too is the Browns' season in a nutshell.

One other thing about the game worth noting and, honestly, there isn't all that much to note, was the fact that the Browns' secondary was particularly depleted.  What makes that interesting is that going into last Sunday's game against Washington the secondary was completely healthy.  During the course of this past week, two defensive backs got injured in practice and Shurmur mysteriously released another, Dmitri Patterson..  It's pretty unusual for two players on non playoff teams to get hurt in practice this late in the season.  But this is the Browns where there is no script, no playbook and thus no usual mode of operation.  That left the likes of Sheldon Brown and Buster Skrine to pick up the slack and they did just exactly what you'd expect.  Brown spent the first quarter just a step behind any receiver he was recovering.  Skrine spent the game committing penalties.  Brown was hurt on a particularly cheap shot and will be lost for the last game of the season.  Tough luck on the injury, of course, but at least he doesn't have to suit up.  Dawson and Jackson won't be so lucky.

The Browns season comes to a merciful end next week in a game with absolutely no meaning to it.  The team visits the Pittsburgh Steelers who were knocked from the playoffs on Sunday and for the first time in years have likewise nothing to play for.  It will be interesting to see how they handle the experience.  If they need some pointers they have a whole library of Browns' film from the last decade they can watch.

The Things We Know--Week 14

The world has to turn, I get that.  And when the world has to turn, the NFL has to play, I get that too.  No one, least of all me, expected anything as important as football to really stop so that we can all pause and ponder the violent country we live in, a country where mass murder occurs with such frequency anymore that we’ve become as numb to it as another Cleveland Browns loss.  We didn’t stop for 9/11.  We aren’t going to stop for innocent children massacred by a mad man in an idyllic Connecticut town.  The Cleveland Browns played on Sunday and lost in spectacular fashion.  I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter.  The outcome of the game will set the stage for another housecleaning in a facility that knows nothing but housecleaning and I’m still pretty sure it doesn’t matter.  So numbed am I by the events on Friday that it was hard enough to muster up enthusiasm for the game, let alone for figuring out once again what went wrong with the Browns.

Yet there was a game and while its significance was anything but, it did happen and it was a disaster.  Let’s dive in, shall we?

Whatever fun it might have been to fantasize about a mediocre Browns team sneaking into the playoffs with a mediocre 8-8 record, the reality that came crashing down in the team's home finale 38-14 ass-whipping at the hands of a Kirk Cousins-led Washington Redskins was the painful reminder that there are miles to go before we sleep. Miles to go before we sleep.

It's hard to pinpoint the exact spot where the game spun out of control but a good place to start is with 1:14 remaining in the first half.  That was the point where Trent Richardson scored his second touchdown of the day and gave the Browns a 14-10 halftime lead.  It gave the Browns and their fans a false sense that some of the strangeness of the first half would have no impact on the second half.  Hardly.  For example and for emphasis the handoff to Richardson may have suggested that head coach Pat Shurmur was still dedicated to a running game.  A halftime lead and possession of the second half kickoff and a slow, kidney-punch of a drive on the ground to open the second half would suggest that as well.  Shurmur apparently had other ideas all along, perfectly wonderfully awful ideas.

Whatever Shurmur and his coaching staff said in the 15 or so minutes of halftime couldn't have been less spot on than if it had been delivered by George Armstrong Custer as he headed into his last home game at Little Big Horn. The Browns came out in the third quarter and delivered a spectacularly woeful performance for the ages as the Redskins put up 14 points, seized the lead, then Browns' pride and ultimately the game.  To emphasize the point, though, the Redskins added another touchdown early in the fourth quarter to put the game out of reach, though that was clear far earlier. The two teams traded final touchdowns that accounted for the final score.

In retrospect, Shurmur had essentially abandoned the running game far earlier in the first half then most realized.  The Richardson touchdown near half time was really nothing more than redirection, at best.  Richardson had 11 friggin’ carries the entire game, 8 of which were in the game’s first 22 minutes.  When you look back at the play calling, all the 3 and outs and disjointed quickly aborted first half drives and lousy Reggie Hodges punts, you discover that there was no rhyme or reason to what Shurmur may have been thinking regarding the overall schematics of the game, let alone the second half.

If this is how Shurmur puts on a late season push to save his job then it isn't a surprise that it's hanging by a thread in the first place. For all the progress that the team seemed to be making late in the season against the few teams in the league with bigger problems than them, Sunday was the wake up call that this team still has significant and fundamental weaknesses. The case for Shurmur and Heckert could only be made with progress and while the team could lose its final two games and still claim progress, it isn't enough. It isn't even in the same zip code as enough.

I would sum it up thusly.  The problem with the Browns is that no defeat is merely a defeat. When the Browns lose, as they often do, it’s a grim reminder of how off the rails this franchise has been that simply dissecting a defeat and then moving on is rarely an option.  The Browns lost Sunday because the general manager and the head coach failed this team long before Sunday though they failed it on Sunday as well.

Let’s start with Shurmur. He’s a head coach because of a reputation for running a high caliber offense or at least an offense of competence.  If there’s one conclusion you can come to about the Browns under Shurmur it’s that their offense consistently sucks.  There are personnel issues galore and that rests at the feet of Heckert.  But schematically the offense makes almost no sense and Sunday was its doppelganger.  

Richardson is probably hurt, though he disclaimed as much after the game.  But he seemed to be running hard in the first quarter and the Browns seemed committed to getting him yards.  It was a ruse.  Just like that, Shurmur pulled the plug on Richardson and not in favor of, for example, Montario Hardesty, which might have been understandable in context.  Shurmur simply abandoned the run for Weeden’s arm.  Then it just snowballed from there.  Weeden throws a ridiculous interception on the team’s first possession in the second half, the Redskins score quickly and the Browns are down by 3.  Shurmur then panics, gets anxious to get that score back and stays with the air assault, all evidence that it wasn’t working notwithstanding, and Richardson and Hardesty essentially were decoys.  In the case of Richardson, an awfully expensive decoy, but a decoy nonetheless.

This is why Shurmur can’t coach the team next season.  When the game dictates the strategy, Shurmur is less of a factor because he’s not left to insinuate himself on the process.  The Browns have played plenty of close games that by their nature dictated the approach on offense to the point that Rick from Brunswick, long time listener first time caller, could have taken over for Brad Childress.  But when the Browns entered half time with a lead against a hot team, it was incumbent on Shurmur, with his team getting the ball to start the half, to dictate the pace and ultimately the outcome.  At the first sign of trouble, the Weeden interception I’m talking about here, Shurmur threw the run game overboard along with the women and children and road Weeden as if he was Tom Brady.  I’ve got news for Shurmur.  Weeden isn’t even Brady Quinn.

As for Heckert, Sunday presented a whole host of reasons why he was proactive on Friday by giving a press conference that essentially was his “fire me” moment.
Heckert has control, wants control and believes he deserves control.  It’s as if he were pleading to anyone who would listen, “see, right here, it’s in my contract.  I’m not making this shit up.”  But that was under a much different construct.  Jimmy Haslam is the antithesis of Randy Lerner.  Haslam has brought in Joe Banner and Banner doesn’t strike anyone, including Heckert, as a Mike Holmgren clone, content to sit passively by and collect paychecks he doesn’t deserve.

But let’s assume that rather than Friday serving as a graceful way to explain your firing before it’s actually happened it was Heckert’s pitch to explain why he should remain.  Then Sunday is a problem.  For Heckert’s sake he better hope either that Richardson is hurt or that Shurmur is as incompetent as a game planner as he appears.  Otherwise Richardson is on course to be an even bigger bust than Weeden and of all the things this franchise can’t continue to tolerate blowing first round picks is at the top of the list.  Meanwhile, Cousins, a fourth rounder with less playing time than Weeden this season, was so far superior to Weeden it was embarrassing, to Weeden, to Shurmur and to Heckert.  It made you wonder exactly what Heckert saw in Weeden in the first place.

The other thing that Sunday demonstrated was the failings of Heckert’s dogged insistence on having final say over the roster and then populating it with as many inexperienced players he could corral.  This team may be maturing in some respects but it’s still the same team it was earlier in the season that can’t stem the tide when an opponent gets on a roll. (Of course in saying that I recognize that Shurmur is a part of that problem.  When he panicked Sunday, so too did his team and that was as big a reason as any that once the Redskins took control in the second half, the Browns had no chance of stopping it.)

Heckert’s made some decent personnel decisions and Travis Benjamin and the touchdown he delivered with his feet, again, is proof of that. It's just that when you want total control of the roster it comes with some serious responsibility and a roster as young as this is going to struggle. It almost has to. The NFL can accommodate rookies just not a whole team of them at once.  That’s why the only conclusion to reach about Friday’s press conference was that it was Heckert’s way of saying goodbye.  Sunday’s game was the fan’s way of saying good riddance.

You can blame Weeden for Sunday because he was awful but it’s not like he’s been particularly good either.  He didn’t get to be the 32nd rated quarterback in the league over night.  It takes a lot of bad play to sink to that level.  And his two interceptions on Sunday, along with about 43 batted balls at the line, shouldn’t have been a surprise.  He’s third in the league in interceptions and assuming they keep stats about batted balls, Weeden has to be near the lead in that category as well.  So yea, Weeden had another crappy, mistake filled game but that’s not really the point.

Weeden will always be Heckert's grand experiment and Weeden's dismal performance Sunday, punctuated as it was by the same things that have been apparent all season--bad throws and poor decision making--looks like a failure. But it always did if only, but not only, because Weeden is a 29 year old rookie who was a reach in the first round. Heck, or Heckert, he would have been a reach in the second round. No team builds around a 29 year old rookie quarterback. It hasn't been done before not because there hasn't been that chance, but because no other team thought it made much sense. The Cowboys drafted Roger Staubach when he was 27 but by the time he was a 29 year old starter he had been in the league a full two years and with a team far stronger than these Browns. The Cowboys were ruling the NFC East for years. In other words Staubach was doing it with a strong supporting cast. No one has ever tried to do what Heckert has tried with Weeden and the results show why.

But let's not delve too far into history when we only have to recall a few years ago when the Browns were led by a strong-armed quarterback with accuracy issues and and decision making deficiencies. His name was Derek Anderson and until Weeden demonstrates otherwise he has a way to go just to be Anderson. If Weeden does develop (and there's no reason to assume a when) it will be at a time when the team will have to plan for his replacement.  That in essence is the real problem with Weeden.

Then there’s the defense.  It’s hard to come down too hard on the glue that’s more or less held this 5-9 team together, but Cousins isn’t Fran Tarkenton.  He isn’t Robert Griffin III, either.  When Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan decided to have Cousins buy time with bootlegs and roll outs, defensive coordinator Dick Jauron was either too surprised to adjust or knew he didn’t have the personnel to handle it.

The thing is, it only took Shanahan about two series to figure out that he needed to move Cousins around the pocket.  Shurmur and his staff couldn’t figure out a counter the entire game.  It makes you wonder whether the Browns used halftime on Sunday to finalize their Secret Santa program.

With two games left and both on the road, the Browns are pretty much where we thought they’d be when the season started.  And not surprisingly they are where they’re at for pretty much the reasons we thought they’d be at the beginning of the season.  So getting verklempt about it now seems like a real waste of veklemptness, if there is such a thing.

And since there really is no good news left (unless you think that the last two games will be meaningless because Denver will have clinched a playoff spot and Pittsburgh will be out of the hunt) I’ll leave you with one last thought to ponder.  For the first time in I can’t remember how long, the Browns are healthy in December.  There isn’t a devastating injury to really point to anymore as a reason this team can't perform.  That means that the team you’re seeing is the team that Heckert and Shurmur imagined.  It’s a 5-9 team full of a lot of couldas and shouldas but it’s still a 5-9 team that hasn’t meaningfully progressed.  Its record, its approach, its outcome is the sum total of what Shurmur and Heckert bring to the table.  When Banner parts ways with one and probably both of them either the night of December 30 or sometime on New Year’s Eve, it will be hard for anyone to argue that they weren’t given a fair chance.

The Things We Know--Week 13

There is any number of ways to approach the Cleveland Browns’ 3-game win streak, but familiarity isn’t one of them.  The Browns haven’t seen a winning streak since former head coach Eric Mangini made his mad-dash sprint at the end of his first season.  Even then, there’s wasn’t a whole lot to enjoy about it.  Mangini was hanging by a thread for a number of reasons, including the recent hiring of Mike Holmgren, and the Browns were so far from relevant that all a 4-game win streak then was to give them 5 wins overall.  And it wasn’t as if anything carried over from that streak into the following season.  The Browns started out 0-3 on their way to another 5-win season.

So excuse fans and players alike if they don’t know how to act in the face of a late season, but not season-ending, win streak.  The competition within that streak may not have been stout, but all a team can do is play the teams on its schedule.  The NFL is and shall remain a no-excuse league and besides there’s no way anyway on or associated with the Browns should ever be looking down their noses at any other team.  Remember, they’re still 5-8 and once again out of any real hope for even undertaking a perfunctory playoff loss.

The overarching story from the Browns’ easier-then-it’s-been-in-years 30-7 rout of the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday is that after giving up a freakin’ 80-yard touchdown run on the game’s very first play from scrimmage, a play that happened so quickly that it actually put the Browns defense on pace to give up 350 points Sunday, the Browns’ defense then pitched a shutout.  That allowed the offense, ably assisted on special teams by Travis Benjamin’s team-record 93-yard punt return at the end of the first half, to modestly do its job by outscoring what is the league’s worst team not named “Arizona Cardinals.”  The accomplished that modest goal by the end of the first half.

But if head coach Pat Shurmur is going to last beyond his second season in Cleveland and/or begin building a legitimate career as a legitimate NFL head coach, he’ll look back on Sunday’s win as the real turning point.  It wasn’t the fact that the team put together a mini-streak against teams in turmoil.  It wasn’t the ostensible opening up of the usually turgid and staid offense.  It was the classy move Shurmur made post game to correct a mistake that needed correcting and that, in the process, kept him in the good graces of a team that just wants to win.

Shurmur knew he blew it when he yanked Montario Hardesty for what turned out to be the final play of a drive that Hardesty almost single-handedly had conceived and led because Hardesty fumbled and then recovered that fumble at the Chiefs’ 1-yard line.  Shurmur, with the knee-jerk reaction of a coach who is both embattled and too by-the-book for his own good, sent Hardesty to the sidelines and inserted Trent Richardson to finish the drive and what little spirit remained of the Chiefs.

“Hmm.  Oh here it is, NFL coach manual, page 8.  When your running back fumbles, remove him immediately and then put your arm around him on the sideline and tell him you still have confidence in him as he stands safely on the sidelines.”  (I note that the high school and college coach manual differs on this point.  They suggest putting the running back right back in to restore his confidence.  In the NFL if you need your confidence restored, see a therapist.  There’s too much money at stake to take chances on guys that fumble.)

Football, indeed professional sports, is a cold-blooded bottom line endeavor and it can’t, it won’t, tolerate second string running backs that fumble, particularly second-string running backs that fumble at the goal line.  Couple that with Shurmur’s usual risk aversion to anything that could create a turnover in the red zone, and Hardesty never stood a chance.  But in what could become Shurmur’s biggest growth moment as a head coach, he self-corrected, apologized publicly to Hardesty for the apparent loss of faith, and then did so again privately.  It was noticed.

When you think about it, though, Sunday’s victory was all about correcting perceived wrongs.  Hardesty’s was just the most noticeable.  Shurmur also threw Josh Cribbs, the team’s most passive-aggressive squeaky wheel, a couple of bones by running a play out of the wildcat offense and then giving the green light to a weird looking and weirdly affective punt formation trick that in large measure sprung Benjamin’s punt return.  Well, Benjamin’s burner speed helped too but stay with the narrative, will ya?

Shurmur used Sunday and the breathing space accorded by playing an emotionally spent Chiefs team populated with guys that previously weren’t good enough for one of the league’s formally worst teams (I’m talking the Browns here, folks), to repay some debts of his own creation.  But it’s that willingness to repay those debts that will endear Shurmur to the team and, in turn, will give Shurmur the best chance to retain his job.

There’s two lessons here.  First, as much as we like to harshly judge others mistakes (while completely and totally rationalizing our own), what tends to infuriate is not the mistake but generally the poor efforts made to correct them.  Second, nobody keeps a head coach who’s lost the ear of the players.  That doesn’t mean players should decide who coaches them, which works out about as well as Eric Mangini getting to hire his own boss, but think Norv Turner.  Turner will be fired by the San Diego Chargers because the players stopped listening to him about two seasons ago.  It finally took a loss to the Browns several weeks ago for their ownership and management to finally notice.

The other lesson from Sunday’s win is that trying something a little different on offense isn’t always a bad thing.  The pitch to Greg Little, which he ran effectively until he somehow got stopped at the 1-yard line, was the kind of non-controversial wrinkle that fans have been waiting to see for two seasons.  Couple that with the wildcat and pistol formations that were run with less success and at least you have the makings of more diversity than the delegate section of a typical Republican National Convention.

Shurmur so often comes across as an automaton as a play caller that you wonder whether there’s anything else in the play book besides the following plays: off tackle left, off tackle right, fade left, fade right, look long for a moment and then dump off to outlet.  It could be that this developed because since Shurmur got to Cleveland he hasn’t had the full opportunity to install his offense.  In his first season, the players were locked out and the first glimpse he really got of his players was about two weeks before the season started.  This year, with the decision to go with Brandon Weeden as quarterback and mostly a new receiving corps and new running backs, all of whom are essentially rookies, it wouldn’t have been easy to install Army’s offense, let alone the complicated version of the West Coast that Shurmur favors.

Offense in the NFL is like pitching in baseball.  It’s most effective when the defense (or the batter) is off balance.  If Sunday was the day that Shurmur decided that the Browns’ skill players are actually starting to grasp the higher level math required by his offense, Shurmur can better keep opposing defenses guessing.  Now it’s true that having the Chiefs’ ragged defense doing the guessing is going to have about as much success rate as Kim Kardashian guessing her way through the MCATs or the New York Times’ Sunday crosswords, but as I’ve said before, no win in the NFL should be diminished.

If there was any area of concern with Sunday’s win it’s that Trent Richardson’s effectiveness continues to drop precipitously.  He had 18 carries for 42 yards, which is barely over 2 yards per carry.  Even Jerome Harrison is scratching his head at that.  Richardson is obviously still hurting and also appears to have hit the rookie wall.  The NFL season is longer and more arduous than a college season so it’s not unusual for rookies to hit the wall.  Maybe that’s what was really behind Shurmur’s mea culpa to Hardesty.  He knows he’ll need him to spell Richardson even more during the season’s last 3 games.

Back to the theme, though.  There simply isn’t a playbook for how Browns’ fans are supposed to feel in the midst of a legitimate win streak.  The win over the Steelers seemed more like the product of Charlie Batch effect and 8 Steelers turnovers that produced only 20 points.  The win against Oakland was a win against, basically, another version of the Chiefs.  Sunday’s win could likewise be attributed to a number of unique factors, from the Chiefs’ very weird roster to a team emotionally depleted by the tragic events of a week before that have now caught up to them.  That the Browns should have won all three still doesn’t diminish from the weight of actually having won all three.  If it shows them nothing else, the Browns team finally believes that they no longer are the worst team in the league.  From all outward appearances, particularly in a season where there seem to be an overabundance of really bad teams, their belief doesn’t appear to be misplaced.

**

Every win streak is a product of a number of factors, including luck and the Browns demonstrated that yesterday.  I’m not sure that anything could have helped the Chiefs on Sunday, but an improbable punt return for a touchdown, two dropped interceptions deep in Cleveland territory by Chiefs defenders and Hardesty getting his own fumble at the 1-yard line are the kinds of things that could have turned the game much differently.

Weeden was particularly lucky that Eric Berry had a cast on one hand.  It gave Ben Watson a chance to knock a sure interception out and kept a Browns’ drive alive that in fact produced a touchdown by Richardson 4 plays later.  The Hardesty fumble was a little different and arguably a close call.  On a day when the Browns had trouble in the first half scoring touchdowns (two in the same drive were nullified because of penalties) while settling for field goals, the Chiefs had a chance to make more of a game out of it.  That they didn't is the story of exactly why Scott Pioli is in deep doo-doo in Kansas City.

**

As important as all of those plays were to the outcome of the game, perhaps the luckiest break, the one that more than anything changed the rhythm of the game came on the Chiefs’ second drive of the game.  After holding the Browns to what essentially was 3-and-out (the Browns got a first down on first down and then went backward from there), the Chiefs took over from their 21-yard line.  Brady Quinn completed a short pass to Dwayne Bowe that turned into 23 yards and then completed a 47-yarder to Bowe in front of Joe Haden that put the Chiefs at the Cleveland 4-yard line.

Quinn then tried to complete two passes over the middle that were both well defended and poorly thrown.  The Chiefs were forced to try a 28-yard field goal which promptly dinked off the upright and fell to the ground.  That the Chiefs didn’t score any points in that drive was lucky.  That they couldn’t score a touchdown was the sum total of the Chiefs’ season and Quinn’s career.

When Quinn was in Cleveland, it seemed like he was never given a real opportunity to be the starter.  Some of that was his fault (the idiotic contract hold out), some of it was circumstance (Derek Anderson’s career year) and some of it was injuries.  But ultimately when he left Cleveland it felt like it was more related to cleansing the facility of anything Phil Savage related then it did an indictment on Quinn’s abilities.

Watching Quinn on Sunday, though, you get the sense that he’s just not a legitimate NFL starter.  There are starts of greatness and fits of frustration.  There isn’t anything he does that is particularly bad.  But there’s nothing he does that is particularly good, either.  Modest is the best description of the skills he brings to the table.  When the season ends, Quinn will still find work in the NFL, but he’ll be a back up.  I expect that the Browns will run into him again, perhaps playing for the Steelers next season wearing the jersey that Charlie Batch was forced to turn in at this season’s end.

**
And finally, in what is turning into a late season bout with good fate and clean living, the Browns are both injury free and running into a team with an injured quarterback.  From the looks of things, when the Washington Redskins come to Cleveland next Sunday, Robert Griffin III, the player that should be starting for the Browns but for the poor poker playing by Holmgren and Tom Heckert, was set to start.  He's the league's highest rated passer.  But an injury in the form of a sprained knee is likely to keep Griffin out and Kirk Cousins in. That means that the Browns have an honest to goodness chance of making it 4 in a row.  All I know is that these kinds of things never happened under Randy Lerner's ownership.  Just sayin'.