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.


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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?

Lingering Items--Concussions Edition

Just remember, we live in a cynical world.

The NFL is about to do a massively right thing by pulling out of its huge bank account as much as $800 million to help thousands of former players who are or may begin suffering from the effects of concussions suffered during their playing days.

Reaction to the NFL’s unprecedented concussion lawsuit settlement has been both fast and predictable and cynical.  Where some see it as the NFL doing the right thing others see it as not nearly enough.  Maybe they just can’t comprehend the scope of how big of a settlement pot nearly $800 million really is.  Then there is the predictable group that has decided in the players shouldn't get a thing.  They knew the risks.  We’ll get to that group in a minute.

There’s never been an effective way to place a monetary value on a human life and there never will be.  In that sense, the carping about the size of the payout isn’t a surprise.  Is someone suffering from Parkinson’s deserving of $3 or 4 million?  Is that too much or simply not enough?  Who really can say?

Lost though in this aspect of the discussion is the simple fact that the NFL stepped up and got this massive lawsuit settled in very short order.  With nearly 4,500 plaintiffs in the purported class action lawsuit, the litigation could easily have taken years just to get through the preliminary wrangling without any of the lawyers breaking much of a sweat. Indeed the parties were wrangling over whether the case should be heard in court or by an arbitrator.  A ruling was due and whichever way it went the other side would appeal.  It could have been years before the parties ever got to the merits of the case.

But this wasn't a lawsuit about someone having water in the basement.  There was real suffering by thousands of former players whose brains and lives got scrambled doing the only thing they ever really were trained to do.  The more the litigation promised to drag on, the worse they would get. Many would have died in the interim.  Many already have.  For all the criticism the NFL gets about its supposed indifference to the needs of retirees, from questions about pensions, to health care, to compensation for past injuries, it was instrumental in putting together an unprecedented, complicated, expensive settlement that promises to provide real relief and benefit to the victims of its violent sport.

There are always aspects of any settlement that anyone can quibble with.  For example, one of the criticisms is that the NFL has only committed $10 million of the settlement toward additional research, which in a vacuum seems woefully insufficient.  But the broader picture on that subject is the NFL has funded hundreds of millions in research already, continues to do so outside the context of the lawsuit and is committing even more money to that effort.

There’s no question that the NFL has had a mixed history of dealing with the players who made the league the economic juggernaut it is today.  And there’s no question here that the league had an economic motive to get the case settled.  At the very least the more it dragged on the more likely there would be revelations embarrassing to the league as one of the key allegations in the suit is that the league deliberately hid the medical consequences of concussions  for years from its players. 

But wrangling over the motive to settle is to miss the relative speed with which the NFL will be getting financial relief to those in distress.  The league essentially paid a settlement that is in the range of what it stood to lose in the litigation anyway and so it’s pretty safe to assume that it indeed understood and underplayed the medical impact of multiple concussions.  It’s also pretty safe to assume that it wanted to provide real relief to these players and it has.

There’s never an adequate way to compensate a person financially when he’s otherwise lost the essence of himself through an injury.  It’s unlikely that the thousands of players suffering from the effects of multiple concussions will ever have their medical fates reversed.  But at least the men who find themselves unable to care for their families and the families who are struggling to take care of these men in a dignified way can ease those burdens with a substantial pot of money.  It may be crass but that doesn’t mean it won’t make it easier.

The NFL should be applauded for actually doing the right thing, particularly since the public default tends to be that the NFL never does the right thing.  Could it have done more? Probably.  It also could have done less.  There were lives at stake.   There still are.  At least the sides are united in the common goal of providing for those who sacrificed so much to make so many others rich.

**

Then there are the “they knew the risks” jerks who feel like the former players really don’t deserve a penny.  Pete Prisco, a columnist of sorts with CBSSports.com, leads this pack.  Prisco, aiming for provocation where understanding would be the better motive decided that this settlement was indeed the right moment to make a name for himself at the expense of others by deliberately taking an intellectually dishonest point of view.  He equated the settlement to a money grab by the ex-players who knew the risks of their sport and now, essentially, are suffering as much from buyer’s remorse as anything else.

It’s a crowded platform on the internet.  Columnists are rewarded on the number of clicks they get and so the hot take like the one from Prisco is designed to garner him traffic.  That’s why I won’t provide a link here.  The less clicks, the better.

The retirees’ lawsuit was actually about the very issue Prisco claims was incontrovertible—the known risks of the sport.  Concussions have always been a part of the mix, certainly.  But the science of concussions has evolved over the years as increased research has more definitively established the long term effects of concussions.  When the NFL knew this was a key to the entire lawsuit.  So despite was Prisco says, it isn’t true that the risks of playing football have been known for years other than in a general sense. 

Jackasses like Prisco come and go.  His work on this issue underscores that he would be best sticking to discussing the societal implications of third and long.  Where Prisco didn’t go but could have and maybe should have is to discuss all the players who still have an almost open hostility toward the league’s efforts to make their workplace safer.

Complain all you want about the NFL’s past conduct but you can’t deny the NFL’s strong push in recent years to improve the safety of the sport through literally dozens of rule changes.  These range from rules designed to limit kick returns to changes in equipment, like the mandating of thigh and knee pads, to the outlawing of helmet to helmet hits.

And yet each time it implements a new rule there is the usual reaction from dozens if not hundreds of players that the league is sissifying the sport.  “Why not make it flag football” or “let’s put a dress on them” are the usual, tired reactions from the players.  When a thug like James Harrison deliberately goes out of his way to injure to members of the Browns in the same game and is suspended for it, he tears into the NFL Commissioner and does so with the backing of his teammates and dozens of other players around the league.  It’s simply scandalous that Harrison and his ilk are allowed to remain in the game and perhaps even more scandalous that he and his type aren’t called out on their behavior by their union leaders.

Frankly the players are their own worst enemies when it comes to player safety.  It’s part of the “warrior” mentality that gets ingrained from Pop Warner on forward that they should play in pain and rub a little dirt on the injury.

In that sense it can be a little frustrating to hear about these kinds of settlements, but only in that sense.  Players do bear some culpability for the lifelong effects many suffer from a result of the sport they played.  Players and their union representatives constantly work at cross purposes from the league in terms of player safety.  And while the specific long term effects of things like concussions are still far from being completely understood, there is no question that players today can and should better understand they are involved in an inherently dangerous activity.

That all said, nothing in that equation relieves the league of its duty as an employer to provide a safe working environment for its workers.  Short of banning the sport there probably is no way of making the sport risk free, but that’s not the goal anyway.  The real goal is transparency.  Players are entitled to the full range of disclosures on all the risks inherent in the activities they undertake on the field.  Only then can they truly make an intelligent decision about whether or not to take those risks.

**

In this context, it’s actually fascinating to read about the travails of Robert Griffin III and the Washington Redskins.  Griffin, after suffering serious leg and knee injuries last season, has been cleared to play in the season opener next week.  Yet according to reports from ESPN, Griffin’s own doctor, the well respected Dr. James Andrew, has strongly suggested that the Redskins are risking further injury to their prized asset by continuing to use him as they did last season.

In other words, Andrews believes that allowing Griffin to be exposed to the constant pounding that a read option quarterback takes will be at the risk of losing Griffin again.  No one much is commenting on whether Andrews indeed made that recommendation though Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan eluded to as much by saying that the team needed to talk to Griffin about the issues related to his medical clearance.

I actually think it’s too cynical to suggest that the Redskins won’t follow Andrews’ recommendations, but those recommendations do put the team and the player in a quandary and it’s just that kind of quandary played out over decade after decade of professional football that eventually leads to the kinds of litigation that the NFL just settled.

Griffiin’s issues aren’t concussion related but they carry significant long term health risks nonetheless. But Griffin wasn’t drafted just to hand off the football or sit back in the pocket.  His strong arm and swift feet are his true stock in trade and when perfectly combined it’s really a thing of beauty to watch.

For Griffin, the long term health risks are well known and established.  He has the transparency to the process that players should have.  But he’ll likely ignore them.  He has a contract to live up to and another to grab down the road.  NFL football represents his best path to lifetime financial freedom.  He’d be better served to reinvent himself as a pocket passer but it carries a tremendous amount of risk as well.  What if it doesn’t work? What if he becomes Derek Anderson? You can see the high level calculus Griffin wrestles with as he confronts these issues and then you start to understand why players put themselves in harm’s way even when they know very specifically that harm awaits them.

**

The Browns’ lack of depth is once again being exposed as injuries mount during training camp.  Until the depth on the team improves significantly, the record won’t tick up appreciably.  Still, this week’s question to ponder isn’t about injuries: When was the last time a team went through its final cuts and ended up with no place kickers on the roster?

Lingering Items--Johnny Football Edition

It’s hard to know whether to be more surprised by the NCAA’s hypocrisy or its ability to be shamed into doing the right thing, at least when pressure gets to them.  I guess I’ll go with the latter since the former isn't really much of a surprise.

A mere days after the Jay Bilas of ESPN exposed the NCAA’s abject hypocrisy in using its own web site to profit off the players it would simultaneously punish for trying to do the same, the NCAA actually succumbed to the shame of it all and shut down the site, though not necessarily its profit churning possibilities.

Oh we've talked about the NCAA and it’s hypocrisy in every manner of operation several times by now so really nothing should be a surprise.  And yet, there it was earlier this week engaged in the kind of “really?” type of behavior that has come to define its existence.

By now you've heard the key elements of the story.  Bilas (who you should follow on Twitter (@jaybilas) was sitting around not doing anything more than simply pondering why Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel faces suspension for allegedly profiting off his autograph when he wondered whether the NCAA was simultaneously profiting off of Manziel in other ways.  So he went to the NCAA’s shopping website, typed Manziel’s name in the search bar and up came a Texas A&M replica jersey bearing Manziel’s number.  Bilas then repeated the exercise for other players, like Jadevon Clowney, and got a similar result.  Then Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated did likewise for even more players and got the same results.  Buy any one of those jerseys and the vendor, the NCAA and the member schools will split the proceeds.  Manziel, Clowney, Braxton Miller, and on and on, won’t see a dime.

In other words, the NCAA raises the increasingly more ludicrous banner of preserving the quaint notion of amateurism when a player wants to profit off his own name, likeness or signature.  The NCAA has no such problem when it’s the one doing the profiting, at least until others caught on.

But character is what you do when no one is looking, not when everybody is and we know that until Bilas opened our eyes to what was actually out in the open, the NCAA was more than content to count the dollars it was making off Manziel and others.

This is the frustrating, hypocritical message the NCAA’s been sending for years and is exactly why it is in the midst of a lawsuit it can’t win.  That action, filed by former UCLA player Ed O’Bannon, has been certified as a class action of former and current players who claimed that the NCAA retaining in perpetuity a college player’s image, likeness, name, what have you, and profiting handsomely from it without sharing any of the spoils with the player is blatantly unfair.

The NCAA’s defense has essentially been that it owns your rights as the privilege of participating, even after you’re long gone from the college ranks.  If it were a fair fight, that might be a good argument.  But in the context of 18 year old kids, all of whom at that age are locked out from pursuing a professional career in either professional football or basketball for at least a year (three for football) by those leagues (due in no small part to the unholy, unspoken alliance between those leagues and the NCAA), the argument loses its luster.  Throw in the fact that a kid who would stand up to the NCAA’s draconian contract terms essentially strikes the death knell for his chances of a pro career and you can understand why what the NCAA does to them is so unfair.

The entire financial underpinnings of the NCAA are jeopardized by the O’Bannon lawsuit and even though Rome is burning around them they continue to walk around its open flames toting 10 gallon cans of gasoline.

The NCAA operates like they’re Tony Soprano only not as smart.  It’s as if they don’t realize that you can’t keep your earners from getting a little taste for themselves.  Everyone in Tony’s chain of command has to earn a little something to keep the wheels of his brand of commerce flowing.  Not so with the NCAA.  Instead it comes across not even as generous as Feudal kings but as high minded pre Civil War plantation owners. Think Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained.  A rise up was inevitable.

As much as I love NCAA football and basketball, the chief earners for the NCAA kingpins, it wouldn't raise my blood pressure if those sports ended up as the collateral damage in bringing an end to the NCAA’s silly moralistic and anachronistic view that student athletes should be grateful to play for free.  I don’t mind the NCAA earning its fair share.  I do mind it earning the complete share.

The NCAA isn’t going to fundamentally reform because it doesn't want to.  It purposely lumps the schools with conflicting interests together in the same category in order to keep fundamentally fair change from happening.  The Big 10 and a few other big conferences have floated the perfectly reasonable idea of paying the players enough of a stipend to keep them from feeling like they have to sell their own stuff in order to make ends meet.  The midlevel schools countered with the perfectly reasonable response that they can’t afford those payments because they don’t have access to the same kind of money as the big schools.  And there the proposal sits, dormant and adrift, unable to get out of its own shadow, the net result of which is all the money stays where it’s always been at, with the NCAA and the schools.  Similar conflicts abound and that’s what prevents any real movement.

Make no mistake, the NCAA is in trouble and if they’re smart, and they've shown such predisposition, they’d plan for the future.  Their lawyers may be fighting the good fight but it’s the NCAA that doesn't even understand that the only thing worse for its future than losing the lawsuit is winning it.

The NCAA’s business model that hinges on the systemic and almost complete exploitation of college athletes is bound to collapse on itself like a stack of Jenga blocks.  Either the O’Bannon lawsuit dismantles it through the legal process or it gets dismantled all the same when the athletes have had enough, it will get dismantled.

It doesn't have to be that way.  The athletes in revenue-generating sports ought to share in some of the revenue generated.  It’s not that hard of a concept and there are plenty of intelligent folks around that could actually figure this all out in a fair and reasonable manner.  I just wouldn't trust anyone associated with the NCAA with the task.  Their heads are stuck so far in the sand that they've forgotten what daylight actually looks like.

**

If you want to understand how insidious all this is, consider the plight of Desmond Howard.  True he’s an obnoxious little shit that went to Michigan, but that doesn't color the fact that he’s caught in the middle of a weird lawsuit that stems from the infamous Heisman pose he struck in the end zone all these years ago and the photo that captured the moment.

The complete story was reported by Yahoo! Sports, increasingly the go-to place on the internet for actual sports journalism.  I won’t bore you with the full details, just Google “Desmond Howard photo lawsuit” and you’ll find the story.  But the upshot is that there is an intellectual property fight over who exactly owns the photo.  Know this, however.  No one is claiming that Howard owns it.  Indeed, Howard’s caught in the lawsuit because he once used the photo for a brief period of time on his own web site and now the outfit claiming ownership of the photo is seeking damages from him and everyone else that supposedly used the photo without authorization.

What makes this story most interesting in the context of the O’Bannon lawsuit is that it illustrates nearly perfectly what the fuss is all about.  There are plenty of people profiting from Howard’s likeness as captured in that photo, including the NCAA and Michigan, to this day.  Of all those who are, the one person who’s not is Howard.  That’s because, again, he was forced to sign over his rights in order to gain the privilege of playing NCAA sanctioned football.

Does anything about that story seem right or fair?  You could argue that the person who took the photo really owns it and I wouldn't have that big of an issue with it.  But the larger truth in it is that he doesn't own it completely and thus isn't able to exploit it completely.  Because the photo is of an NCAA sanctioned football player, the NCAA owns that likeness and the photographer has to pay a licensing fee before he can exploit that photo financially.

If you think the NCAA should hand over some of the fees generated over the years to Howard then you really haven’t been paying attention.  That would entail a thread of enlightened thinking that the NCAA isn't capable of institutionally mustering.  They’d rather bleed their subjects bone dry.

For now Howard is thinking of signing on to the O’Bannon lawsuit and for the life of me I can’t understand why he hasn't already.  But then I remember he went to school at Michigan and realize that it will take him a bit longer to connect all the dots.

**

As a final bit of moralizing on this topic, let me just say that I’m struck at the seemingly sympathetic tone that Yahoo! Sports and even ESPN have taken to the sad plight of Johnny Football Manziel given how hard they went after Terrelle Pryor et al for engaging in virtually the same conduct.

I’m not one to see racism at every turn but it’s worth considering whether the attitudes of those outlets are at all colored by the race of the individuals involved.  It’s easy to see Pryor as a street hustler and Manziel as the white bread victim but nothing is ever that easy.

Pryor had plenty of flaws and demonstrated them repeatedly.  So, too, does Manziel.  In both cases they stem from the same entitlement attitude that puts them at the center of increasingly larger groups of people unwilling to tell them “no” to anything let alone give them a solid piece of advice.  Indeed Manziel’s parents seem to be front and center in helping cultivate Johnny’s reckless party boy image.

The truth is that the same issues that tripped up Pryor and the others at Ohio State appear to be tripping up Manziel.  For reasons I’ll never completely understand the NCAA simply will not allow players to profit from their own property at any level and as long as that remains the rule there will be cases like these that leave other right thinking folks scratching their heads.

Pryor deserved the same sympathy and understanding that the media is now giving Manziel and for the same reason.  The NCAA’s rules on this issue serve not to better the student athlete in any discernible way but instead to serve the NCAA and its members’ school unbridled greed.

**

That was exhausting.  Now for this week’s question to ponder as the Indians seek into their inevitable abyss:  Can even Terry Francona save a semi-promising season from completing slipping away?

Lingering Items--Questionable Characters Edition

The Cleveland Browns’ Josh Gordon has all the attributes that define the modern day wide receiver. His work ethic is questionable, his decision making is awful and he has a massive ego that stretches well beyond his modest achievements.

Maybe general manager Mike Lombardi was right all along. Gordon was a waste of a second round pick. In doing that former general manager Tom Heckert was just continuing a well established core competency of the Browns and wasted second round picks. But that's another story for another day.

What surprises about the Gordon story though is how thin of a thread he's hanging from considering it's only his second year in the league. Already he's run afoul of the league's substance abuse policy several times and now must sit out the first two games of the season. For that kind of production the Browns could have kept Brian Robiskie.

Gordon's latest transgression involves, by his account, a positive test for codeine that he didn't know was contained in a prescription cough syrup. To this point no one locally has challenged Gordon's story and thus fans are under the misimpression that Gordon was just an unwitting victim. Doubtful.

Had anyone in the local media bothered to check, the NFL's drug policy does have a "therapeutic use" exemption. In other words, testing positive for a banned substance contained in a prescription doesn't trigger a violation of league policy. There is one huge caveat and that is undoubtedly what tripped up Gordon.  For the exemption to apply the player has to report the prescription to the league's medical advisor in advance. A player can't wait to see if he passes the test and then having failed claim he was under a prescription.

Taking Gordon's word that he tested positive for codeine it's also clear that either he had no legitimate prescription in the first place or he tried to get one after the fact. He certainly didn't report it in advance. In other words, Gordon's story is just that, a story.

What's more likely, though we won't know for sure unless Gordon fesses up, is that he was drinking "purple drank" or whatever else the mixture of cough syrup and soda is referred to locally. It's a cheap high and very common. Given his several run ins with marijuana, the image or Gordon finding another way to get high while a avoiding his prior drug of choice seems a far more plausible version of how he got tripped up than the rather generic excuse he’s using now. My guess, though purely a guess, is that Gordon was partaking in his version of “purple drank” and simply didn't know that the cough syrup he used to make it contained codeine.  That wouldn’t make him an unwitting victim.  More like a deliberate fool.  At least Joe Haden didn't claim he didn't know Adderall was a banned substance.

Young players, like young people, do dumb things. But Gordon has more of a history. When the Browns drafted him he had already failed three drug tests because of his marijuana use. That's not a guy that's simply dumb. That's a guy with a problem. Add in the recent failed test for another drug intended to induce a high and the pattern is more than established.

To this point in his young life Gordon has demonstrated that getting high trumps his obligations to the Browns and the league and he may find himself out of football soon serving that higher master.  Meanwhile Gordon repays the dwindling faith the team has in him by essentially dogging it at practice. He's claiming an injury but in terms of football injuries tendinitis is among the mildest. If nothing else, Gordon is a guy that needs practice.

Gordon's days in the NFL are numbered and at the moment he seems to be the only one that hasn't noticed. He deserves to have his career dangle like a rain drop from a downspout. If the Browns aren't making other plans, they should be. Fortunately Gordon won't be hard to replace. Terrell Owens and Chad Johnson are looking for work.

**
Speaking of Lombardi, he is becoming chattier lately, buoyed undoubtedly by the heap of praise that club president Joe Banner heaped on him recently.

I'm glad he's talking. I'm not sure it's a good idea. But what he does say provides interesting insight if you bother to follow the dots.

Speaking about the aforementioned Gordon, Lombardi went out of his way to praise his progress even as Gordon sat with an injury that was anything but. Lombardi told the media the other day (as reported in what passes as The Plain Dealer these days) that Gordon showed a great attitude in the offseason and wants to be a great player and that he (Lombardi) is excited to be a part of that.

Given Gordon's fourth failed drug test (at least) and the fact that the most recent was in the off season, one wonders what Lombardi would say if Gordon had actually done his team and teammates a real favor and stayed clean and worked hard, you know like Gordon said he would when it was discovered that he initially lied about not testing positive for marijuana at Utah where he went after flaming out at Baylor.

Meanwhile, when it comes to quarterback Brandon Weeden, Lombardi had trouble expressing anything other than his lackluster support for the team's putative starter.

Try to find the compliment in this quote from Lombardi: "I think (Weeden) clearly has proven in the off-season that he's gotten better at everything they've asked him to do. So, every day is about getting better and I think that's what a lot of players are doing.'' It's tantamount to saying that your teenager is getting better at the things you ask him to do, like taking out the trash. Now instead of having to ask him four times to do it he now takes it out after the second request.

Lombardi was a bit more complimentary of the two quarterbacks on the roster he had a hand in acquiring, Brian Hoyer and Jason Campbell, but the stronger impression that Lombardi left was that quarterback is still an unsettled position. On the Richter scale that runs from wasted second round picks to wasted quarterback picks, this revelation hardly moves the needle even a fraction.

But let's be fair to Lombardi and not assume that his indifferent attitude toward Weeden is just a case of "he's not my guy"ism. Weeden was an ill advised pick because drafting a 29 year old rookie only works in a Disney film.

I'd expect Weeden to be better this year than last when he was one of the worst quarterbacks in the league. There's nowhere else to go but up. But the up has to be significant and soon or he'll just be another Derek Anderson, except without the one good year.

Quarterback is the hardest position to play in sports and patience makes sense, except in the case of 30-year old sophomores. The Browns simply don't have four years to spend hoping that Weeden figures out the game. And even if they did by then it would be time to groom his replacement anyway.

**

Another intriguing statement from Lombardi emanated from a discussion about rookie defensive end Barkevious Mingo.  Lombardi said he's unconcerned that Mingo may not crack the starting lineup. After all, he said, it's not who gets introduced as the starter (though he allowed that this is important in and of itself) but how much playing time a player gets. How true.

Lombardi then allowed that he wouldn't be disappointed if no rookie cracks the starting lineup because, again, it's ultimately about playing time.

That too is as true as far as it goes but let’s face it. If none of Lombardi's draft choices start then that will be a problem. Not to put too fine a point on it but last season's team was awful.  It's the reason a new regime is in place again. It had three, maybe four solid starters, guys who could start for any team. Two of them were let go in free agency. Another is at left tackle. Another at linebacker. In other words this wasn't a playoff team filled with established incumbents. If no rookie starts then how or why can fans expect anything more than another frustrating season?

For now I'll give Lombardi the benefit of the doubt that he's just being cautious and diplomatic and not hedging his bets, though that's exactly what it sounded like.

I'm not in the camp that thinks Lombardi is the devil because he was here once before with Bill Belichick and they did some unpopular things. Banner is a good executive with a good track record and his judgment on Lombardi deserves to be respected. That's why I'm unconcerned at the moment. Banner is also a brutal bottom line guy. If Lombardi's draft class is a washout fans won't need to worry about running him out of town. Banner will do it for them.

**
At the moment the Browns kicking situation is one of the most unsettled areas of the team and yet is getting little notice at the moment. This week's question to ponder:  What's the over and under in minutes in the first preseason game when Banner and Lombardi slap their palms to their head and wonder what they were thinking when they didn't try to re-sign Phil Dawson?

Lingering Items--Indians Business Edition

One of the abiding questions of recent times about what’s happening with the business side of the Cleveland Indians revolves around the Dolans’ recent sale of SportsTime Ohio.

The Dolans went to some difficulty and expense to first cancel its television broadcast contract with Fox Sports Ohio and then launch their own cable venture m 2006 with Indians games as the centerpiece.  Yet just a handful of years later they abandoned the project and sold STO, ironically to Fox Sports.  Did the Dolans cash in?  Is that what funded this past season’s free agent splurge?  Hard to know in either case, but perhaps they sold for a more mundane reason: it may not have been generating the profits they thought.

On the surface team owners establishing their own cable networks to broadcast their games seems like a good business plan.  Essentially they sell the broadcast rights to themselves, one pocket to the other, and get cable television subscribers to fund it.  What could go wrong?

Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  The Dolans aren’t disclosing anything other than corporate speak to explain the rationale behind why they abandoned STO but perhaps a story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal shed some light on what was really going on: cable operators don’t want to pay huge fees to carry a channel the overwhelming majority of cable subscribers don’t even watch.

As a backdrop, the Dolans weren’t the first to establish what amounted to an in house cable network as a way of enhancing their revenues.  In some sense they were probably a bit late to the party on that one.  But as it turns out, those ventures weren’t nearly as foolproof as club owners thought they would be.

Tuesday’s story focused on a similar operation in Houston that was dedicated to broadcasting Astros and Rockets games but there’s no reason to think the same math doesn’t apply in Cleveland.

In Houston as in Cleveland, owners and investors wanted to cash in on what seemed to be ever increasing licensing fees passed merrily along to increasingly strapped cable television subscribers.  It’s kind of a “cake and eat it too” plan.  The team sells its television rights to its own network.  That network goes to the various cable operators and demands that the channel be carried on basic cable at a huge per subscriber fee. The owners get huge licensing fees and nearly all the advertising revenue.

And for years, that’s exactly what’s happened.  Indeed, the single biggest content fee passed along to subscribers is that charged by ESPN to cable operators.  Those operators don’t want to alienate viewers and thus carry the channel, passing along the cost to the entire subscriber base.  It’s made ESPN rich enough to bid on the broadcast rights to baseball and football which, in turn, has given ESPN the clout to charge even higher fees to operators which, in turn, has further increased the monthly cable bills of all of us.

As ESPN thrived under the model, a mini explosion of similar channels followed, mostly focused on more discrete subjects such as the NFL, major league baseball, the Big 10, the SEC, and the like.

It works for just about as long as cable operators are willing to offer the channels and pass along the costs.  That is becoming an increasingly more difficult task.  Cable operators often argue that they are merely protecting the interests of their customers who don’t want to keep seeing their monthly bills increase.  That’s true, but a convenient truth.

There is significant evidence, according to the Wall Street Journal story, that sports on television isn’t nearly as popular as perceived.  According to Nielsen ratings cited by the Journal, aside from the NFL and the biggest games in a handful of other sports, the TV audience for sports is about 4% or less of households on average.  That’s a pretty stunningly low number.  For basketball and hockey, it’s less than 3%.  Ouch.

That means that somewhere around 96% of all cable subscribers are tuning in, if at all, only for the biggest games.  For the most part, they could care less.  That means that the same 96% of cable subscribers are paying so that the more rabid 3-4% can watch a midweek Golden State vs. Utah basketball game.

A more reasonable person might ask: why can’t the 4% who want to watch sports on a regular basis simply pay for it themselves?  The answer to that is simple and two-fold.  First, there is a point at which even that 4% would not continue to ante up.  There simply aren’t enough viewers willing to pay enough money to justify the network’s investment into broadcasting the sport.  Second, it’s more lucrative for networks to sell advertising time if they can plausibly argue that their reach is 96% bigger than it really is.

The other truth for the cable operators is less, shall we say, “consumer oriented.”  You see, many cable operators like Time Warner, also own and produce their own content that they like to have broadcast on their cable systems.  Adding content they don’t own competes for eyeballs with the content they do own, although perhaps not as much as they think.  The bigger issue though is that as high cost sports networks push cable bills higher, customers abandon cable for something else, like the internets.  That’s bad for cable operators who have seen flat to declining customer growth for the last several years.

ESPN has enough market clout and diverse programming to mostly get what it wants.  Rarely do you see cable operators drawing a line on them.  But increasingly they are drawing a line with others.  Time Warner, for example, refused to carry the NFL Network for years until the NFL lowered its economic demands and agreed to allow Time Warner to put the network on a sports tier that is paid for separately by the customers who want it.   Undoubtedly that’s hurt the financial model of the NFL Network even as it has expanded its theoretical reach.

All of this gets us back to STO.  The Dolans didn’t get into too many skirmishes with cable operators over the subscriber fees but they had to lower their financial demands to accomplish this and that in turn lowered the profits, not to mention the quality of the overall product.  Outside of the Indians’ game, the programming on STO mostly has the look and production values of a local cable access show and with about the same size audience.

So STO was sold to Fox Sports.  But in many ways this is a different Fox Sports.  In the last few years Fox Sports has been expanding its footprint and is launching its own ESPN clone of a network.  Having regional programming that feeds into a national platform gives it a significant head start in its head to head death match with ESPN.

Given Fox’s imperialistic plans, the Dolans undoubtedly realized a profit in the sale and perhaps that, more than anything else, likely funded the free agent shopping spree this last off season.

While the STO venture was mildly successful for the Dolans, it wasn’t nearly as successful as they imagined.  To the extent that has an impact on future budgets for the team itself, and undoubtedly it does, it makes it less likely that fans will see similar shopping sprees in future off seasons.  Welcome to 2009, Indians fans.

**

Speaking of business plans and because there are no such things as coincidences, the Indians have gone full Monty into what they like to call dynamic pricing, according to Crains Cleveland Business.

Essentially the Indians vary ticket prices like Las Vegas varies hotel prices.  Buy early and you’re likely to pay less, irrespective of the opponent.  Wait until the last minute against a desirable opponent and expect to pay more.

Crains used the example of bleacher seats for the upcoming game against Texas on July 27th, which is a fireworks night.  Initially tickets were sold for between $10 and $26, depending on location.  The prices right now range from $30.25 to $36.

This has generated some mild complaints among some fans and has spurred a slight increase in advance ticket sales, which is the Indians’ goal.

Fans who are complaining do so because they want the right to wait until the last second to buy a ticket without any consequence attached to it.  But that’s not a reality in most any other purchase and there’s no compelling reason it should be the reality when it comes to Indians ticket purchases.

If I book a flight at the last minute, I expect to pay more.   That may seem unfair except that by buying late I gave myself the maximum flexibility to change my plans.  That flexibility came at a cost, of course, and I could have traded that off by taking more of a risk by buying it earlier and hoping my plans didn’t change.  It is a choice.

The same holds true for sports tickets.  It can be hard for a fan to plan in April to attend a game in July without knowing how his plans could change. That’s why many don’t choose to buy tickets that far in advance.  They don’t want to take the risk that they’ve wasted their money.  But there’s no reason, moral, ethical, economical, that the Indians or any other team have to assure fans that tickets can be had at the same price the day before the game.   It’s simple risk shifting and there’s nothing wrong with that.

As mentioned, the Indians are seeing some success with dynamic pricing which can only mean that there’s no going back.  That’s a radical change from the days when you could literally walk up the day of the game and buy a good seat for the same price that the person sitting next to you paid two months prior.  But on this issue, there’s no faulting the Indians or the Cavs and Browns when they inevitably follow suit.  Sometimes a business needs to be run like a business.

**

The Indians beginning the second half of a surprising season leads to this week’s question to ponder: Who is more deserving of the first half MVP, Jason Kipnis or Terry Francona?

Lingering Items--Bigger Truths Edition

If I had just one wish as a sports columnist, it would be to write with the absolute clarity and sense of purpose of Jason Whitlock.  He doesn’t duck important issues, particularly when race is involved.  He doesn’t adhere to conventional wisdom or anyone’s party line and doesn’t write to meet anyone’s expectations but his own.  Time and again he’ll be on the opposite side of where you’d thought he’d be on a particular issue and where you might be.  When you're finished, he'll change your mind.

His recent column on Jay-Z’s entrée into the world of sports as an agent is brilliant in both its simplicity and logic.  Jay-Z may be a cultural phenomena, Whitlock argues, but that doesn’t qualify him to represent athletes.  More to the point, Jay-Z only trusts his musical career to the best in the music business. Athletes like Kevin Durant and Robinson Cano should do likewise, meaning trust their athletic careers to the best in that business instead of a wanna be athlete living vicariously.  It’s such a solid, simple view that it reveals, in clear sentences contained in short paragraphs, the illogic of Durant firing his current agents only to be represented by Jay-Z.  It can't and won't end well.

But this isn’t a fan letter about or to Whitlock.  It’s more to emphasize that issues of race and politics and business and sports occasionally intersect and when they do sorting through them is tricky business.  The issues reveal themselves often enough that there's no need to contrive them, except if your the Plain Dealer's Bill Livingston.

Livingston never met a sentence he couldn’t torture or a thought he couldn’t mangle.  It’s usually best to ignore him, like his bosses do by relegating him to the back pages of the sports section waiting out his retirement.  Occasionally Livingston gets lucky, the Indians are off, the Browns and Cavs aren’t doing something stupid, and there’s a big hole to fill on the front page.  When that harmonic convergence occurs, we’re left with a column from Livingston like last week when he kind of sort of defended celebrity chef Paula Deen’s blatant racism by ham handedly using the Gordon Gee situation as a counterpoint, as if the situations are at all similar.

To put Deen and Gee in the same column is idiotic.  One is a racist and a hypocrite.  The other wears a bow tie.

Deen’s in trouble because she couldn't bring herself to settle a lawsuit/shakedown brought by someone who had the goods on her.  Now she's really paying because, well, she said what she said.  Yea, the legal system sucks sometimes.  Yea, the woman and her attorney were engaged in a legal form of extortion.  But ultimately Deen brought on her own demise because she hasn’t the good sense to understand that by not purposely escaping the vestiges of a racist upbringing you're damned to repeat them.

When it comes to Gee, what he said and did can’t credibly be argued as even remotely similar.  Making jokes at the expense of the boobs that run Notre Dame or mocking the modest academic achievements of certain SEC schools is a weird thing for a college president to do in any context but it isn’t racism or hypocrisy.  It’s just an uber geek unable to read the room.

The implication that Gee escaped his foibles as Deen is being unfairly punished given her recent change of heart is so off the mark that it makes you wonder if anyone at the PD bothered to even try to edit the column.    Gee was forced to retire.  His income, always less than Deen’s, was impacted.  Deen fell further because she had much further to fall.  Ohio State is as big of academic platform as anyone could want but it pales in comparison to the platform that Deen used very profitably to push her lard-based recipes on the public while hiding both the diabetes that her cooking style induced and the fact that once diagnosed she became a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical industry while still pushing the country toward obesity.

A sports columnist works best when he or she can take sports related events and find their inner truths in the context of a larger world.  That’s Whitlock’s unique talent and Livingston’s biggest problem.  With the Plain Dealer going to a mostly internet based platform, Livingston will now be forced to compete almost directly with Whitlock.  I suspect his retirement, like Gee’s, will be forced and will be soon as well. Good riddance.

**

The Indians have been one of the consistently worst teams in major league baseball the last 10 years.  Their attendance has been at or near the bottom in each of those years.  Some may see cause and effect but not club president Mark Shapiro.  He sees a different truth, one that requires no introspection on the failures of his front office reign.

Whether you view Shapiro has incompetent or unfairly hamstrung by cheap owners is probably missing the point.  Shapiro is a survivor of the first order because the chief skill he possesses is the ability to sell his genius to a gullible ownership that has bought everyone of his excuses without question or exception.

In a column in Crain’s Cleveland Business, Kevin Kelps unwittingly falls victim to Shapiro’s snake oil charm by advancing a Shapiro theory that the Indians’ attendance hasn’t really tanked, it’s been market corrected.  Under the Shapiro theory, per Kelps, the Indians’ sell out streak and attendance in the early 2000s was the result of a new stadium and a lack of competition from the Browns.  The loss of corporate backers that have moved out of town, increased competition from the Browns (as if) and a recession have all served to create a new normal where the Indians will be one of the worst draws in baseball because, well, they just will be because, I guess, we suck as fans.

Like most Shapiro theories, it has enough truthiness to pass muster among gullible owners and columnists.  But what’s far more fascinating is the utter lack of blame that Shapiro places on himself and his charges in building one of the worst teams in the league, year after year.  The underlying message from Shapiro is that wins and losses aren’t all that relevant to attendance.  Market size and competition within that market is what matters most.

What’s interesting about that theory is that it’s merely a rehash of what pre Jacobs field/Jacobs ownership tried to sell as well as if baseball games are to be enjoyed on their individual merits, like any other form of entertainment.  They, like Shapiro, sold that yarn because they couldn’t do what it really took to boost attendance: spend.  If fans are spending their discretionary cash on anything but the Indians, then that's the Indians' fault, not the fans.

There are true baseball fans among us but they are and always will be a minority here and elsewhere.  Baseball, like other major league sports, is not a collection of individual games but a pursuit with an overarching story, like a movie.  Brad Pitt can open a movie based on his name but he can’t make it profitable if the movie sucks.  Movie studio execs wouldn’t argue that the paying public should just be grateful to attend movies without regard to whether or not it’s entertaining so why should a baseball exec like Shapiro?

The Indians lousy attendance is directly and almost perfectly correlated to their performance.  It’s true that a particular game might be entertaining but most fans are tourists and not natives and so when they spend their money they want to maximize the chance that the product they’ll see will be entertaining.  A team that loses more than it wins doesn’t maximize the odds the average fan needs to make the investment and if there’s one thing we know about the Indians of the last decade it’s that they lose more than they win.

Shapiro has strangely held on to a job in which he’s been abjectly unsuccessful for most of it, assuming you judge success by wins and losses.  He’s not come close to building or sustaining a team that is more likely than not to win day in and day out.  He’s facilitated an ownership group that has repeatedly disappointed its fan base by refusing to make the needed investments despite promises to do so.

All I hear right now is that the Dolans did spend in the offseason.  They did.  But it doesn’t vitiate the previous decade when they didn’t. The indifference of fans now is that they already have the singe marks from the previous times they got too close to the flame.  You can't blame them for wanting to see more from a team and a franchise then a starting pitching staff that can't go 6 innings on a nightly basis.

Shapiro is smart enough to know that he’s selling a load of crap and smart enough, hopefully, to not actually believe that load of crap.  The truth is that the potential of this market is known and it’s much higher than what we’re seeing now because the team has been so bad.  Is it as high as it was in 2001?  Perhaps not.  But this town has more than demonstrated it will pay up and show up when given a consistent reason to do so.  Shapiro has more than proven an inability to give the fans their reason and the only ones who truly don’t get that simple point are the most important: the Dolans.

**

The Cavs' pursuit of rickety and underperforming free agent center Andrew Bynum is perhaps one of the most fascinating free agent pursuits in years.  By almost any measure, Bynum isn’t worth even half the money the Cavs have thrown at him.  He’s basically the basketball equivalent of Grady Sizemore, drawing interest based on his theoretical value unrelated to his actual production because all too often he's injured.

What makes it fascinating is that the Cavs offered to make him richer in one year than the average fan will see in a lifetime and yet they still couldn't keep him from pursuing a contract elsewhere.  Bynum and his agent felt obliged to test the greater fool theory to see if there’s anyone dumber or more desperate than the Cavs.  There could be.  Sports owners and executives are generally a nervous bunch. It didn't turn out to be the case.

The plight of the Cavs is such that they literally have to throw that kind of money around to even get in a conversation with a player of any credibility and it’s a stretch right now to even but Bynum in that category.  Cleveland is a miserable place to be in the winter and that’s the heart of the NBA season.  The Cavs have nice facilities but so does everyone else.  What they lack is something they can’t change: the weather.  They also don’t have enough horses to be considered an upper echelon team at the moment so whoever comes is coming into a rebuilding project that may or may not take.  It's not Shaquille O'Neal sidling up to LeBron James.

Twelve million a year is  certainly enough to get me to live even in Michigan during a football season but that doesn’t mean I’d like it and it may be enough to get Bynum to Cleveland even if he won’t like it.  But if either Atlanta or Dallas had gotten close to the Cavs offer, Bynum wasn't coming and the Cavs and they could have continued to stockpile cash and cap space in the misguided belief that LeBron James sees the errors of his way and returns to a city he didn’t much like in the first place.

The Cavs will be built, if at all, organically.  Free agents show up in basketball when they think they are the final piece and not the first.

**

There are plenty of sports questions to ponder, but the biggest question to ponder this week (and last): will it ever stop raining?