The Things We Know--Week 16 Makeover Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creeping Stability

The Cleveland Browns are finishing up their organized team activities, which aren’t mandatory, so that they can start their mini-camp, which is mandatory. In the meantime the steadying hand of team president Mike Holmgren is ever present and what a difference it’s made.

To say that head coach Eric Mangini got off to a slow start in his new job would be an understatement on the level of the Cavs are having merely an interesting off season. Mangini came in with a huge chip on his shoulder and an uber confidence that belied his modest accomplishments to that point. He couldn’t have picked a worse strategic plan if he had merely thrown a dart on a board instead.

When he wasn’t alienating established veterans, he was pissing off rookies and their agents by having them volunteer for a 10-hour bus ride to help out at his youth camp in Connecticut in the same way that Rich Rodriguez has his players volunteer for extra practice in the summer.

Then came perhaps the worst run training camp in the history of organized football that provided a springboard for a season that made Bill Belichick’s tenure in Cleveland seem like a Tony Robbins seminar by comparison. In between there were firings, trades, a fan revolt and a near mutiny from within.

Maybe it was all just part of a vaunted process and the natural outgrowth of a change agent meeting resistance from enemies of progress, but when the dust settled owner Randy Lerner was frustrated to the point of declaring that he needed a credible person in charge of his organization, a tacit acknowledgement that neither he nor Mangini qualified for that spot.

In rode Holgrem and suddenly it’s the Browns that look positively functional while the Cavs are solidly out of sorts. The Indians, hopeless.

The biggest controversy at the moment for the Browns has to do with the relatively high number of restricted free agents who won’t sign the one-year contracts tendered to them. If this had been a year ago, this would have been chalked up to another misstep by Mangini, as if a team that is 4-12 can’t get by without D’Qwell Jackson, Jerome Harrison, Matt Roth, Abe Elam and Lawrence Vickers.

Instead, under the new regime this is general manager Tom Heckert’s problem and virtually no one is raising much of an issue over it. That’s the kind of implied confidence the average fan has in both Holmgren and Heckert that it will get resolved quietly and professionally. No drama, no tears, just mature human beings confronting the daily grind of problems in their business.

Beyond this little free agent issue everything else is perfectly sanguine. That’s what makes me nervous.

In the last 10 years the Browns really haven’t had a season in which there wasn’t any controversy. Under the ownership of first Al Lerner and now his son Randy, the Browns have been a the Old Faithfuls of dysfunction. You could set a watch by the eruptions, they were that predictable.

Even as the losses piled up like autumn leaves in the backyard, this team has never lacked for another story to tell. Whether it was Chris Palmer and his runaway train, Butch Davis and another lecture about guts or Romeo Crennel and his magic coin flip to pick a starting quarterback, the Browns have been more entertaining off the field than on.

But now the Browns are making the sound of one hand clapping. It’s really the sound of a creeping stability, the sense that maybe Lerner finally got something right.

The Browns still don’t have enough quality players to make a serious run at the playoffs. Right now the fans would be satisfied with a serious run at 8-8. But the barge, seemingly pointed permanently in the direction of a black hole, has actually begun the slow turn toward respectability.

It’s not one thing really but a series of small things that provide the clues. There’s little if any grousing by anyone inside or outside of Berea. Draft picks showed up and are working out. Even the restricted free agents are trickling in and those that aren’t are fairly quiet.

This is what it really means to have a serious, credible leader in charge. It’s one thing to push around a guy like Mangini, he really hasn’t accomplished anything in the NFL. Holmgren’s resume is far more impressive. He’s either seen it or done it and that’s something he has on everyone else in the organization at the moment.

It helps, too, that Holmgren speaks his mind and when he does he speaks plainly. He keeps spin to a bare minimum and the rest of the organization as begun to takes its cues from him that the quickest exit out of panic mode is to actually stop panicking.

Mangini is the biggest beneficiary. Right now no one’s giving him a hard time even as his natural tendencies creep in from time to time. There was little bit of “there he goes again” when Mangini hinted a few times over the last few weeks that he sees using Seneca Wallace at quarterback along with Jake Delhomme.

Is this Mangini trying to play mind games with his quarterbacks? Probably. He operates from the management school which motivates through infliction of insecurity and some habits die hard. He’s also probably trying to keep the competition guessing as to his plans, as if they’re even paying attention at the moment. Other habits die hard as well.

But beyond these kinds of quirks and tics, Mangini is mostly acting far less like the paranoid control freak he came across as last year. He still doesn’t answer questions directly and probably never will for fear that he may give away some sort of state secret, but he’s also far more relaxed about how he goes about it.

He also seems far more welcoming to his players as if he’s come to some sort of realization that being a prick isn’t generally the best approach to managing the troops.

All of this means, of course, that there is likely going to be far less opportunities to kick around Mangini this season. And that’s a good thing. When the team’s lousy, a ready punching bag is all that can keep a fan’s interest. It’s kind of fun I suppose to write about things like Phil Savage telling a fan via email to essentially “step off,” just as it’s kind of fun to write about players getting suspended for talking to the media about staph infections. But in truth it’s most fun to write about what most fans want to focus on, the games themselves.

Unfortunately, in Cleveland there’s been precious little to write about when it comes to games that doesn’t begin with “another day, another loss.” and that isn’t confined to just the Browns. But, as implausible as it seemed just a few short months ago, it looks like it will be the Browns, under Holmgren, that will be the first Cleveland team to put the focus back where it belongs. I wonder, for once, if the Cavs are paying attention.

Twin Sons, Different Mothers

With Notre Dame football, they say you can hear the echoes. The problem these days is that they aren’t the echoes of Knute Rockne or the Four Horsemen, but of an implosion of the program that’s taking place in South Bend. And at its center is Charlie Weis, essentially the twin brother of a different mother to the Browns’ Romeo Crennel.

Though Crennel doesn’t bear nearly the same brunt of responsibility for the state of the Browns that Weis does for the sorry state of Notre Dame football, the similarities in their status and the status of what they oversee has to make their former head coach, Bill Belichick quite proud of his progeny.

The struggles Weis is encountering mirror his friend Crennel’s struggles with the Browns. It shouldn’t go unnoticed, for example, that both coaches jettisoned their opening day starting quarterback. Frye was traded to Seattle but whether or not that was GM Phil Savage’s idea or Crennel’s may be one of the last remaining mysteries around that particular debacle but is not as relevant as the result. Demetrius Jones, who opened the season behind center for Notre Dame, is off to Northern Illinois after just one game and if it was his idea, let’s just say that it wasn’t discouraged by Weis.

Weis is flirting with history at Notre Dame and not in a good way. His 0-3 squad faces the very real possibility of being the first Notre Dame team to start 0-4. Likewise, Crennel, even with the surreal win over the Bengals last Sunday, has more or less flirted with bad history since he got here. The win against the Bengals, for example, was only his second against a division opponent in 14 tries. He also must hold some sort of record for futility on replay challenges.

Beyond these odd parallels, it does raise the issue of why storied programs trusted their fates to lifelong NFL assistants.

In the case of Weis, the overwhelming majority of his career has been spent on someone else’s NFL staff. While he did spend a fair amount of time in his early years coaching high school football (his only head coaching experience before Notre Dame) and four years in the late 1980s on the football staff at the University of South Carolina while earning a masters degree, he started in the NFL in 1990 and there he stayed, under first Bill Parcells and then Belichick, in New York and then New England.

Prior to getting the job in Cleveland, Crennel had no head coaching experience at any level. He spent 10 years in college, most of which was with Parcells at Texas Tech, and entered the NFL in 1981, mostly with Parcells and Belichick.

But there is more than just these similarities. In the amount of time each had been in the league as assistants, every NFL franchise had been through at least one head coaching change. Most had been through several. Yet neither was ever hired for the top spot, if they were even ever considered. To put the most positive spin on it possible, every NFL owner and every NFL general manager charged with hiring a head coach repeatedly found someone more qualified than either Weis or Crennel to lead their franchise. At some point it stops being bad luck.

Despite what should have been a red flag to the Notre Dame administration, they hired Weis, who now seems as overmatched as a head coach as does Crennel. An offensive guru, Weis’ current team is officially the most inept offense in the entire Division I. Beyond being merely inept, they look unprepared, which has been a nagging problem with the Browns under Crennel. As he goes about trying to fix what’s wrong, Weis seems clueless where to start. In other words, Notre Dame is suffering the shortcomings that kept Weis from getting a head coaching job for so many years in the first place.

Which is the dilemma the Browns find themselves in today. The fact that Crennel was completely unsuccessful for years in getting a head coaching job wasn’t much of a red flag to the Browns. The victory against the Bengals was as nice as it was unexpected. But one victory cannot erase the institutional problems on this team. It can only obscure them until the next time they surface, which is inevitable.

Selecting a head coach may be a bit more art than science, but there is a fair amount of science involved nonetheless. It’s not an accident, for example, that the Pittsburgh Steelers have had just three head coaches in the last 38 years. The Browns are on their third head coach just since 1999, fourth if you count Terry Robiski.

One of the reasons, it seems, has to do with the Steelers’ approach. Chuck Noll was 37 years old when he was hired. Bill Cowher was 34 years old when he was hired in 1992. Likewise, new head coach Mike Tomlin was 34 years old. After some missteps preceding the hiring of Noll, the Rooney family hit on a formula that has served them, and others, well. Find a young, talented up and comer with enough experience to be respected but not so long in the tooth that he’s lost his ability to be flexible. It’s a formula that most other NFL franchises have followed, except Cleveland, which has been unable to land on any formula since their return.

Chris Palmer, who was nobody’s first choice, was 49 years old when he was hired. Butch Davis was 51. Crennel was 57 years old when he was hired. On that level it seems like the Browns approach begins and ends with checking for gray hairs. But digging deeper, there is more, or less, afoot depending on your perspective.

For example, Palmer sort of fell to the Browns when other choices, like Brian Billick, turned down the job. Though not as old as Crennel, Palmer was nevertheless the long-time assistant that had been passed over before for the top spot and hasn’t been considered since. Having made the mistake of hiring the bridesmaid lifelong assistant, the Browns changed course, dramatically.

Davis was a bit of a mixed bag, neither completely a college guy nor a NFL guy. He spent several years as a college assistant, mostly with Jimmy Johnson, before following Johnson to Dallas. He then fled the NFL, Charlie Weis style, for the reigns of a high profile college job. But Davis was successful and used that to make a grand entrée back into the NFL as a head coach. Given the leverage that his college success created, the Browns succumbed and turned over the entire football operations to him, a move that Davis was if not ill-suited for than at least completely unprepared for and a move that ultimately kept this franchise from escaping the Dwight Clark years. In the end, the problem with Davis was not as a head coach but as a personnel evaluator. However, keeping him in one role but not the other would have been untenable to Davis. Had that been possible, there is some likelihood he’d still be the coach of this team.

Having made mistakes with two different approaches, the next selection begged for the more tried and true method that the Steelers and others had followed. Inexplicably, however, the Browns decided to re-visit something that has not seemed to work for any franchise, including their own, the elevation of an entrenched assistant. Not so inexplicably, it isn’t working again.

Crennel isn’t a bad guy. In fact, quite the opposite. If he was a jerk he wouldn’t have survived as an assistant for so many years. But the fact that he’s a nice guy who is genuinely liked by the players is hardly the most crucial skill necessary for being a successful head coach. Where Crennel continues to fall short is in his ability to present a coherent, organized and prepared team, week after week. While it’s difficult on many levels to comprehend how a team can look so inept one week and so proficient (at least offensively) the next, such wild swings shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise. In fact it defines the issue.

The real trick, and where Parcells and particularly Belichick excel, is bringing a level of consistency and expectation from week to week. You can argue that it’s easier to do when there is sufficient talent to deal with, but that’s not necessarily the case. Belichick’s teams in Cleveland weren’t the most gifted and Belichick himself made his share of mistakes. But rarely were those mistakes of preparation or organization. If anything characterized Belichick, the consummate up and comer who got his first NFL head job, not surprisingly, when he was 39, it was and remains an incredible eye for detail and penchant for hyper organization.

These are the areas where both Weis and Crennel fall woefully short. Not surprisingly it’s why their teams likewise follow suit and will so for as long as they remain in charge. Get used to it, Notre Dame. Get used to it, Cleveland.