A Steep Learning Curve Indeed

After about a week or so of letting the latest fire inside the Berea headquarters of the Cleveland Browns burn indiscriminately, owner Jimmy Haslam has spoken with the kind of earnestness that suggested a belief that his words would douse the flames while calming the masses. 

To lead with the positive, at least Haslam answered the questions posed. To point out the obvious, though, it didn’t help his case, the situation or the overarching narrative that the team remains where it’s been, in the gutter.

The biggest revelation, and taking a page from Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank’s book,  was Haslam trying to get ahead of the NFL’s imminent announcement that Ray Farmer, the team’s general manager, indeed brake league rules by texting coaches during games by announcing it himself.  Yes, apparently, Farmer did as alleged. 

Perhaps the bigger news though is that Haslam couldn’t care less.  Rather than offering up even an ounce of criticism that his chosen pick as general manager may be out of his element or, at the very least, not setting the right leadership example for others to follow, Haslam instead supported Farmer as if he had just pulled off the biggest coup since Kevin Costner procured Vontae Mack, Ray Jennings and Seattle’s top punt returner while still getting back the three first round picks he foolishly gave up to get the Johnny Manziel-like Bo Callahan.

In a story from Thursday’s Akron Beacon Journal, Haslam called Farmer “smart,” a description that’s hard to square with the stupidity of his misconduct.  He lavished praise about Farmer’s work ethic and his all around awesomeness.  Haslam even went to great pains to say that while he hates that his organization now looks like it’s run by dumbbells, he “hate[s] it more for Ray Farmer.  I can tell you it eats him up every day.”  Well, there is that.

It’s nice and good for team unity I suppose for Haslam to publicly support Farmer, even in such an over the top manner, but in many ways it’s done at the expense of slapping the fans across the face, hard. The NFL hasn’t yet announced the punishment the team will get but irrespective of whether it’s just a suspension of Farmer or something more serious, such as lost draft picks, is irrelevant.  The fans are left trying to justify for another whole off season exactly why they root for a team, let alone spend money to support it, that seems not just off message but off mission.

Then when you couple it with Haslam’s real intent, to rally the fans behind a guy who in just his first year of running the draft botched two first round picks and failed to secure any credible receivers despite knowing at the outset that Josh Gordon wasn’t going to be available to them, it makes you wonder whether Haslam even understands that he didn’t buy the team as a means to give goofs like Farmer a job, he bought it to supply entertainment to fans who just want the team to win once in a while.

 It’s all well and good that Haslam has such trust in Farmer.  The real question is why?

It’s as if that that question never occurred to Haslam.  Haslam responded to the question as to why Farmer shouldn’t be fired with the kind of praise one might reserve, say, for the general manager of the New England Patriots, not the beleaguered general manager who swung wildly and missed on two number one picks in the same draft.  Haslam said “I think you’ve got to look at [the] individual’s body of work, and we’re comfortable with Ray’s body of work.  We’re very comfortable.”  I’d love to know who the “we” is in that sentence.  Stated differently, that “we” certainly doesn’t include the fans.

In any event, it’s really quite fascinating stuff.  In the first place, Farmer’s body of work is pretty small, so even in that context “comfortable” wouldn’t seem to be an appropriate word. At best it would be “cautious.” For most it would be “scared.”  In the second place, what there is  of his body of work isn’t pretty.  He bungled the draft.  He knowingly broke NFL rules subjecting himself and his team to sanctions.  By all accounts he was at the center, if not the cause, of all the other dysfunction that resulted in the team virtually imploding once again by year’s end.  Maybe Haslam is satisfied because he’s comparing Farmer’s sins to those he’s presiding over at his own personal ATM, Pilot Flying J, and thinks, “at least Farmer wasn’t cooking the books.”

While his defense of Farmer is just downright puzzling, his defense of the way things are run generally in Berea call into question Haslam’s own judgment, if not his competence.  Responding to Jason Canfora’s widely reported story about the dysfunction in Berea Haslam  said “I don’t at all want people to think we think everything is great.  OK? We don’t.  What I want you to understand is we do work together.  It’s not dysfunctional….All I want to convey is we do get along, we do work well together and we’ve got a common goal.”

Concede that they do have a common goal and put that aside.  But even the most casual of fans can readily tell that this is a franchise that doesn’t work well together and hasn’t since Haslam and before Haslam.  In fact if there’s anything that’s been remarkably consistent it’s the inability of the front office to work well together irrespective of the people involved.

When a front office is working well together an offensive coordinator still under contract doesn’t put together a 32-point presentation on why he should be let out of his contract after one troubling year so he can go anywhere else.  A front office that’s working well together doesn’t dump still another quarterbacks coach in favor of someone even less accomplished than the guy they just let go.  A front office that works well together doesn’t pressure its rookie head coach into starting a quarterback who was no more ready for real NFL play than the fictional and aforementioned Bo Callahan.  A front office that’s working well together doesn’t ignore the red flags of the mercurial and controversial quarterback it drafted and then act surprised that said quarterback is now in rehab.  And for God’s sake, a front office that’s working well together doesn’t see the need to take a 3-day retreat immediately after the season in order to, as Haslam said, clarify roles, strategy, where it wants to go and how it’s going to get there.  If it really had been working well together, a retreat would have been the last thing it needed.

For all his cluelessness though, you can’t say that Haslam isn’t without humor, even if it was unintentional.  Talking about that recent retreat that Haslam and the front office took, he said “I actually felt that since our family bought the Browns, it’s the best week we’ve had.”  What about the fans?  When are they going to get their best week, which most as define as one that culminates in a Super Bowl title and a parade through Public Square. 

Haslam is a passionate owner, no doubt.  He is in the midst of a steep learning curve, as he admitted. What the interview revealed though is that Haslam is still pretty far down on that curve and that it’s getting steeper.  His faith in Farmer is misplaced if only because, although not certainly because, Farmer so embarrassed the organization at exactly the moment Haslam has been trying to project calmness and competence.  What ultimately will be Haslam’s undoing though as an owner is not this kind of misplaced faith disguised as loyalty, but his abiding miscalculation of the fan base he inherited.  The fans are fed up with the circus and don’t want to pay 30% more for the privilege of looking like fools and their money.

Draft Day--Where Fantasy and Reality Collide

It’s nearly Draft Day for the Cleveland Browns and it’s funny how the movies and real life can collide, especially when it is serio-comic and especially when it involves the Browns.

In Draft Day, the movie, a beleaguered fictional Cleveland Browns general manager working for an unrealistic owner feels pressure to change the course of the team with its early first round pick in order to restore respectability to what was once one of the league’s great franchise. In Cleveland, the reality, it’s much the same except that it’s hard now to remember a time when the Browns were once one of the league’s great franchises.

Actually, the real difference between the movie plot and what’s taking place in Berea is that the Browns’ real general manager, Ray Farmer, isn’t beleaguered so much as inexperienced, significantly inexperience.  He’s 39 years old and is in his first stint as a general manager anywhere and is responsible for the first time ever for finalizing a roster that has more holes in it than the plot of a typical Kevin Costner movie.  (Short movie review: I actually thoroughly enjoyed Draft Day.  You think it’s easy to wring drama out of a movie dedicated to picking college football players? Jennifer Gardner helped plus Costner is at his best when he’s in a sports-themed movie.  The pictures of Cleveland were nice, too.)

Here’s where the movie and reality differ.  The Browns of Draft Day, despite a series of lousy records, were far less dysfunctional.  The biggest cock up, as the British like to say, was that Costner’s character had fired his father, who had been a somewhat revered head coach of the Browns. He did it at his mother’s request.  That’s about the only thing that hasn’t yet happened to the real Browns.  Give them time. 

Consider:  The management clowns in charge at this time last season tanked last year’s draft, sacrificed the present for a not too distant future to bring forth a portfolio bursting with plenty of draft picks for 2014.  And then those same management clowns, confident that the draft picks would be valuable because they constructed a team destined to lose became suddenly fearful that the rookie head coach and a pesky local product second/third string quarterback could accidentally turn things around, started gutting the team as if they were really channeling the plot of Major League to make sure their not too distant future plan bore fruit.

They needn’t have worried. 

So next Thursday was to represent the coronation of the accelerated plan for respectability concocted by Joe Banner and Mike Lombardi.  It was the day the Browns and their fans would finally get their most fervent wish; a franchise quarterback who didn’t fling the ball underhand into opposing players arms when pressured; a running back who could hit the slim gaps in the line more than once a season, a defensive backfield that didn’t spent most of every game with its back toward its own line and maybe a linebacker or two that could cover a tight end.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to executing the grand strategy.  Club President-For-Life Banner and Talent Evaluator Extraordinaire Lombardi revealed themselves to be the snakes we all thought they were as they conspired to rid themselves of the next great head coach they said they had just hired less than a year prior.  As the fans revolted for, like, the thousandth time in the last 6 years and federal agents set up shop in the Tennessee headquarters of Pilot Flying J, Browns’ owner Jimmy Haslam started seeing conspiracies and hearing voices and quieted the din by starting over not at Pilot Flying J but with the Browns.

Haslam sent Banner back to whatever rock he crawled out from under, Lombardi likewise and suddenly the Browns had themselves another new administration, securing forever the simultaneous records for number of organizational colon cleanses in a decade and the number of ex-employees still drawing a paycheck they didn’t deserve in the first place.

The problem of course is that while Haslam has a flair for the dramatic, he lacks the internal clock necessary to accurately gauge timing.  He dismissed Lombardi and Banner after they had alienated any potential head coaching candidate with a modicum of experience and then had to settle for a guy that wasn’t on the short, medium or long term list of any of the 12 other franchises seeking a new head coach this offseason.  To make matters worse, he then elevated a rookie into his first job as general manager.  Their mission: faithfully and successfully execute the Most Important Draft Day Ever.

It’s this backdrop that informs what the Browns do next and if it hadn’t happened in real life you’d never buy it in the movies. 

Farmer and his two months of prep could surprise. But let’s be clear.  Prep does count.  No one needs the amount of time the NFL actually allocates to the draft.  Indeed, the whirr and spin of all that takes place in the two weeks prior to the draft is essentially nonsense or nonsense² this year as the league actually pushed the draft out two weeks this year.  But most teams, most people would agree that a team needs more than 2 months to prepare for the draft.

With the draft on the doorstep Farmer gave the obligatory press conference that general manager’s give, the kind where nothing is said but everyone tries to read between the lines anyway.  The only difference this year to year’s past is that it was a far more pleasant experience.

Farmer is young and inexperienced, meaning he hasn’t been around long enough to become a douche.  Or maybe he’s just a decent guy that the Browns lucked into for once.  But at least Farmer didn’t act as if he was having his back molars removed through his alimentary canal every time someone asked him the equivalent of when the ground war was scheduled to start.

NFL teams treat draft information as if it were nuclear launch codes so there was no chance that any useful information could be gleaned from his press conference.  There was no truth to discern either from what he said or what he didn’t say. 

Farmer talked about what a great football player Johnny Manziel is and how his goofy, immature off the field antics don’t change that assessment.  That means that Farmer either is going to draft Manziel or he wants someone above him to so he doesn’t have to.  That’s the point. 

Opinions differ on who the Browns should take in this draft, and that’s probably just speaking for those in the draft room.  Nonetheless expect the Browns to be conservative because that’s how rookies in the front office act—conservative.

Remember that scene in Draft Day when Kevin Costner fleeced a rookie GM in Atlanta?  It happened because the Atlanta GM in the movie was new and afraid of making a mistake.  Expect Farmer to not necessarily get fleeced by another GM but to tread lightly nonetheless, afraid of making a mistake.

Draft days can be and often are unpredictable, particularly in a year where there is no strong consensus number one pick.  Guys who looked like they’d be high on draft boards could drop, further complicating the calculus for Farmer who, all things being equal, would probably like to take an offensive lineman and then see what falls his way late in the first round.  All things being really equal, don’t be surprised if Farmer kicks the can down the road for even more draft picks in 2015.  At least then he’ll have had about 14 months of preparation, assuming of course that the voices in Haslam’s head of quieted a bit.

It will be fun.  It will be interesting.  I doubt it will be game changing.  Remember, this team has a track record.  It didn’t get to this level of dysfunction quickly.  It’s built up over the years and once it takes root it is near impossible to completely eliminate it.  Still, if you want a prediction then you’re always safe quoting Clubber Lange when asked what awaited Apollo Creed in his next fight: “pain.”