A Bottom Line Business

Just win, right baby?

Pro sports is a bottom line business and there's no better bottom line then a win of any stripe. And that's what the Cleveland Browns got on Sunday, beating the Seattle Seahawks 6-3 a week after laying a colossal egg against the Oakland Raiders. What the game lacked in excitement, it more then made up for in lack of intrigue. As soon as Phil Dawson kicked his second 50+ field goal of the day there was little doubt of the outcome. That was due to a combination of a good Browns' defense and a bad Seahawks' offense, feel free to fiddle with the percentages how you want.

To say the game was a snoozer is to do a disservice to Ambien. There hasn't been a game this boring won by a Cleveland Browns team since the Browns beat the Buffalo Bills by the same score two years ago. You remember that game, don't you? It's the one where former general manager accelerated his ascension out of town by sending a profane email to a fan after the game.

If you did manage to stay awake for every play of this game, you're probably breaking out the Visine about now. There were plenty of eye rubbing moments.

For instance, it's really kind of hard to explain how a team that had the ball for over 42 minutes on offense and ran an astounding 84 plays, like the Browns did, managed only 6 points. It's even harder to explain how in all of those minutes and plays the only ones hey ran in the red zone were late in the fourth quarter.

It's also kind of hard to explain how Dawson, who had the first game of his career with two field goals in excess of 50 yards, still managed to have two others blocked. And for added measure when we're talking about special teams breakdowns, again, is the fact that but for a fortunate call on a phantom block in the back penalty on Seattle's Kennard Cox against James Dockery, the Seahawks would have won the game instead. It nullified a punt return by Leon Washington that had gone for a touchdown.

Ok, I lied. It's not that hard to explain. Let's start with the offense.

For reasons that I'm sure head coach Pat Shurmur will adequately explain once he thinks about it, the Browns seemed hellbent on focusing more on possession then effectiveness. There were few pass plays, for example, that were of the vertical variety. It wasn't clear whether Shurmur just feared Colt McCoy passing down field like Luke Fickell fears Braxton Miller throwing down field or Shurmur had game planned as if the weather would be 35 degrees, windy and rainy, and just didn't feel like scrapping it when the weather turned out otherwise.

Whichever the case, it was painfully clear that the Browns were not so much concerned with putting together drives as they were maintaining a few slogs through a difficult yet bendable Seahawks defense. Thus were an endless series of short out passes, several swing passes, a few over the middle passes, and plenty of runs in the middle of a stout defensive line. It all added up to 20 first downs and kept the ball out of the hands of a Seahawks offense that hardly knew what to do with it anyway.

But let's at least give some credit where it's due and in not so snarky fashion. One of Shurmur's shortcomings as a head coach is his inability to reign in the throwing tendencies of his offensive coordinator, who happens to be the same person. With Peyton Hillis on the sidelines nursing a sore hamstring (or was he?) it seemed like a situation tailor-made for Shurmur's instincts.

Instead he stubbornly committed to running the ball with Montario Hardesty and recently signed Chris Ogbonnaya. Between them, they had 36 carries, which is surely worth an exclamation point! Hardesty more or less responded with 95 yards on 33 of those carries, but that was more than enough to keep the clock moving. McCoy, too, had 8 carries for 31 yards, but those were all the result of broken down pass protection running head long into receivers who couldn't get open. The guess here is that those were the times that a more vertical pass play was called, but that's just a guess since there were plenty of times when the protection broke down before McCoy had a chance to grip the strings on the ball.

The reason all this is important is that it ended up having the intended effect near the end of the game as the Seahawks defense tired and gave up some key runs that, but for the second of the two blocked field goals, would have technically sealed the game earlier.

So in that sense it was a positive to see Shurmur take some of the pressure off of McCoy and put it on the running game. The negative, though, is that while Hardesty can bang out some tough yards, he seems to lack that extra gear to get around end or crack back into a slight opening that the really great running backs possess. It would have been interesting if Hillis had been able to play (or was he able to play?) to see how stout that Seahawks defensive line really was.

Still there should be a few statistical highlights when you run the number of plays the Browns did. In addition to the 162 yards rushing (from which we subtract the 21 yards lost in sacks), McCoy was 20-25 for 178 yards and 1 interception. He did throw one interception, which occurred when the Browns were actually moving the ball forward in what could be called chunks. Maybe that's really what spooked Shurmur.

Now let's talk about the special teams. There was no secret to the two blocked field goals. Red Bryant was just too much for the middle of the line to block. He was able to push his way through far enough each time to spoil any trajectory that Dawson might have been able to put on the ball. As for the breakdown on the punt coverage, it was simply a matter of missed tackles. Washington avoided several tackles at the initial point of contact and from there the seam opened. The penalty call on Cox was a mistake but an understandable one. Cox did extend his arms at Dockery's back and Dockery, the last person who could have gotten Washington, fell. But if there was contact, it was less then a high school freshman gets on his first date.

The defense was a bright spot for the Browns but it was aided greatly by two overarching facts. First, Tavaris Jackson, the Seahawks starting quarterback, was out. That left Charlie Whitehurst to make just his third start in 6 seasons. He played exactly like a guy making his third start in 6 seasons. He was jittery, tentative and lacked any touch on the ball. It didn't help, either, that on three or four occasions when he was on target his receivers dropped the ball. Ultimately he was 12-30 for just 97 yards and one interception, which came, not unsurprisingly, immediately after the called back punt return.

If the lack of personnel wasn't a difficult enough obstacle for the Seahawks to overcome, another was created when starting running back Marshawn Lynch was scratched right with a bad back right before the game started. Without a credible running attack, Whitehurst was pretty much stuck playing Charlie in the Box on the Island of Misfit Toys.

Indeed it seemed rather unlikely that the Seahawks would even find a way to score a single point. It's telling actually how their points did come about. On the one defensive play where the Browns' coverage did break down, Whitehurst found a wide open Sidney Rice all alone at about the Browns' 10-yard line. While the pass was completed, it was Rice's wrong shoulder and forced Rice to lose balance and step out at the 9-yard line. A running play went for no gain but on second down Ahtyba Rubin was called for a face mask penalty, giving the Seahawks the ball at the Cleveland 2 yard line. Another run for no gain followed by two incomplete passes forced the Seahawks to kick the 20-yard field goal. In that short series of plays did the Seahawks aptly sum up the true awfulness of their performance.

So again, do the math how you want but the Browns did come out with the win and stand at 3-3 which, if only psychologically, is miles ahead of 2-4. It puts 5 or 6 victories this year well within reach and a chance for everyone to come away with the only victory this town needs at the moment, the one spelled p-r-o-g-r-e-s-s.

The Grades Are In

The grades are in and if you care to put any faith in them, then the Cleveland Browns didn’t have such a great draft after all.

So-called experts, from Tony Grossi at the Plain Dealer, and Jarrett Bell at USA Today, and nearly every other NFL writer with access to a laptop in between has offered up an opinion on the Browns’ draft and at best it’s drawing mediocre reviews.
Yet as I review the reviews I can’t find a unifying underlying reason for the collective shoulder shrugs.

By all measures, the Browns addressed their needs. No one has much negative to say about Joe Haden or T.J. Ward. There seems agreement, generally, that Colt McCoy could be a steal in the third round. At most it seems that the Browns’ are being downgraded because their draft wasn’t particularly glamorous, as if glamour equals great. If it did, Paris Hilton would have won an academy award by now.

If any of this worries you, it shouldn’t. Putting stock in the grades handed out by reporters who got nearly every pick wrong in their own mock drafts is like putting your faith in Jhonny Peralta to drive in a meaningful run. Do it at the risk of your own mental well being.

Let’s dispense with the context. The NFL draft is all about guessing which college players who have never played a NFL game in their lives will be able to make one of the most difficult transitions in professional sports. Grading the NFL draft is about guessing which teams made the best guesses without, you know, actually yet seeing the results on the field.
If you looked at the USA Today on Monday, Bell graded the Seattle Seahawks as an A+. Yet when you bother to read why, you find that it is based more on Bell’s man-love for Pete Carroll than anything else.

Carroll’s been on the job in Seattle for a few months now after getting out of southern California apparently one step ahead of the plodding justice meted out by the NCAA. Carroll was just following the lead of a few of his players, like Reggie Bush, that did likewise.

But Carroll is well liked. He’s accessible to the media. He’s rah rah. He’s also been a dismal failure in the NFL in two previous stints and until he actually proves otherwise in his latest job with the Seahawks, simply succeeding at USC isn’t going to erase that record.

In this past weekend’s draft, Carroll drafted a left tackle, a safety and a receiver. A left tackle, assuming it’s the correct left tackle, is always a good safe pick. NFL writers like to praise teams for taking left tackles while resisting more glamorous opportunities.

Joe Thomas was an excellent pick for the Cleveland Browns a few seasons ago as he immediately became an offensive line fixture and a Pro Bowler as well. But I don’t think anyone in retrospect would give Phil Savage an A+ for that draft now, especially as Brady Quinn tries to find himself in Denver.

The same thing ultimately will apply to the Seahawks’ pick of Russell Okung. The Seahawks may indeed have gotten the worthy successor to Walter Jones, who is retiring, but simply taking Okung at the moment hardly qualifies the Seahawks for such sweeping praise.

For the Seahawks, it will come down to how safety Earl Thomas and receiver Golden Tate perform in the years to come. If they and Okung become Pro Bowl fixtures then the draft will indeed have been an A+. But for now the grade seems a tad premature, doesn’t it?

You could pick apart Bells’ grades on every other team similarly.
Bell gave the Browns a C+ grade on their draft but there’s nothing in his write-up that actually suggests why. Indeed if you read it Bell makes it seem like the Browns did everything right.

Reading between the lines, the main criticism leveled by Bell and others who seem lukewarm toward the Browns has to do with the injury histories of a few of their draft picks.

The NFL is a rough sport and at some point in every player’s career an injury will occur. The question is whether T.J. Ward, for example, is more prone to injuries because of those he suffered in college. But is that true?

The best you can do, really, is trust that the guys making the decisions, general manager Tom Heckert and team president Mike Holmgren, have competent enough medical advisors who actually can make an educated guess about the issue.
Now if it turns out that Heckert and Holmgren defied the opinions of team doctors who examined Ward and looked at his medical past, that’s one thing. But for now there’s no reason to believe anything like that occurred so downgrading the Browns’ draft on that basis doesn’t make much sense.

The obvious truth is that there is absolutely no way to know how the draft will turn out for the Browns or any other team for that matter. But that won’t stop the grading game anyway.

What makes all this even more ludicrous is that it’s not as if those doing the grades have any superior knowledge on the topic.
Covering the NFL may give you a leg up on the average schmo in terms of understanding the pro game but it doesn’t exactly make you an expert on college football or its players. It’s like having a college professor grade your kid’s performance in middle school because he looked at one of his 8th grade mid-term reports on ancient Rome.

At this point, the only realistic grades worth offering for any team are of the pass/fail variety. The best way to do this is just to determine whether your team went wildly off the rails. Did it ignore its own needs in favor of fliers? Did it take a player no one has ever heard of?

It’s worth noting that under that measure the Browns drafts of seasons past got passing grades and yet in retrospect few if any of those drafts were particularly productive.

The Browns of this year similarly get a passing grade. The Browns had some obvious needs in the defensive secondary and addressed them. They have a gaping need at quarterback and addressed that. They were somewhat weak at running back and addressed that. In other words, the Browns went after the players you’d pretty much expect them to go after.
That doesn’t mean that every pick will turn out well. Indeed it’s highly unlikely that all 8 draft picks will even make the team.

The same, though, goes for every other team, mainly because there are less openings than applicants.
Which is the point anyway. It may make somebody in Seattle feel good to know that Bell gave the team an A+ in April, but the real test is whether two Aprils from now it will still look that way. Rarely they do.

Through the Looking Glass

Before the Browns season started, most fans were already looking toward November, not because of some key intra-division match-up but because that’s when the Cavs season opened. Undoubtedly, it held more promise.

But here we are, entering the second week of November, the Cavs are on the west coast and flying below the radar while fans are indeed focused on a key Browns intra-division match-up. This is what it’s like to live on the other side of the looking glass.

When the Browns entered the Stadium this past Sunday to take on their lookalike cousin from the West Coast, the Seattle Seahwaks, the prevailing thought was that since the two teams were so similar offensively, the dividing line would be the defense. Uh oh.

And indeed it looked that way early when Seattle took a 21-9 lead at halftime. But in what is most surely becoming the most inexplicable season experienced by any Cleveland pro sports team in recent memory, somehow the Browns ended up on the winning side of the ledger, again, winning a third straight game for the first time in six years.

The hows and wherefores were on full display Sunday. The problem is figuring out what really was the key. Talk to a hundred people and you’ll get a hundred different views.

Some might think, for example, that Jamal Lewis doing his best Jerome Bettis impersonation as one of the keys, even if the comparison is a bit imperfect. Sure, Lewis had a very Bettis-like performance with four rushing touchdowns for a combined six yards. But unlike Bettis in his last few years, the Browns actually use Lewis as their regular back. That didn’t help much on Sunday. Even when he wasn’t scoring, he was still running for less than two yards a carry—16 other times for 31 yards. Still it would be hard to dismiss his hard-nose running in the red zone on Sunday or his key 34-yard run on a screen pass in overtime.

Some might discuss Derek Anderson, again, putting together yet another in a string of standout performances. He threw a career high 48 times, completing 29 for 364 yards but for no touchdowns, due mostly to some poor throws in the red zone. But his two naked bootlegs, particularly the second that came in overtime, were absolutely crucial to the outcome. As unexpected as the first call was, the second was even more so. It’s like trying two fake punts in one game. Anderson’s play has made for a level of intrigue at the quarterback position that will fully play out in the coming months, if not years.

Some would also feel it worth mentioning offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski, who has brought the Browns the most innovative offense this town has seen since the Lindy Infante days. Each week reveals still another wrinkle, like the aforementioned Anderson bootlegs. And with all Chudzinksi has brought and for what the future appears to hold, he deserves a pass on some iffy play calling at the end of the first half on Sunday that resulted in a field goal when a touchdown seemed inevitable.

It would be hard to argue with those who claim that the game was won on the sheer will of tight end Kellen Winslow, II. His 11 catches for 125 yards hardly tell the whole story. It was a heroic performance of epic proportions. It wasn’t Hacksaw Reynolds playing on a broken leg, but it was close. Going into the Seattle game Winslow already was nursing all manner of injuries, every one of which seemed to be aggravated at some point during the game. But he fought through it in a way that makes one appreciate how truly brutal the pro game can be and why whatever money the players make, sometimes it just isn’t enough.

Winslow’s past issues were enough to paint him as a bit of an iconoclast if not a total outsider with the rest of his teammates. But at this point, there is no question that he has become the heart and soul of this team. His play on Sunday is exactly what is meant by leading by example. There is absolutely no doubt that Winslow’s fellow teammates watched that performance with a sense of both shock and awe and ultimately came away knowing that however hard they may be working individually, they’ll have to work that much harder just to keep pace with him. Forget all the other mumbo jumbo you hear from coaches, this is how teams ultimately get made.

But I think I speak for many Browns fans here when I say that the major takeaway from this game and, to a certain extent the Rams game the week before, is that the best way to get this defense to perform is to put the other team in a fourth and one situation. Anything else and you’re taking your chances.

Opposing teams toy with the Browns defense like an older brother toys with his little sister having a tea party with Barbie and Ken. Like plastic tea cups and plates, defensive coordinator Todd Grantham gets all the pieces of the Browns defense set up just so every week only to have the opposing team kick the table over time and again.

But for reasons that will remain as mysterious as the popularity of Dancing with the Stars, when it gets to fourth and one the Browns defense responds, two straight weeks. And while they are playing lousy defense in general this is the one area they have mastered. Which means, of course, that from this point forward Grantham just needs to get his players to act like every down is fourth and one. It’s worth a shot, anyway. Not much else is working.

What really is hard to fathom at this point is that the Browns came through the first half of the season, when the schedule was arguably the hardest, at 5-3. Equally hard to fathom is that they are 4-1 at home. What was the over and under for that at the beginning of the season and who had the guts to make that bet? Only the truly degenerate gamblers.

But of course, as good as another Browns win feels, the reality that comes with the dawning of Monday is that the Browns are headed to Pittsburgh on Sunday. With the remaining schedule seemingly favorable, the Browns don’t necessarily have to win the game to prove they are legitimate playoff contenders, but it would help.

What would help even more, however, for this team’s and this town’s psyche is for the Browns not to lay a gigantic egg in the middle of Heinz Field, again. That goal may seem modest but it is an important bridge that has to be crossed. The drubbings this team has endured by the Steelers recently all have served to demoralize in a way that a few victories against teams like Miami and St. Louis can’t erase. Even a “quality” win (whatever that means) against Seattle won’t linger very long if the Browns get abused next Sunday.

The Browns started the season as a laughingstock. Since then they’ve gone from a curiosity to competitive to a full-fledged surprise. But if they are going to progress further, to, say, a quality team, there is not only the pesky business of acquiring better defensive players to contend with, there also is the pesky business of exorcising the remaining ghosts, like the Steelers.

Maybe that’s putting unnecessary pressure on this team. But on the other hand, if this team is really playoff caliber, that’s the least of the pressure they’re likely to feel down the road. If the Browns really want to prove that they’re back, next Sunday is as good a time as any.