Lingering Items--Adjustment Edition

It's going to be another long season for a city that only knows long seasons. But anyone taking a realistic assessment of the Cleveland Browns knew that already. What they don't know, what noone can answer is when the light at the end of the tunnel will not just be another oncoming train.

Certainly Mike Holmgren can’t answer it nor did he much try at his press conference on Monday (itself an event but perhaps consistent with a vow to be more accessible to the local media). What he did offer up, though, spoke volumes about the season to come. It wasn’t pretty.

In one breath Holmgren said he expected the team to be better but in another he expressed some astonishment at the composition of the roster and the fact that fully half is comprised of rookies and second year players and is being led by someone in only the second year of his head coaching career.

With no discernible sense of irony Holmgren also said that the team is pretty much where he thought it would be. Huh? Either Holmgren has adjusted his expectations without bothering to tell the fans or he really is as disconnected from the day to day operations as most fans have suspected.

I actually don't much care as much about the youth on this team as I do about whether the guy in charge was aware this was happening. The latter is related to the former anyway. Clearly Holmgren didn’t know what was happening and that is what they call in the business a red flag. It makes every thing else he says suspect.

Holmgren has given general manager Tom Heckert final say over the roster but perhaps sometime before the 53-man roster was announced Holmgren and Heckert should have met and discussed how this team, with all its youth and beauty, was going to meet the almost conflicting goals of significant improvement and roster overhaul in the same season. You get the feeling that Holmgren didn't realize what this team looked like until he read about it in the newspaper. Actually, that may be exactly how he found out.

And that, really, was what Monday's press conference was all about--lowering fan expectations. Holmgren reminded everyone more than once that quarterback Brandon Weeden is a fine passer but is still a rookie. He also went some length to distance himself for last year's pledge of big improvement in almost every way imaginable, probably because he knows that you can’t have a rookie quarterback, a rookie running back, rookie receivers, rookie defensive linemen, no linebackers and a likely to be suspended cornerback and think you’re going anywhere but down.

But more frustrating was his view on how an opening day loss (highly anticipated given how the Eagles defense toyed with the Browns' starters two weeks ago in a meaningless game) doesn't mean much because the season is a marathon and not a sprint.

In the words of Jim Steinman, "stop right there." I don't know if I'd label the NFL season a sprint but it's surely not a marathon. With only 16 games on the schedule one loss is far more impactful to a team's season then in any other sport. But that's not even the biggest problem with Holmgen's statement.

No, that would be reserved for the lack of situational awareness that it displays. The Browns 2.0 have played 13 seasons. In that time they've won their season opener once. That's right, once. In those 13 years they've had just two winning records at season's end. But let’s put an even finer point on it. In those 13 seasons, there have only been 24 weeks total when Browns fans could claim that their team had a winning record. In other words, 90% of the time over the last 13 years the Browns have had a losing record. If you take away the two winning seasons of 2002 and 2007, there have only been 6 weeks in the remaining 11 years when the Browns have had a winning record. To bring it all home, there have been 7 seasons in the last 13 where the Browns didn’t have a winning record at any point and 3 seasons where they enjoyed a winning record for exactly 1 week.

So when Holgrem blithely dismisses the importance of this team in this town getting off to a good start it shows me that he has no idea just how desperate these fans are to have something positive happen with this team, if just for a little while. That’s why, if nothing else, winning the home opener is so important. In context it would contrary to the strong trend in the other direction.

**

As I thought more about Holmgren's press conference it occurred to me that while he was clearly level setting rather modest expectations for the team he barely knows, the fans weren't his intended audience anyway.

Where Holmgren seemed most emphatic was with respect to his job status. Declaring he's never quit anything in his life, Holmgren clearly put the onus on owner-to-be Jimmy Haslam to push him aside and, in the grand tradition of every front office executive who's come before him in the last 13 years, pay off the remaining years of his contract.

That's the only way any of Holmgen's statements can be squared. Holmgren sounded as much like a man auditioning for his new boss as he did a man explaining to future employers that the team is on track and would get to the promised land if only he had been given the time to see if through.

In that sense Holmgren actually sounded much like Eric Mangini during the final days of The Lost Season. Mangini hadn't yet been officially told his fate from Holmgren though it seemed clear to everyone else. He sounded at times like he was lobbying for a third season while also reminding the rest of the league that his plan was working should he need a new job.

It didn't work out for Mangini (it still hasn’t) and I don't see a different outcome for Holmgren. If/when Holmgren is pushed aside, the likely outcome is that he’ll retire back to Seattle with Haslam’s money to live on for a few more years. And that, more than anything, will be Haslam’s real welcome to the NFL. He’ll join Lerner as another billionaire giving away money to guys that didn’t deserve it.

Meanwhile what I hope doesn't happen but probably will is that once again the fans will be asked to be patient while the new blood cleans up the old mess. What we won’t know but will be left merely to debate is whether the team was on the right track in the first place because it will once again be time to visit the one place that the fans know better than any other--square one.

**

Getting now to the meat of the matter, you can’t say that Holmgren doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He perused this roster and knows that significant improvement is unlikely.

I don't know what to make of the Browns' rather unusual roster, except for one thing. There is simply too much youth on this team to expect improvement, substantial or otherwise, as measured by wins and losses.

Let's use the Carolina Panthers as our barometer. Last season they went 6-10 with Cam Newton as their quarterback. That was an improvement of just four games from the prior season. (True, it tripled their victory total from the year before, but they were still nowhere close to the playoffs.) That seems about right considering the caliber of player Newton is versus the kind his predecessor, Jimmy Clausen, was.

By all accounts Weeden is a better passer than Colt McCoy but the difference between Weeden and McCoy isn't even close to the difference between Newton and Clausen. So expecting a huge jump for the Browns, assuming you think the Panthers took a huge jump, just by changing quarterbacks seems a bit of wishful thinking.

If you're thinking then that the addition of Trent Richardson will make all the difference, that's doubtful, too. The 2010 Panthers were terrible but it was more anomaly than trend. The season before they were 8-8. The season before that they were 12-4. In fact at no point in their existence have they been as miserable as any of the Browns' recent seasons.

But staying with that 2010 Panthers team it's true that they didn't run the ball well that season but their same two primary running backs were far more effective in 2011 with the addition of Newton, who had a substantial rushing total of his own. Even with a very effective running game the Panthers still only improved by 4 games.

It won't take much for Richardson to markedly improve the Browns' rushing game but unless he has a record-setting season, he won't approach the combined rushing totals of the Panthers' backs last season. Add to that the fact that Weeden is almost no threat to run and you come to the rather easy conclusion that while the Browns should be more balanced like the Panthersin 2011, it still won't amount to much this year.

And, as I just mentioned, the Panthers were already a better team in 2010 than the Browns were in 2011, the records notwithstanding.

But all of this just gets us back to the even more salient point. While upgrading at quarterback and running back, the Browns also got markedly younger almost everywhere else as well. This doesn't bode well in a league where youth is served only occasionally.

I would expect the Panthers to take another decent step forward this season because it is now more experienced. But even this season may not be of the leaps and bounds variety, the kind that Holmgren envisioned for his own team this season.

The Browns may be on the right trajectory, but as trite as it sounds only time will tell. Unfortunately there simply won't be enough time in this season to really make that judgment and that's all Haslem may give this regime before he decides to repaint the walls of Berea.

**

Staying with this same theme, given what Randy Lerner extracted from Haslam for control of this franchise, have we been underestimating Randy Lerner’s business acumen all along?

Courting Optimism, Delivering Cynicism

To be a sports fan is often to live in the sometimes conflicting and complementary worlds of cynicism and denial. The more our teams disappoint us, the more cynical we become about their prospects. Yet we also deny the underlying reasons they disappoint, holding them to subjective standards they often aren’t capable of achieving.

In Cleveland, these attitudes coexist, running deep, wide and long. To be a Cleveland fan is to be a cynic based simply on the almost complete lack of success by any of its three major franchises. No coach gets hired, no trade gets made, no player gets transacted without it invoking some sort of cynicism.

Yet despite the cynicism they embrace and endure in Cleveland the fans remain hopeless romantics in deep denial over a what it would take to make them less cynical in the first place. Instead we expect success simply because there are players wearing the name “Cleveland” on their jerseys.

This brings us to the Cleveland Browns, poised as they are to start another season of wrongheaded hopes and all-too-familiar failures. If ever a team balanced cynicism with optimism, it's the Browns.

Listening to fans talk about the prospects of the Browns after the first two completely meaningless preseason games engendered just those wrongheaded hopes while the third preseason game, the supposed dress rehearsal for the regular season, drove home all the various reasons that despite our deepest wishes, this season likely will do nothing to eradicate our abiding sense of cynicism about the team, a new owner notwithstanding.

Let’s be unvarnished about last week for a moment. The turgid performance of the Browns against the Eagles was exactly what it was intended to be, a dress rehearsal for what the regular season will mostly look like.

What, you thought Brandon Weeden was Cam Newton because both were drafted in the first round? Suddenly the receiving corps became Al Toon, Jerry Rice, Terrell Owens and Ozzie Newsome in their prime? As near as my aging eyes can see, Weeden has looked like exactly what he is: a rookie with a good arm and an almost complete lack of understanding of how the pro game really operates. The receivers are mostly untested and issue-ridden and still trying to decide how to elude the kind of corners they rarely faced in college.

But yet since Weeden drops back to pass and has the title “quarterback,” we expect to see the kind of results that take at least a few years and that’s assuming the best of circumstances, which this hardly qualifies as. And because the Browns line up three wide with players labeled “receiver,” we unreasonably expect immediate proficiency at route running and ball catching. Heck, they haven't even learned how to get open on a consistent basis.

That’s why this all begs serving up still another in an endless series of reminders that this team isn’t very good and when it fails to achieve it’s not because head coach Pat Shurmur didn’t get the most out of them, even if that's part of it. It’s because they weren’t that good in the first place.

This is not to suggest that this team isn’t on the right track. You can see the progress in the players being developed. Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that the roster is improving and that it is deeper then it was at any time in the last several seasons. But an improving roster doesn’t mean it’s good roster yet and certainly not a roster capable of going toe to toe with the better teams in the league week in and week out.

If you watched the offensive line, for example, get run over against the Eagles defensive line it was a sobering reminder that Weeden is just a blown assignment away from a concussion, sooner rather than later. Then if you listened, cynically, to the excuses offered up by the offensive line to explain said performance it just made you realize this will be another long season with earnest players trying hard to overcome their essential mediocrity.

I’m not a big fan of predicting a team’s record. It matters little, except in the drafting pecking order, whether the Browns finish 3-13, 4-12 or 5-11. Nothing about any of those records is particularly impressive and any of those are the likely outcomes based simply on this team’s over reliance on rookies and its still serious lack of depth at any position and consequent heightened vulnerability to the inevitable injuries.

What will make this season interesting and hence make me less cynical about the team's future depends on the smaller battles game by game. The questions this team needs to answer in terms of whether it’s really getting better (and, concurrently, whether it still makes any sense to put faith in the current regime) will depend on whether it can find ways to improve its production on both offense and defense.

Can the team improve its running game? Trent Richardson seems like a good edition, if healthy, but even he’ll have trouble running if the line plays like it did against the Eagles. If the run blocking doesn’t improve, quickly, there’s virtually no chance that the run game will improve and, by extension, no chance that the passing game will get better, even if Tom Heckert were to pull off a trade for Tom Brady. Weeden won’t have enough time to throw to the rookies charged with catching the ball and lacks the mobility needed on a consistent basis to slow down a pass rush that doesn’t fear the run.

Can the run defense improve? Heading into the season this was a question mark before Phil Taylor got hurt. It’s just a bigger question mark and it doesn’t inspire confidence for the option to be rotating rookies who think that they’ll create havoc because they’ll have fresh legs. The run defense has been an embarrassment for years and has forced the secondary to play up to stop big runs (which it’s done with only modest success). When the secondary is up in the box, you know what comes next. And as we’ve seen, this secondary gives up a lot of long pass plays.

An improved running game and run defense may not translate into more victories, yet, but it will eventually as long as that course remains pursued. But if this turns into another season where the offense can't move the ball and the defense can't ever control the line of scrimmage, then the flood gates of cynicism will remain open for business.

Losing It

Managers or head coaches tend to get fired for a variety of sins, the most ubiquitous and least defined is when they’ve “lost” the team.  How does one actually lose a team?  Hard to say but like porn, you know it when you see it.

To look broadly for a moment, here’s an example.  Former Cleveland Indians catcher/journeyman Kelley Shoppach seems to be doing his level best to ensure that Bobby Valentine has a one-and-done season in Boston.  He sent text messages to upper management complaining about Valentine, which is the modern/coward way of registering dislike for your boss.

The point, though, is that Shoppach, when found out, had no problem fessin’ up.  That means that Shoppach is fearless or stupid or both.  I’m guessing both but leaning to fearless because there’s nothing easier for a general manager to do than to cut a journeyman catcher, particularly one who’s bitching about the manager.  But consider that if Shoppach isn’t the dumbest player in the majors and understands the relative lack of leverage his modest career provides he’s done the math and figures Valentine must be gone.  Who am I to argue the point?

But let’s localize the example.  The Indians have fallen off a fiscal cliff of their own due in no small part to imprudent management with an amazingly consistent ability to make bad decisions.  And while it wouldn’t surprise if the players all looked around and said to themselves “if the owners don’t care why should we?” why is it that Manny Acta can’t seem to channel Lou Brown, the manager of the fictional Indians in the movie “Major League” and rally the troops against the avarice of the owners?

Maybe because he’s lost the team.

I’ve seen 40+ years of Indians teams and in well too many of those years they have been lifeless blobs of protoplasm so it is worth remembering that when you try to contextualize this year’s model.  Still, the team that slept walked through a recent west coast trip in which it won one game, barely, but mostly embarrassed itself for nearly two weeks is in the running for its own special place on the bobby prize shelf.

Particularly dispiriting was the series against Seattle.  Up until the recent series was completed, these two teams were twin sons of different mothers.  In truth they still are.  But as the Indians barely registered a pulse in losing three straight, the Mariners ended up looking like a much better team.

Is that how this is going to go for the rest of this season?  Probably.  The better question though is can Acta survive it?  The answer depends on what Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti want out of Acta. 

Presumably Acta was hired to develop the young talent on the roster and get them to a place where they could compete.  Of course that was Acta’s charge in Washington and his teams then pretty much look like his teams now.

That’s not to lay all or even the lion’s share of the blame at Acta’s feet for how miserable the Nationals were under him or how miserable the Indians are under him now.  In both cases he was saddled by bad upper management that delivered to him an odd mix of young players with some potential and aging veterans that came cheaply.  In truth few managers around can make that mix work.

I suppose you could just focus on the young players on the Indians roster and ask yourself whether they are developing under Acta.  That’s where it gets difficult.  Asdrubal Cabrera has hit some sort of wall the second half of the season and has been mostly a non factor.  Jason Kipnis is finding his second year difficult.  Michael Brantley is developing but Carlos Santana is struggling.

This isn’t to lay all or even the lion’s share of the blame for this on Acta, either.  Young players develop unevenly and the additional pressure placed on them by the various veterans who are not even meeting modest expectations isn’t helpful to the process.

Still, since this is a bottom line business, the blame will fall somewhere.  It would be far more useful, probably, to fire the roster and keep the manager but I suspect Antonetti wears rose-colored glasses and thus will fall back on what is more easier and probably cheaper; fire the manager.

That said, if Acta does survive this season it will only be because it really doesn’t much matter anyway.  There are no miracle workers in sports, just other voices from other rooms.  The problems with the Indians run deeper than the manager but that doesn’t mean they don’t also run to the manager. 

Which should cause some concern for Acta, considering how the bad facts are stacking up like dishes in a frat house sink. 

The Indians have had two losing streaks of at least 8 games this season.  If not for a good start to the season, the Indians would easily be on a pace to lose 100 games.  They are 4-21 in their last 25 games.  Every time you turn around the opposing team seems to have 7 or 8 runs on the board.  They fired their pitching coach in mid season.  They have a closer who is essentially out of control, which, in truth he always was but now that he’s failing to save games it’s become apparent again.

Anyone of those things would be a good marker for believing that the wheels have fallen off.  Collectively the wheels aren’t just off, the whole damn vehicle is stuck in 8 feet of mud somewhere off the coast of Lake Erie.  None of that speaks well for Acta.  Managers and head coaches have been fired for far less.

The case for Acta probably comes down to two main points.  He didn’t put this roster together and despite the shitstorm, he’s remained calm throughout.  Maturity shouldn’t be underrated.  It’s the lack thereof that will be Valentine’s downfall in Boston and forevermore.

Yet as calm as he’s been, it would be hard not to notice a certain “read between the lines” quality to Acta’s comments lately.  It’s not direct criticism of his bosses, certainly, but it’s not as if it couldn’t be taken that way.

That’s the kind of thing, too, that gets managers fired as well, unless they already know their fates.  Acta’s been down this road before.  I suspect he knows how this all turns out.

All My Cleveland Teams

When I was a kid, my mother, a fan of soap operas generally, and the ABC brand in particular, would spend hours each day engrossed in the doings of Pine Valley, Port Charles and wherever else the ventures of Erica Kane, Vicki Lord Reilly Buchanan or Luke and Laura Baldwin Spencer took them.

Despite putting out 5 full hours of programming each day for 52 weeks out of the year, the plots of each moved with all the plodding speed of Bernie Kosar in his prime. That’s another way of saying that you could miss months of a show at a time and pick up nearly where you left off without having missed anything significant.

It took my recent trip abroad and my both forced and deliberate avoidance of the Cleveland sports scene (except to see if anything else had been sold or anyone had been fired) to realize that the numbing sameness of those soaps were no match for the present day Cleveland Indians or Browns.

It’s not that things don’t change with these teams. It’s that the changes are almost imperceptible. New characters get introduced; old ones are killed off, not literally just fired or cut. The merry-go-round of one season to the next does spin but tends to not make progress. The same tired story lines abound.

Consider the Indians. There may come a point where something dramatic will happen that makes the average fan actually start paying attention again but that day seems far off. Instead it’s just the gradual wear of what turns into another meaningless season that turns into an off season of excuses that turns into another new season of misplaced hope that turns into, well, you get the idea.

The Indians having suffered the inevitable swoon of a flawed roster are playing out the string of a season with 6 weeks still remaining. Nothing’s been accomplished and there’s nothing to be accomplished. It’s been a pointless season unless the point was to provide comfort in the familiar. We could say that it’s time to “let the kids play” but that too is is the same plot point each year.

Upon my return I did get a chance to peruse an interview someone locally did with Paul Dolan. It may have been Terry Pluto though that hardly matters. I was struck by Dolan’s chagrin at the Indians’ 11-game losing streak and how that took the team right out of contention. More accurately, I was struck by the fact that Dolan was chagrinned by the Indians’ 11-game losing streak.

No one can actually see an 11-game losing streak coming, I’ll give Dolan that. But as the season turned serious, which it always does after the All Star break, flaws get highlighted. There was always going to be a stretch where the team would embrace its pretender status by enduring a stretch of games where they’d go, say, 11-22. The fact that the Indians dug this 11-game hole in one fell swoop is a tribute to efficiency but not surprise and certainly not chagrin.

No, chagrin should be saved for the fans that never get the benefit of a better or at least more interesting story arc. But then again if you don’t change the producers of the show or bring in a fresh crop of writers with different ideas, why should anyone expect anything different?

I doubt that Manny Acta’s job is in jeopardy just as I doubt that Chris Antonetti’s or Mark Shapiro’s jobs are in jeopardy just as I doubt that the Dolans have any plan on selling the franchise. It’s not that any of them are particularly or unusually incompetent. It’s more that none of them bring anything particularly new or fresh to the mix anymore, assuming they ever did.

For example, there may come a time when Antonetti makes a better trade or hits on a bargain basement free agent, but there will not come a time when he takes a different approach to making trades or signing free agents. The confines of his jobs have been set by his bosses and they’ve shown no inclination to try and do anything differently. Likewise the extent of his abilities is well established. It’s not so much insanity in the sense of them doing the same things in the same way and expecting a different result. It’s more like doing the same things in the same way and assuming the same result, as if the point is existence and not competitiveness.

The long view of this all, like the long view of those soaps, is that things will change but ultimately they’ll stay the same.

The Browns are a different kind of soap opera but a soap opera nonetheless. Their willingness to replace leading characters has been bold if nothing else. But these changes, alas, have been in soap opera tradition, meaning that there has been some sort of disfiguring accident and when the bandages removed a new actor emerges playing essentially the same part.

Maybe you like Mike Holmgren or Tom Heckert better than, say, Carmen Policy and Dwight Clark, but fundamentally they’re playing the same parts in much the same way. And that has been the real disappointment of As the Browns Turn. You’d like to think that the new actors would bring a heretofore unseen dimension to the role but ultimately they fall into the same old traps reading the same old lines and getting the same old results.

But unlike their sister show, General Indians, there is every chance that the Browns will actually take a much different direction. The impending ownership change is noteworthy because it really is the opportunity to completely re-imagine the enterprise. If the new owner doesn’t do something bold then it will be an opportunity squandered.

I saw where Bud Shaw of the Plain Dealer made the point that nothing should be off the table when it comes to the Browns and I couldn’t agree more. Maybe you like some of the moves Heckert has made and maybe he is a keeper, but let’s not get sentimental over Brandon Weeden or Travis Richardson just yet. The team is still deeply flawed and a complete change of direction, which is to say a completely fresh approach from how the team buys pencils to how it conducts the draft and signs free agents, isn’t going to be much of a setback.

Stability is the hallmark of any good franchise so advocating for instability seems counterintuitive. But as the Indians have shown us, stability as a goal unto itself, can also be a veritable breeding ground of long-term mediocrity.

Besides, what’s so stable about the Browns anyway? The fans have shown a keen ability to be comforted by the thought of football without any promise of good football. Indeed, they seem more engaged by their consensus of rage against the miserable show that is the Browns. In short, they may hate the results but they certainly love to hate those results, don't they?

You have to wonder, though, will these teams go the way of the ABC soaps, which, after decades on the air, find themselves canceled? It's hard to imagine, but eventually any business model built on delivering the same bland results is bound to fold.

Vacation Time...

Here's the final installment from my Springsteen summer, a video from the historic Helsinki show that closed the European leg of his tour, "i Don't Want to Go Home."  Enjoy.  Be back soon:

Vacation Time...

Still gone and loving it.  Another video from Springsteen's historic Helsinki show, "Back in Your Arms".  Enjoy:

Vacation Time.....

Gone to Europe to follow the Springsteen trail.  Here's another video from Helsinki, the opening number of the epic 4-hour show "Rockin' All Over the World.  Enjoy:

Vacation Time

Time for some well deserved (at least in my opinion) vacation.  I'll be gone for a few weeks but in my absence I'll be releasing a series of videos of Bruce Springsteen's epic, precedent-setting European finale from Helsinki, Finland where he inched past the 4 hour mark for the first time.  That doesn't even include the 5-song acoustic set that took place about 2 hours prior to the real show.  Here's the first of those videos, "Blinded by the Light" acoustic. Enjoy:

Low Cost, Low Risk, Low Effort

The only way a true Cleveland Indians fan could be surprised at the state of the team’s roster or the front office’s refusal to improve it at the trade deadline is if he fell asleep in a cave, woke up, and thought it was 1997.

This front office and this ownership group dangle the possibility of late season moves to a starving fan base to keep interest afloat but were never serious about really doing anything. That would involve risk and cost money and if there are two things that are anathema to this front office and ownership group it’s risk and cost.

The only plus side to this inaction is that by doing nothing they also did nothing dumb. The hottest of rumors involved a possible trade of Shin-Soo Choo because he’ll be a free agent at the end of NEXT SEASON and because he has in his employ Scott Boras. See, the Indians front office hates Scott Boras. Just the mention of his names causes them to wet themselves. Boras doesn’t think much of creative, hometown discount type deals. He’s as sentimental as a jellyfish and twice as slippery. In the 2012 offseason he’ll market and sell Choo to the highest bidder and there is no chance that it will be the Indians.

So, as is the custom here in Cleveland, the angst rolls, the chat rooms explode and the talk shows crackle over the possibility of getting “nothing” for Choo as he leaves for New York or California or Detroit.

Since we do know how this movie plays out in theory it makes sense to try and get something for Choo, in theory. But ask yourself whether you trust Chris Antonetti to get good value for Choo? Antonetti has nothing yet on his resume that suggests he’s got enough gravitas or savvy to convince a team to part with legitimate prospects in exchange for Choo. Stated differently, there's nothing to inform the fan that Antonetti could have ever been on the other side of the Ubaldo Jimenez trade.

Thus the calculus is whether or not Choo’s value to the team is higher as a player here for another season and a half or as a commodity to be bartered clumsily for a couple of players who we ultimately hope will get good enough to be traded down the road for other prospects.

Until Antonetti proves his meddle as a general manager the best, safest course is inaction. Better to actually watch Choo in Cleveland for another 200 games or so then to watch Choo play those 200 games for a contending team while grousing over the prospects his trade would garner as they toil in Eastlake or Akron.

Meanwhile, back where it matters, fan interest, at least as measured by attendance and television ratings, is ebbing. It's not that they can't figure out what the Indians are doing, it's that they can. The code, such as it was, has been cracked and the Indians are listing as a franchise as if this were 1989.

No question that the front office and the owners have noticed, but at the moment no one's quite sure what they plan on doing about it. For the time being they're trying to paper over the problem with promotions. But they can't have a fireworks display every night. Eventually they'll have to find an answer to the abiding question of how exactly it plans on having a team with enough heft to contend for an entire season.

It’s been a nice, pleasant surprise the last few seasons that the team stayed within spitting distance of contention until the Browns’ preseason started. But while the team generated some raised eyebrows for the first half of last and this season, few fans if any believed that the team was really built to contend. Even that, though, isn't the crux of the sin. It's more that there doesn't seem to be any intention to take the bold steps that contention actually requires.

The slightly broader context of this season begins with last season, extends to last off season and culminates, most probably, with the current disastrous road trip.

Last year’s team was achingly similar to this year’s model and therein lies the problem for the fans. There’s been no progress. Everyone could see the holes in the roster last year that caused the team to fade just as the season got interesting. That would seem to have begged an approach to fill those holes in a meaningful way.

Yet there was nothing bold done in the offseason to give the fans even a sliver of hope that this season would be anything different. It hasn’t been and so the fans, jaded by this vicious cycle of inaction, are losing interest.

Building a team the way the Indians are trying to do was never going to be an easy task. It relies on so many things going right and is so dependent on almost nothing going wrong. The front office has done a lousy job in the draft for the last several years and its impact is being felt through the lack of impact players in the minors. The front office keeps kicking the tires on retreads and it shows. Derek Lowe and Johnny Damon have very little left in their tanks. Next year's retreads aren't going to offer anything different. And the few risks it does take are always head scratchers. Grady Sizemore anyone?

We’re long past debating the frugal way in which this franchise operates. It won’t change and railing about it isn’t going to change anything either. But we’re not past debating the point as to whether Antonetti or Mark Shapiro can implement the strategy.

The early results on the Antonetti reign aren’t very promising as the wave of empty seats and lower broadcast ratings readily attest. All that's really occurred is a continuation of the Shapiro reign where a previous season's ability to contend was ignored in favor of a murky longer view involving progressively cheaper players and wounded warriors and a vague promise to do something when the time is right.

Well, guess what?, the time never seems to be right and that's ultimately what has the fan base miserable. You can't keep selling the same bottle of snake oil and not have the public eventually catch on. They have. The fans may be hopelessly hopeful but they aren't stupid. They may give the front office and the owners the benefit of another off season, but when that begets next year's Derek Lowe or Johnny Damon, they'll find other ways to spend their money. That means that Dan Gilbert and his casino, situated comfortably next door to Progressive Field, are likely going to stay healthy for another year while the Indians take on still more water.

Not Lerner Revisited

It’s no real surprise that Randy Lerner is on the precipice of selling controlling interest in the Cleveland Browns.  He may be a lifelong fan still clingy to his Browns jammies, but he’s been a reluctant owner since Day 1.  The only surprise, really, is that he held on this long.  He has a pattern.

When the sale is finalized, Lerner’s deconstruction of most of what his father built will have been completed.  When Lerner inherited MBNA bank and all its billions from his father Al, he didn’t wait nearly this long to sell it so he could pursue other hobbies.  With the sale of the Browns, Lerner is now nearly completely free of money-making enterprises.  That sound you hear is the huge cry of indifference as to what he does next.

The news has been kicking around inside the NFL for months that Lerner was in negotiations to sell controlling interest of the team.  Jimmy Haslam III, he of the Flying J rest stops that seem to dominate the highways from Cleveland to all points south, owns a minority interest in the Pittsburgh Steelers but he came to the inevitable conclusion that he was never going to wrest majority control of that franchise from the Rooney family. (Recall, though, that there was actually talk at the time Haslem bought his interest that the Rooneys may have been interested in selling outright.)  

Liking the view from the owner’s box, Haslam let it be known that his desires were bigger.  Because the key to life is timing, those desires found a willing partner in one whose own were waning.  It could be about the money as the reported sale price for controlling interest is in the $1 billion range, but it seems more about Lerner finally trying to find his own identity while also finding a way to remove his square peg self from the round hole of NFL ownership.

All the instant reassurance that the Browns would not be relocated as the result of the sale was meant to quell a skittish fan base but in truth there was never any chance that the NFL would ever allow the Browns to be relocated again anyway.  The real question to mull is exactly what kind of owner Haslam will be?

We know that Lerner was a lousy owner by any measuring stick you want to pull out but he did understand at least that his ownership interest was never really his in the first place.  He held it in trust for the fans even if he was clueless as to how to engage with them.  That contrasts wildly with owners like Jerry Jones in Dallas and Dan Snyder in Washington, D.C., two megalomaniacs locked in their own separate battle over who really represents the center of the solar system.  Fan engagement to them is simply another branding opportunity.

There has never been anything about owning the Browns that appealed to Lerner so it won’t be sad to see him go.  His detachment was legendary.  When the team needed him most he set off for England in a quest to own a Premier League team.  He granted interviews sparingly and reluctantly.  He made decisions impetuously as if the intent was to sweep the problem off the desk as quickly as possible.  It’s no accident that the Browns have foundered under his ownership.  Lerner foundered as an owner and the team and its results matched his psyche.

As for Haslam, maybe the team never gets appreciably better under him but it certainly can’t get worse.  The other thing is that it almost doesn’t matter to the fans how bad the team is anyway.  They mostly still support it with an unwavering enthusiasm irrespective of the abuse that usually results.  That said, what Browns fans should understand is that once Haslam takes control it won’t be too long until there’s regime change and the inevitable several year waiting period for it to take hold.

Haslam strikes no one as Lerner Revisited so it’s safe to assume that he has no intention of paying nearly a $1 billion bounty to own a set of crown jewels and then let someone else caretake it for him.  That means that unless Mike Holmgren can finagle his way into the new ownership group his days as a long distance architect are probably numbered.  Once he’s gone it doesn’t take long for the rest of the dominoes to fall.  Perhaps that’s why head coach Pat Shurmur was so prickly at his press conference on Friday.  He understands how this all works.  In the speed of a one day news cycle, Shurmur’s second year as head coach took on a certain air of “what’s the point?”.

So whatever excitement you might muster for Brandon Weeden as the quarterback of the future, you shouldn’t get too comfortable.  Whatever regime Haslam installs will undoubtedly have a different view of the football world then Holmgren, Heckert, and Shurmur.  It will manifest itself in the defensive schemes they play, the type of offense they run and the type of players they want.  In short, the current system, for whatever merit it might have, will get flushed, sooner or later but definitely.

Do the fans have it in them to endure another regime change?  Of course.  They understand the cycle as well as anyone.  Besides there is a certain allure of new blood.  It brings with it a renewed sense of hope even if it eventually collapses under its own weight of incompetence.

On the surface, there is much to like about Haslam, particularly as compared to Lerner.  Perhaps Lerner’s biggest shortcoming as an owner stemmed from his almost complete lack of business acumen.  Lerner inherited his wealth that was borne of a successful business his father started.  Lerner took the same indifferent approach to that business, MBNA, which he took to the Browns.   He sold it at the first opportunity.  He sunk a pile of dough into the Aston Villa franchise in England but it hasn’t helped much.  Indeed it has been bleeding money under his ownership.  In other words, he has no record of accomplishment.

Haslam on the other hand actually took the family business and with his brothers worked long and hard to learn it and then grew it into a far more profitable venture.  His fortune isn’t just inherited it’s also earned and that’s a significant difference.  Running a series of truck stops may be nothing like running a NFL franchise but the same business principles apply to each.  Customer loyalty is critical to any business and surely Haslam could not have built a successful business without understanding that.  That gives him a huge head start.

When you take care of your customers and give them a reason to want to do business with you again, good results tend to follow.

Yet there seems to be a little concern that Haslam is a self-proclaimed Steelers fan, as if somehow that would retard his ability as an owner of the Browns.

Frankly, I wouldn’t care if Haslam was a Michigan grad who interned for the Yankees and held lifetime season tickets to the Steelers so long as he takes a more proactive approach to owning the Browns.  Dan Gilbert was viewed as a carpetbagger from Detroit and yet has invested significantly in the Cavaliers and the community.  You may question his direction but never his passion for the Cavs and its place within the city of Cleveland.

Haslam and Gilbert are of a similar ilk and so it’s far more likely that Haslam will follow the Gilbert model and not the path set out by Lerner.   I would expect Haslam to embrace the special relationship between this team and its fans.  I would expect him to seek first to rebuild the trust with the fans that Lerner never seemed interested in capturing.  Ultimately, I expect Haslam to be successful because that’s his track record.

New ownership for the Browns may not have been the preferred way of kicking off a new season but it’s not a huge negative, either.  The team will once again struggle on the field as the thinness of its roster reveals itself when the inevitable injuries mount.  But as Haslam’s ownership works its way first through the approval process and then the transition it will serve as a decent distraction.  Whether it becomes an actual distraction, however, remains to be seen and something Haslam, ultimately, has the power to control.

Lingering Items--Retribution Edition

Time will be the real arbiter of whether or not the NCAA did the right thing in severely punishing Penn State University, but for those complaining perhaps they missed the meat of NCAA president Mark Emmert’s reasoning.

That Penn State was made an example of is probably beyond question. But of what, exactly? With no sense of irony, Emmert railed against the fact that the culture of winning has become so all consuming that it has created an atmosphere of “too big to fail” programs at some universities.

The phrase “too big to fail” is thrown around a lot these days and I’m not sure that it could ever apply in this context, but the point is still taken. At Penn State as in many places, the wants, needs and desires of the football program came to dominate the entire ethos of the university. When Joe Paterno, as well entrenched of a head coach as there has ever been, could literally impose his will on his own superiors by halting any further investigation into or a reporting of the allegations regarding Jerry Sandusky, it’s pretty clear to any objective observer that the tail is wagging the dog and that’s usually a huge red flag.

It’s easy to understand how it gets to that point and that’s perhaps where the NCAA is still turning a blind eye, particularly in the context of “too big to fail.” Everything the NCAA stands for at the moment is about money and how its two most prominent programs, football as practiced in the Bowl Subdivision and Division I men’s basketball, can generate even more of it. That money is used by the universities as a way of offsetting the costs of running big time programs and other non-revenue generating sports and that money also is used by the NCAA itself to run the rest of its so-called mission.

The athletic budgets at some schools these days runs upwards of $100 million. The bulk of that money goes toward football but it’s also used to run the multitude of other programs that provide great opportunities for student-athletes but serve only as a drag on the budget. Few athletic programs these days are self sustaining so it takes subsidies from the university’s general fund, along with private fundraising, to cover the difference. Those are dollars that can’t be used elsewhere in the university community.

That puts a great deal of pressure on football and basketball. A winning program is critical to a large university because it generates far more money than a losing program. They really are the tide that raises all of the university’s ships.

This really was the basis of Paterno’s “grand experiment” at Penn State and in a larger sense the basis for how the NCAA itself operates. The revenue generating sports serve as a catalyst for everything else that needs to get done and for awhile it worked, at least until it didn’t.

As the program under Paterno’s leadership began to assert its control over the university generally, the construct flipped. Arguably the NCAA never had that solid of bearings in the first place.

In any case, that’s the context in which Penn State’s punishment was handed down. By essentially assuring that Penn State will not be competitively relevant for years, the NCAA really is attempting to change a culture of winning at any cost that the trustees of the university still seem unwilling to change.

The question is when will someone step in to teach the NCAA the same lesson?

Nothing about what the NCAA is doing generally is meant to change this equation. The agreement to go to a half-assed playoff system is about first generating even more money and second finding a new way of splitting that ever-increasing pie. It will only continue the emphasis on winning at every level of what’s an increasingly corrupt enterprise.

Penn State will serve as a cautionary tale for awhile but it will end up being forgotten eventually, sooner rather than later. But as sure as you’re reading this, there’s a handful of programs around the country that are heading in the same direction that caused Penn State to spin out of control. How big is Nick Saban in Alabama? How about Les Miles at LSU? Where will Ohio State get under Urban Meyer? The next time any university makes another compromise in favor of the football program, and its probably happening a dozen times a day across the country, will be another clue that its trustees missed as to why the program ultimately exploded in a wave of some scandal or another.

**

Speaking of the Penn State trustees, if they think their job is done because they decided, albeit reluctantly, to take down the statute of Paterno, they are mistaken.

We’ll never know for certain, but had the trustees stepped in and shut down the program at the end of last season and carried it into this season, it seems unlikely that the NCAA would have lopped on additional penalties.

As it was, the NCAA was faced with an incredible situation. The Freeh report revealed in letter and form how the trustees were willing participants in allowing the culture of Penn State to metastasize to the point where they, too, were essentially underlings of Paterno. They voted down reforms in previous years that would have changed the culture of the university if adopted. They cast a blind eye when Paterno insisted on dealing with his player disciplinary issues outside of the university's general population. The president of the Board failed to inform the rest of the Board about the problems bubbling up on the Sandusky front. The trustees as a group acceded to Paterno’s demands for a more lucrative contract even as the controversy was developing. Then as the problems played out the trustees were very reluctant to act. Firing Paterno was the easy part. What they failed to do was take a more firm stance on the program itself.

All of this put the NCAA in a nearly untenable position. Its reaction may have been unprecedented but so too was the situation it faced.

**

As it turns out, Paterno isn’t the only one to feel like the Sandusky scandal wasn’t a football scandal. I’ve been fascinated, actually, by the number of head coaches and columnists that have been critical of the NCAA for sticking its nose into a situation where they claim it doesn’t belong.

If the trustees won’t do anything, who then is left?

But you don’t have to answer that question to appreciate that that NCAA had no real alternative and stay true to its ever murkier mission. Even if you take the view that the NCAA only deals with competitive balance issues, this was certainly one of them.

By protecting the football program from the public revelation that its long term assistant head coach was a long term serial pedophile, Penn State and Paterno were able to retain a favorable reputation long after Paterno ceased to be an effective head coach. It helped in recruiting. Put it this way, what parent would knowingly send their son to be coached by someone who was inclined to protect a pedophile at the expense of his victims? Exactly.

Penn State was able to stay competitive because of this cover up and for that, at the very least, it deserved punishment by the NCAA.

**

Switching gears to the Cleveland Indians, it had to make you tingle just a little to know that the Indians obtained Brent Lillibridge for the stretch run. All it cost them was a minor league pitcher with a stellar record and a reputation for not being able to throw hard. Doug Jones anyone?

And if that didn’t make you tingle then surely you did when general manager Chris Antonetti said that the Indians’ willingness to improve the team right now hinges on the outcome of this week’s Detroit Tigers’ series.

Seriously, the Indians don’t understand the fans’ indifference?

I always thought the Indians were just one weak hitting utility player away from challenging the Tigers and now we’ll be able to test that theory. I also always thought that the Indians were run on a day to day basis without any real long terms plans and now we know that’s true.

It is a rather fascinating circumstance where Antonetti would place so much emphasis on one series as if the rest of the season to this point was meaningless. You almost get the sense that the Indians’ relatively decent first half of the season ended up being Antonetti’s biggest nightmare. But in the overall context, it make sense.

These Indians aren’t built to compete for the long haul and Antonetti isn’t much making progress in that regard. They are built to play .500 ball at best while keeping a meager payroll intact.

The truth that’s revealing itself is that there really isn’t much Antonetti can do anyway. Because of a lousy farm system beget by years of bad drafting, the Indians lack the currency to make a run at anything other than the Lillibridges of the world. On the flip side, the Indians lack any real assets for which someone would pay with the kind of prospects they really need.

That means that the Detroit series is really irrelevant. Still it’s fun to contemplate how Antonetti will react if his next worst nightmare comes true: the Indians sweep the Tigers.

**

For the first time since, I think, the Nixon administration the Cleveland Browns enter training camp with all of their draft picks signed. You can thank the rookie salary scale in the most recent collective bargaining agreement for that.

That leads to this week’s question to ponder: what will Browns’ fans do with all the pent up angst usually reserved for wondering when their number one pick will be signed? And since it’s been a few weeks since we had a question to ponder, let me add another, related one: What’s a training camp without the obligatory “I can only coach the players who are here” quote from the head coach?

A Statue to Denial

There is no amount of reality that can change the mind of someone in denial. Committed smokers will ignore every warning to their health until it’s too late. So, too, apparently will the Board of Trustees of Penn State.

Seemingly committed to implementing most (but not, of course, all) of the recommendations of the Freeh report that detailed institutional criminal indifference to the helpless and numerous victims of Jerry Sandusky’s sick obsessions, the Board of Trustees still can’t understand the fuss about a little ol’ statute of culprit and disgraced former head coach Joe Paterno that stands as a beacon of sorts, in not so Happy Valley.

The results of the independent investigation into the whys and wherefores and hows of Sandusky are such that for whatever good intention Penn State’s so-called “Grand Experiment” of balancing athletics and academics once had that experiment is now over and it failed miserably.

Maybe it is impossible to balance big time athletics, especially football, with the academic goals of our biggest colleges. But the answer to that question isn’t borne out by the Penn State mess. Penn State failed because those conducting the experiment, like Paterno, were both arrogant and myopic. So impressed were they with their own theories and high mindedness that they became the very symbols of what they supposedly were guarding against.

And yet, and yet, despite one damning page after another of a report so complete in its discrediting of Penn State, the school’s Board of Trustees still cannot seem to grasp the enormity of the situation or even their own level of culpability.

The statue of Paterno should be the first thing to go. Until it does it stands for what exactly? One of the trustees claims that the statue represents the good Joe did and not the bad as if by fiat he can dictate how others should feel about Paterno.

As long as it does stand it represents denial on a grand scale, its image intended to harken back to a time before the world knew about Sandusky, apparently. There’s no honor in that unless you’re completely delusional, which the trustees apparently are. The report placed significant and equal blame on Paterno and three other top university administrators for failing to “protect against a child sexual predator harming children over a decade.”

Indeed, the report can fairly be read to place even more blame on Paterno then the others for two key reasons. One, he ran the football program with an iron fist and steamrolled any one, including other administrators, for years to keep any problems “in house.” That’s in the report. Second, he knew of the allegations 10 years before they came to light, denied it under oath, and also talked an administrator out of reporting the abuse allegations in favor of dealing with the problem directly with Sandusky, which had the added benefit of not bringing unfavorable publicity to the university. That he wasn’t prosecuted initially was a nod, again, to the power he wielded in a small community.

Because of his intentional indifference to dealing with Sandusky’s criminal creepiness, there were additional victims that suffered repeatedly for years. That makes Paterno directly complicit in the sexual abuse of several children for years. There’s no other way to spin it and no way to sugar coat it. For whatever else he did with his life, this will be Paterno’s lasting legacy. No one needs a statue to remind them of that.

But why rush to judgment? The trustees say they need many more months to pass so that they can reach a decision not informed by emotion. If nothing else, the consistency of the thinking of Penn State remains remarkably in tact. Sandusky was able to victimize several more kids as the result of just that kind of deliberate Penn State think, which is to close your eyes and wish the problem away through the passage of time.

If there was a clear thinking person associated with Penn State at the moment he or she might realize that that kind of thinking really is the best marker for how deeply infected Penn State really is and why just a general housekeeping will never be enough.

Penn State may have world class research facilities and scores of excellent students, but it is all being overseen by a criminal enterprise deluding themselves into thinking they’re a bunch of high minded educators just trying to do their best to get by. They are a bunch of low minded, protectionist goons who seem more intent on preserving their own jobs than in doing any real good for the university they’re charged with overseeing.

Paterno, too, demonstrated a remarkable ability to turn over the facts in his mind in a way to avoid facing the reality of a situation that he was ill equipped to handle.

CNN released a letter that Paterno had written shortly before his death addressing the scandal that he helped foster through his wrong-headed protective instincts. Paterno couldn’t have been more definitive or more defiant: the Sandusky scandal wasn’t a football scandal and it wasn’t an academic scandal.

It’s exactly the same kind of thinking as the trustees who oversaw his pathetic reign. If Joe says it’s a certain way then that’s the way it must be.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again.

That Sandusky was a serial pedophile preying on vulnerable young men isn’t unique to football generally, but it had everything to do with Penn State football. Sandusky used that program as his own personal recruiting tool for vulnerable children. Paterno used his position in that program and with the university to shield Sandusky from further scrutiny. If using the football program and its facilities with the permission and acquiescence of people in charge who should have known better but didn’t to further pedophilia isn’t a football scandal, then what exactly is it?

The NCAA is all about punishing schools and players who use the advantages of athletics to further their own personal and/or economic interests. Maybe our small minds can only grasp what that means when its players getting free tattoos or selling their gear for rent money. But that’s not a sufficient reason nor will it ever be when it involves a school, a program and its leaders deliberately ignoring the most heinous form of human trafficking as a sick, twisted bastard was in their midst getting his jollies fondling children. They did it to preserve the program from embarrassment and to keep the spigot of money turned on full blast without interruption. just so they can avoid embarrassing publicity.

Penn State, as an institution, is infected with a toxic mold and it’s going to take more than a little bleach to get it clean. If the Board of Trustees doesn’t immediately dismantle the Paterno statue as the most immediate step and then follow it up by suspending the football program indefinitely and perhaps forever, it will serve as a reminder that a winning team and the money it generates is more important than honesty, integrity, virtue and, ultimately, just doing the right damn thing.