A Tribute to Bloated Excess

You have to hand it to the NFL. The annual meat market known as the Combine has started and it’s generating all the excitement that the NFL expected when it decided to invite noodnik reporters inside the ropes to watch anonymous-looking faux student athletes attempt to trade in on their three or four year commitment to do the minimum amount of academic work at various Division I schools while enhancing the athletic budgets of said schools so that they could then get on with their life’s work, a 3-4 year career in the NFL that starts with them getting drafted in the fifth or sixth round and ends with them as another Bill Belichick-inspired salary cap victim.

In a completely related story, the NFL revealed Thursday that it wants to overhaul the NFL’s offseason, essentially pushing everything back a month not because it is concerned about the players or safety or anything substantive like that but because it wants to ensure it has relevant events in each month of the offseason, part of the NFL’s quixotic quest to be as ubiquitous in March as it is in October. This is a problem of the NFL’s making, like most problems in the NFL, and as usual they are crafting their uniquely NFL resolution.
  
The problem with the NFL schedule right now, looking at it solely from the point of view of the branding experts the NFL hires to help run its business, is that the event the NFL manufactured out of the Combine now bumps into the event the NFL manufactured out of its once quaint championship game. Both events now dominate February and March is now a sleepy, dead month where free agency begins and teams work behind the scenes in the run up to the event the NFL manufactured out of the draft, which takes place in April.
 
You can well see the problem, right? It’s not just that free agency, which starts in March, doesn’t generate constant coverage, though ESPN tries its damndest to make it so. It’s more that it’s not a visual event. Local television crews are reduced to tracking incoming flights to see who might be visiting Berea and where they might be having dinner but that’s good for about 30 seconds, at best, and it’s all local. The NFL gets little buzz. And for good measure, if you think it’s boring to listen to Joe Banner drone on and on about renovations to the Berea complex, wait until you hear him drone on and on in March about free agents the team won’t actually sign and draft prospects that the team has no intention of pursuing. If you’re the aforesaid NFL branding expert, is that how you really want fans in Cleveland to view your product during March? How about New England where Belichick would rather have a colonoscopy than talk to the press, be it March or December?

Step one of course was to move the Super Bowl into February. If you think it seems nutsy to play football in February in New Orleans, wait until you get the unique thrill it is to play football outdoors in February in New Jersey. But pushing the Super Bowl into February helped distance the NFL’s annual tribute to excess from the more mundane and generally more compelling playoff games that serve as the preliminaries.

Nothing and I mean absolutely nothing can beat the Super Bowl as the most uniquely American event ever. It’s the reason the Taliban hate us. It’s a Las Vegas hotel buffet on steroids shoving pancakes deep fried in lard and coated in chocolate and powered sugar down our throats. There isn’t a story too small, too insignificant to merit a 10 minute piece on Sportscenter. It’s a place where Martha Stewart mingles breezily with Snoop Dog and the rest of us act like it’s normal despite the fact that in any other context Martha Stewart wouldn’t get within two states of bumping into Snoop Dog as he entertains sycophantic white kids from the ‘burbs with his clichéd admixture of marijuana and misogyny.

The Super Bowl is a celebration of almost everything the NFL aspires to be, assuming it aspires only to be a money printing operation. By the time the game is actually played, most people are tuned in not for the action on the field but for the commercials in between.

The Super Bowl may have grown somewhat organically from humble roots to bloated excess but don’t think for a moment that the NFL would change a thing about it, from the staid entertainment (Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band serving as such a glaring exception that I no longer believe that they actually performed but that I imagined it, Bobby Ewing style, as the real entertainment, Styx, ran through an even more overwrought version of The Grand Illusion) to the 12 hour pre games, to the fireworks and the smoke and the National Anthem and the nip slips and, oh yea, the game. Even this year’s blackout actually seems to have been contrived to revitalize a game that was on life support at that very moment.

So, yea, the Super Bowl gets February and all the post game analysis should spill into the few weeks thereafter, that’s the theory anyway. But when the NFL branding experts pushed the Super Bowl into February its glow, which by their calculations should linger for about 18 days thereafter, was getting snuffed out by the Combine, which those same branding experts advised should likewise become an event.

That’s the sole reason, I think, that the NFL Network was invented in the first place. In its early days it offered exactly nothing of any interest to any fan anywhere. That’s still mostly true, actually. But then the branding experts hit on an idea, a perfectly wonderful awful idea. Cover the Combine. And boy do they. From the 40 yard dash to the squat thrust to the cones and to whatever other activity some Torquemada wannabe NFL assistant devised to simultaneously test and embarrass a college kid. What I’m waiting for is for the NFL to broadcast the Wonderlic test administered verbally and with real-time scoring. “What did George Washington say when he crossed the Delaware?” “Poop poop pe doop, poop poop pe doop.”

And let’s just say it and get it over with. The Combine is stupid. If it once had some usefulness it doesn’t any longer. The best prospects shit all over it by refusing to participate, a small and final act of defiance before those prospects fall under the iron fist of the NFL and the increasing fines it administers for virtually any act of noncompliance. At best it serves only to confirm what each team’s scouting department already knows and if it didn’t exist it wouldn’t matter. Teams still bring in all the prospects they want after the Combine ends to do exactly the same thing, confirm what they already know.

But the Combine does serve a larger purpose. Its phony substantive bend, and the reporters who blindly follow the narrative, make it seem as though something is happening. That in turn generates column inches and video reports on every imaginable outlet in the service of the NFL’s ultimate goal, brand awareness. It literally dominates all football talk in February; I mean all football talk once the Super Bowl is in the rear view mirror. Because there’s no turning back on the Combine, mainly because the NFL never turns back on anything, ever, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, it was only a matter of time before it got a full month all to itself. And that will happen when the NFL gets its way, which eventually it will, with the union and revamp the calendar so that the Combine is in March and the draft moves to May. That will make April the dead month of free agency and prospect probing.

I’d like to think that the NFL would cede April to baseball as it’s season opens, but I know better. I’ve been covering this hapless group for far too long already. Somewhere in a conference room on Madison Avenue some branding expert is focus grouping an idea for a Free Agency Bazaar that runs from April 4th through April 21st on Miami’s South Beach. when it happens remember you heard it here first and that now I own the copyright.

Posted with Blogsy

Lingering Items--Ownership Edition

There’s no real playbook for how exactly one goes about the business of actually owning a professional sports team except, of course, the requirement that you have or have access to plenty of money.  But once secured, the day to day job of owning a team is mostly a blank canvas.  Jimmy Haslam, the now-conflicted owner of the Cleveland Browns, apparently is still early on in feeling his way through the process and fans here are worried.

As you’ll recall Haslam gave up the CEO job at His Pilot Flying J truck stop empire in favor of doing whatever it is that owners of professional sports teams do.  In the few months he’s actually owned the Browns, that included quite a bit of activity.  He finessed Mike Holmgren out of town, he fired a general manager and hired another, he fired a coach and hired another, he met with city leaders and then, for good measure, he secured a nice little annuity for his team by selling the naming rights to its stadium for a 20 year term.  It was certainly more than 6 days of work.

But having crossed off those tasks from the mental list of “to dos” that he keeps, Haslam started to realize that there wasn’t much left for him to do at the moment particularly if he was going to allow the people he hired to run his football business to actually do their jobs.

So Haslam decided to push out the executive he just hired from Pepsico to run Pilot Flying J by giving him a different role and took back his old job of CEO.  It was kind of a ballsy move, actually, the kind we’re not used to seeing here in Cleveland.  Holmgren for example couldn’t muster the courage to fire Eric Mangini and put himself in as head coach when that was all he really wanted to do.  Indeed the Holmgren example is instructive.

One of the reasons Holmgren ended up being a lousy whatever the hell he was stemmed from his inability to see himself as anything other than a coach.  He lacked the guts to take the job himself when that would have served both him and the fans far better than hiring Pat Shurmur.  Holmgren thus dithered in a role he was ill suited to play, grew bored quickly and mailed in his job performance, figuratively and literally.  In that sense and with that as a data point, maybe it is good that Haslam went back to what makes him happy.

But Haslam better become more sensitive to the fan base he serves.  Fans here don’t like finding out from the local newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee that he’s had a change of heart about how he spends his day.  They wanted to hear it first hand and didn’t.  Haslam owed this courtesy to the Cleveland fans he expects to support his now hobby and not to the citizens of Knoxville who were just getting to know the new guy at Pilot Flying J.

As to the move itself, Haslam is adamant that nothing has changed regarding his commitment to the team, telling the Plain Dealer that “I don’t think anyone would question our passion, effort, intensity or devotion to the Cleveland Browns and, candidly, to Northeast Ohio.  Our family has a tremendous investment, and we want to win as bad as anybody does up there and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win.”

Not a bad rejoinder to those who would question his commitment but it would have been more effective if he had not referred to the fans as “anybody..up there.”  It probably would have been the opportune time to start referencing the collective “we” and not remind everyone that depending on the route you take, there’s one possibly two states between where his team plays and where his real passion lies.

This is where we get into the whole “how exactly does one actually go about being an owner?” discussion.

In Cleveland the last two owners have had no other job beyond owning the team and I don’t think anyone would hold either up as a model owner or a model for Haslam to emulate.  Art Modell didn’t adapt to the idle time well so he tinkered and tinkered with the team, convinced himself that he knew as much about football as anyone on the planet, and set in motion a decades long course of losing everything he built because of it.  Randy Lerner on the other hand had an immense capacity for being bored perhaps the difference from Modell being the fact that at least Modell at one time in his life actually held a job.  Lerner was like the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy, dividing each day into increments of frivolity in order to make his spectacularly inane existence manageable.

I suspect that most owners in the NFL have some outside business interests that keep them busy during the down days of the NFL, meaning mid February through mid July, but on the other hand Haslam is now one of the very few owners in the NFL who has a completely separate full time job as CEO of a pretty good sized company.  That role requires him to satisfy a whole host of constituents, not the least of which are family members with sizeable stakes in said company.  In other words, Haslam as CEO requires a fair amount of attention to that task.

Does that mean Haslam is destined to become another crappy owner of the Browns?  Not necessarily but there is pause, isn’t there?  By default, Haslam won’t assimilate very quickly if at all in the local community.  In that regard, his “up there” comment is very telling.  Then there is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about—the management team he put in place to run the Browns in his absence.  Fans seem relatively sold on Joe Banner as, I guess, club president or whatever he’s calling himself, but are less so on Mike Lombardi who, whatever his title might be, is the guy populating the team with free agents and draft picks.

Haslam as absentee-owner (and a house in Bratenhal that he says he’ll occupy once or twice a week in season doesn’t make him resident) could work but at the very least the jump he made back to the family business was too soon.  Fans have not had an opportunity to get comfortable with the team Haslam put in place and given all of the other similar teams put in place before them there’s a pretty good chance that fans will never get comfortable with them.

I think Haslam owed it to the fans to stay the course he set out, basically promised, when he became owner.  It was a bit of a bait and switch and is now another reason for fans to think that this isn’t going to work out any better than anything else that’s been tried. The fans may not be right, indeed they usually aren't, but it's up to Haslam to prove them wrong and right now he hasn't made much of an effort to do that.

**

Speaking of owners, the Cleveland Indians’ Larry and Paul Dolan are putting together a nice little offseason for themselves.  When they set out to rectify the chief criticism of them it should be noted.  And so it is that the Dolans have pumped an additional $20+ million into the payroll and hired an actual, honest-to-gosh successful manager for this upcoming season in an effort to rebuild fan faith and recapture fan enthusiasm.

For what it’s worth, it’s hard to tell really whether either of the Dolans are otherwise gainfully employed outside of their duties as owners.  They have investments certainly and other businesses but neither are acting as CEOs of other on-going concerns.  Has that helped or hurt the Indians, hard to say.  But I think the fact that they live locally assuage any concerns about their commitment to the town or team.  The concern with them has always been their financial wherewithal and their generally self-fulfilling prophesy way of running a team they purposely labeled small market so that they could justify running it in small market ways.

The Dolans haven’t become the Steinbrenners but no one expected them to.  But for the first time in years they have decided that reinvestment was needed, the growing number of empty seats around Progressive Field being a serious clue.

There’s no way of knowing at the moment whether the Terry Francono, Michael Bourn or Nick Swisher moves will bear fruit except in the Cleveland-curse sort of way that we know nothing ever works out like it should.  But rightful credit is due to the Dolans and to general manager Chris Antonetti for doing something.  They had to.  If the offseason had consisted simply of bringing in a washed up Jason Giambi and a weak armed Daisuke Matsuzaka, and we’ve had exactly those kinds of offseason in each of the last 10 years, then fans would have blown their brains out.  To put a sharper point on it, fans would have stayed away in even bigger numbers than last season and the Dolans would find themselves struggling to meet the modest attendance totals of the Indians circa any year prior to the move to what is now Progressive Field.

At this point there isn’t any question that the Indians are an improved team from the mess that was last season but just how improved is the real question.  Perhaps the biggest question though is whether this is a one year cash infusion or part of a multi year plan to actually reinvest in the franchise and get it back to where it can actually compete.

Where the Dolans have failed the fans in the past has been in not building on a previous season’s success.  That they have finally reinvested in the team is great and is applauded but it must be part of an overall attitude change and not a one time event or the alienation from the fans they feared for this year will simply be delayed by a year.

**

This all brings us to the last owner in town, Dan Gilbert.  He’s closest, perhaps, to the model that Haslam seems to be adopting.  Gilbert is a Detroit person through and through but what he’s done to overcome the perception as an out of towner has been to move some of his business operations to Cleveland.  Jimmy, are you listening?

The other thing though is that Gilbert, in the various enterprises he has going including the new casino, is perhaps the most distracted owner in town.  Has that negatively impacted the Cavaliers?  Hard to say and the reason it’s hard to say is that the NBA is by far the toughest league in which to build a team back up from the bottom.

The NBA’s history is irrefutable at this point.  Once a team sinks to the bottom it’s at least a decade before it’s competitive again and that’s assuming competent management.  You can try to accelerate the timetable but it’s rarely been done.  The salary cap and the draft lottery combine in a unique way to keep bad teams down for as long as possible.  The Cavs seem on track in that regard.

The reason Gilbert seethed when LeBron James left had everything to do with the financial impact it would have on Gilbert’s empire knowing this history.  With James out of the mix, the Cavs overnight became a bottom tier team with all of the bottom tier  perks that come with that status such as empty seats and decreasing revenues.  If the Cavs were a stand alone enterprise that would be one thing.  But the residual impact of those empty seats spills over to concessions and, more particularly, to a difficulty attracting casual gamblers to the Horseshoe Casino.  A full Quickens Loan Arena for 40+ winter nights a year translates to a lot of lost money at the gaming tables and slots.

Would the Cavs be further along if Gilbert were focused entirely on the Cavs?  Again, hard to say.  Gilbert, like Haslam, believes in hiring professionals to run the business while providing oversight that hardly requires a 24/7 level of concentration.  So Gilbert’s success, like Haslam’s, will depend fully on whether the general managers they have on hand are up to the challenge.

**
A popular question floating around this past week, given the Indians' moves, has been which local team is closest to the playoffs? The better question and this week's question to ponder is which local team is the furthest?

Lingering Items--Losers Edition

As compelling as Sunday’s Super Bowl ended up being, I never lost the sense, not even for a moment, that I'd be conflicted No matter who ever would end up winning. Would it be Baltimore, the city that played a desperate doddering old man like Art Modell like a Spanish guitar as they stole what wasn’t theirs because someone stole what was, or the San Francisco 49ers a team led by a former Michigan quarterback?

In the end, I rooted, and hard, for the 49ers because the Ohio State connections outweighed or at least cancelled out the Michigan influence. Mostly, though I rooted for San Francisco because Ray Lewis is a douche.
Let’s be clear on this point. I didn’t actually care who won and I wasn’t even so much rooting against Lewis and his team winning as much as I was just so sick of everything Ray Lewis that as usual he made it easy to pick against his team.
The convenient lazy postscript is that Lewis ended up being one of a handful of players who compiled a storied career and ended up going out on top. Know this much. Lewis had a storied career and Lewis' last game resulted in a Super Bowl victory for his team. But that will never mean that Lewis leaves as a winner. If there was one shining moment in an otherwise dismal outcome for the team I wanted it was watching Lewis get pushed around like the paperweight he’d become. Believe me when I tell you this, there isn’t one person in the Baltimore Ravens organization, from owner Steve Bisciotti to Ozzie Newsome to the ball boys (who may or may not be led by Eric Mangini as he tries to resurrect a career he sabotaged) who if you got a few Scotches in them wouldn’t admit that he’s glad Lewis and the circus are leaving town.
At best Lewis a distraction. At most he’s a shadow presence who played long past his expiration date. The problem is that the team couldn’t afford to bench Lewis because as the self-appointed heart and soul of the team Lewis put himself (cleverly, I’ll give him that) in a no-touch position. So now John Harbaugh and company no longer have to concern themselves with the Ray Lewis problem. They can actually put someone in there that is competent.
Lewis evokes that visceral reaction in everyone not associated with the Baltimore franchise. Watching the game and all its festivities made me realize once again what an insufferable prick Lewis really is. From the bizarre pre-game interview he gave to Shannon Sharpe, and interview in which he said that he can't be the guy people think (i.e. an accessory to double murder) because God wouldn't allow him to do so much good if he was such a bad guy, to the heavy eye black makeup that passed useful about two exits ago, Lewis is not the embodiment of what the NFL should be pushing forward but a sad, pathetic example of what the NFL has become, a sport that rails against bad actors publicly but rewards them privately.
Lewis is a poser and there are a whole generation of posers just in the NFL that got their start because they saw Mr. Ray act like an asshole while the cameras rolled during the pre-game huddle that essentially featured Lewis chanting incoherently while seemingly whipping himself into a reality-camera induced frenzy. It was always just an act.
But being a poser is hardly an egregious sin these days. In his case, save it for the abject phoniness that is all things Lewis. In his later years he became a self-described man of Christ who seems to have missed a few of the lessons along the way, busy as he was siring six illegitimate children with four different women. Then there was that whole little incident Lewis tries to so blithely shush away involving a double murder. There are plenty of articles around the internets about it so no need to recap it except to note that Lewis eventually plea bargained his involvement down to obstruction of justice, weirdly escaping prison, and then paid hefty private settlements to the families of the two slain men. No one accused Lewis of actually sticking the knife in the two victims with whom he and his posse fought but he was there, his white blood stained suit mysteriously disappeared and there was blood in his limousine. No wonder he settled.
Lewis is likely a Hall of Famer, probably first ballot. He certainly has an impressive playing resume from his early days and he’s been living off that for at least the last 5 years, probably longer. But he probably did enough in his first 10 years to warrant his enshrinement mainly because when it comes to getting elected to the Hall of Fame it’s one thing to be involved in double murder and obstruction of justice aren't nearly the barriers to entry as moving a franchise has proven to be.

**

Speaking of vainglorious jackasses that moved franchises, it was good to see that the Hall of Fame electors chose to kick Art Modell’s candidacy to the curb once again. I suspect you won’t see Art reconsidered until the senior committee lets him in a decade or two from now as an overlooked great of the game.

As with Lewis there’s no need to recount all of Art’s transgressions to make the point about why he doesn’t deserve football’s ultimate honor, not now not ever. That’s what the internets are for. But the fact that the Baltimore media keep pushing his candidacy is both appalling and a marker for why sports journalism has become a nearly worthless endeavor.

Bill Simmons, writing on his Grantland website, gave a startling confessional about the dichotomy between writing what he really feels and writing what is politically correct. It’s what’s kept him from calling out in more forceful terms the cheaters that overwhelm all our sports and instead marveling in their artificially enhanced endeavors. And as Simmons notes, he’s not alone. There’s a whole profession dedicated to doing pretty much the same thing so as to not risk its access.

It’s that same mentality that pushes the sycophantic writers in Baltimore to keep pushing Modell for the Hall of Fame. It keeps them on the inside. That they have to change facts isn't even an issue. Fox News has built an entire network on the concept that facts are debatable. Besides, they don’t want to deal in facts so much as appease an audience that doesn’t want to hear anything negative about the scumbag that screwed an entire city. I have no doubt that these same hacks using the exact same motivation would lead the charge to deny Bob Irsay enshrinement into the Hall of Fame if he was ever a serious candidate. Irsay bad, Modell good.
Guys like Modell don’t deserve to be held up as paragons of virtue. He was anything but. His life at best was a set of competing narratives. There was the good/funny Art, the guy who supported charities and such when the cameras rolled and there was a fundraiser to attend. There was the bad/deceitful Art that lied about moving the Browns and screwed his business partners. The Hall of Fame isn’t for the good/funny kind who donate to charity. Ray Lewis can lay claim to charitable works but I can guarantee you that no one will feel a need to base the decision to put him in the Hall of Fame simply because he found a way to shield income by establishing a Foundation that gave some money to some kids in need. It’s what Lewis accomplished on the field that will make or break his candidacy and so it is with Modell as well. Modell was a loser of the first order in Cleveland. All he did was run off good coaches, make one bad football decision after another, screw the city that flowed millions his way, robbed the fans of a team they blindly supported his follies, all while compiling a record that never did result in a Super Bowl victory until he moved the franchise and for once put it in the hands of those far more competent. The day that qualifies for a bust in the main wing of the Hall of Fame is the day they should shut it down permanently.
**
As it does every year about this time, well, for the last 42 years anyway, the Browns latest bunch of brass is regrouping and trying to figure out how to close the gap between themselves and this year’s Super Bowl champ.
They have their work cut out for them.
On defense I hesitate to say but say anyway that the teams aren’t all that far apart. The Browns have no one who could quite match Ngata, either in temperament or accomplishment, or Ed Reed. And while those are two are a very big presence, the rest of Baltimore’s defense was shaky at best. You could see that on Sunday, particularly when Haloti Ngata left the game.
It’s offense where the Browns have miles to go before they sleep, miles to go before they sleep. Joe Flacco was shaky this past season and then suddenly the switch went on. He played well the last month of the season but really you could actually see the difference starting with the second half of the New England playoff game. Flacco was struggling and so were the Ravens. Then Flacco put it together, his passes suddenly got crisp and he became a real leader. That carried into the Super Bowl. It helps that the Ravens offensive line is solid as are their running backs and receivers but ultimately Flaccos was the difference.
Contrast that with the Browns and you can easily understand why owner Jimmy Haslam already announced that Brandon Wheeden will face competition. Haslam learned early on that this is a quarterback-centric league and the sooner the Browns find a good one who isn't a 30-year-old sophomore the sooner they'll really begin to close the gap.
**
With the news this past week that Travis Hafner wrestled a million or so dollars out of the Yankees despite an irrefutable track record that says he won't play in even half of the games, this week's question to ponder is who will have a better record at season's end, the Indians or the Yankees.

Posted with Blogsy

Lingering Items--A Banner Edition

There are any number of ways to look at the upcoming Super Bowl and the local and national media won't tire of trying to tell you what that should be.  But really if you're a Browns fan is there any other context than to look at the participants and use them as a benchmark for how far your team has to go? Didn't think so.

For in truth, the only point of the NFL, indeed all sports really, is to find a way to get to the top of the mountain.   When you're a team like the Browns that can't ever seem to exit base camp, all you can do at this time of year is to watch the better climbers do what they do best and figure out how to be one of them when you grow up.

The Browns journey over the last decade plus  has been quixotic, to say the least.  To say the most it's been one big cluster after another and while we've dissected all the reasons why until we're as sick as sick can be, the fact remains that neither the patient nor those who care about it most (that's you, the fans) has gotten any better.  This is the narrative that we all know so well, including now owner Jimmy Haslam and his right hand hatchet man Joe Banner.

Haslam has made no great missteps since he bought into the Billionaire Boys Club known as the NFL unless you count his almost blinding trust of Banner.  This isn't a screed about Banner, however, just a cautionary note that while Haslam's methodology is sound it success still hinges on the execution by people.  Banner has enough of a resume to warrant some level of trust but right now the fans are a little queasy placing their faith in the guy who just placed his fate in the combined talents of Rob Chudzinski and Mike Lombardi.

At first I was confused because I assumed that the Browns and Banner were thinking of the guy who played Mike Lombardi in the TV show Rescue Me as their new personnel guy.  Sure that Lombardi was confused about his sexuality but he was a helluva fireman and always had Tommy's back.  So that had to count for something.  Then someone told me it wasn't that Mike Lombardi but the recycled nut job who helped run Bernie Kosar out of town.  That didn't exactly clear things up until I remembered that this is Cleveland and nothing smells as fresh as a repainted house.  So yea, it made as much sense as the Cavs blind faith in Byron Scott.

The trepidation about the actual Mike Lombardi (and Chudzinski) is well earned, sure, but at what point do the fans just sit back and let it all be?  There have been seemingly far more competent hires in the Browns' recent past and yet not a single damn one of them worked out. I suppose then just on the basis of that rare combination of dumb luck and contrarian thinking there's every reason to hope that this can work.

I know more about why Chudzinski hasn't yet been a head coach (young, paying his dues) then the reasons why Lombardi's been on the sidelines for the last 5 years giving curbside opinions into open microphones instead of showering his brilliance on some other wanting franchise.   Maybe the right situation didn't materialize.  Maybe he liked the non pressured life of a pundit.  Maybe no one until Banner trusted him enough to make personnel decisions for real.  So Lombardi enters the fray here in Cleveland with a cloud hanging over him, which is nothing new for virtually and Cleveland sports hire, and an upcoming draft that will either make other teams look stupid for ignoring his acumen for so long or confirm Browns' fans worst fears.

But hell, let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt for now and treat it as if there's a choice. Let's remember that in most circles outside of Cleveland a recommendation, particularly a glowing one, by Bill Belichick, is highly valued.  That doesn't have to be good enough here mainly because Browns fans would be nervous if Belichick up and quit the Patriots and came back to coach Cleveland instead.  But there's really no way of knowing how Lombardi will perform until he does.  Besides let's stop acting as if something terrible will happen if Lombardi does turn out to be the devil.  This franchise through all its losing has proven to be remarkably resilient and the fans remarkably forgiving as it waits for some sort of oracle who probably never will arrive.

**

Are you finding the budding feud between Banner and his childhood buddy and former boss, Eagles owner Jeff Lurie delightfully perverse? I know I am. When Banner and Haslam escaped Arizona without doing something really stupid like making a flavor-of-the-month, always-chokes-when-the-pressure's-greatest, no NFL experience, getting-out-of-Dodge-before-the-NCAA-can-saddle-up guy like Chip Kelly the highest paid head coach in the NFL, they did so because Kelly was vascillating. An attention whore at heart but as decisive as a 6-year-old in Dylan's Candy Shop, Kelly wasn't coming across as all-in. While flirting with Haslam he also was making goo-goo eyes at Lurie and secretly texting his love to Phil Knight. So the Browns' contingent left and Kelly went back to Oregon, a classic case of overplaying a truly lucky hand.

But when the Eagles couldn't find a suitable date they called back Kelly and he proved he isn't always as stupid as he's been and jumped. A press conference was held and all sorts of cutesy pointed barbs were hurled toward banner by Lurie and the next thing you know a rivalry has taken hold. Gosh I hope not.

I'm all for circling the wagons around the locals and protecting them from the invaders but really, what's the point?  Lurie is an idiot. He ran a perfectly successful coach out of town in favor of a perfectly enigmatic question mark.  Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't but why get all grouchy about it? It's not as if the Browns and the Eagles are tethered by their division. They aren't even in the same conference. Chip Kelly could go on to be the next Bill Belichick and Rob Chudzinski could go on to become the next Chris Palmer and it still wouldn't make me question the decision to leave Kelly standing on the tarmac of Sky Harbor airport picking at his scabs. Kelly is a shady character and the Browns always will be better off without him.

On the other hand if Banner engages the fight by bringing in a washed up Michael Vick in order to try and prove a point, then I will start to worry mostly because what's business will have turned personal and that's just one more distraction this franchise doesn't need.

**

Norv Turner was officially introduced to the media by way of a press conference with his new boss earlier this week and all attention turned to the “Brandon Weeden Question.”  Basically, is Weeden the guy or not?

The early verdict is that it’s too soon to tell.  Chudzinski and Turner say they have to look at some more film, talk to Weeden, etc ad nauseum.  But if Brandon Weeden doesn't fit the offense that,Chudzinski and Turner have in mind, well, doesn't that just figure?  Weeden was a risk pick based on age alone. He needed to impress immediately because of his age and instead ended up as one of the worst quarterbacks in the league, a player who had some early downs, some mid season ups and some end of season disasters.  He played like a typical rookie, assuming that rookie was 10 years younger.

Weren’t fans told that Weeden’s age was an advantage?  Whatever extra maturity he brings didn’t particularly translate on the field and so now what Turner and Chudzinski face is a 30 year old second year quarterback.

Will Weeden develop isn't as much the question as will he develop in enough time? That's the question Turner, Chudzinski and Lombardi will debate in one form or another for the next several months. It's the most important personnel question they face and the one they can least afford to screw up.

That said what's the effective alternative? Is there someone coming out in this year's draft that makes the Weeden question a no-brainier?   Hardly. Throw in Weeden's contract, a contract that reflects his actual draft position instead of where he was projected, and you immediately get the sense that no matter how many hours the Browns' current brain trust debates the matter, no matter how much film they watch, no matter how many times they take in vain the names of the previous Browns' brain trust who put them in this position, Weeden will be back under center or in the shotgun come next year's season opener.  Call it the Travis Hafner syndrome—too much contract to dump.

In other words, pray that Banner and Lombardi do the right thing and resign Phil Dawson. I see lots of stalled out drives in the Browns’ future.

**

Getting back to Kelly, he's the subject of this week's question to ponder:  What's the over/under on how long he'll stay in the NFL?

A World Class Creep

Lance Armstrong is a liar, but that’s hardly the extent of his sins.  He’s also a thief, a fraud, a serial cheat, a gutless bully and about the worst possible guy you can ever imagine a guy being.  While there seems to be a growing trend in the media at the moment to put Armstrong’s transgressions on some sort of sliding scale giving him a relative pass for some and railing against him for others, there’s no need for the exercise.  He’s a despicable being unworthy of anything more than completely fading from the national conscious and crawling back under the rock where he came from.

I’m not buying the current narrative that seems to excuse his cheating under the guise that everyone in bicycling did it.  Yea, everyone did it and they did it because the guy that was winning and kicking their asses was doing it and they knew it.  They were doing it to level a playing field that Armstrong deliberately tilted in his favor.  That doesn’t excuse their transgressions either but let’s face it the “everyone does it” defense is used because it works.  It also illustrates why even the now pedestrian charge of using performance enhancing drugs doesn’t seem to hardly raise an eyebrow these days.

But I will concede that if Armstrong merely took the drugs and kept to himself, sort of like Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens,  that would be bad enough but perhaps not world ending bad, especially these days.  But Armstrong was about so much more, so much hideously more.

In pursuit of perpetuating his continuing fraud on the world Armstrong deliberately went about trying to destroy everyone who got in his path, men, women and children, without a second thought to the damage he was doing.  Lives have been ruined by and because of Armstrong.  And all for what?  So he can go on Oprah Winfrey’s fledging, failing network, boost her profile and ratings, in what, some sort of redemption tour in a pathetic attempt to reclaim a competitive sports career?  Lance Armstrong perjured himself when he testified under oath to that which he now says isn’t true.  A statute of limitations on that crime may keep him from prosecution but the simple fact is that Lance Armstrong should be in jail.

The reaction thus far has been fairly interesting if not predictable to Armstrong’s confessional, particularly given how calculated it all was, though eventually I expect it will probably take the familiar arc that Armstrong is banking on: shock, disgust, forgiveness, celebration.  Here’s hoping that this is one cycle that breaks.

Armstrong had the first opportunity not to go down the path of performance enhancing drugs.  No one held a gun to his empty head and forced him to dope.  In fact it was more the other way around.  Armstrong held the careers and fates of others in his hands and pushed them to follow his illegal lead time and time again.

Having chosen to cheat, Armstrong then went at his craft fully vested in lying, cheating and stealing a thousand times over to his fans, his sponsors and anyone else with even a fleeting interest in bicycling.  When someone broke ranks, Armstrong got insular and combative in the most destructive way possible.  You could Google Armstrong’s reactions to the various claims made against him over the years by journalists, doping agencies and fellow riders and you’d end up with pages of denials.  And they weren’t denials by deflection, the sort of “everyone just wants to see someone who is successful, who beat the odds, fail” denials that really act as hedges in case the truth is ever discovered.  They were denials of absolute certainty built on taking the supposedly higher moral ground against those who would bear false witness to his greatness.  Lance Armstrong is a true sociopath, a sociopath of such historic proportions that he should be immortalized in the same way that Charles Ponzi is immortalized.  Now when athletes and their enablers cheat through drugs, deception, fraud, you name it, we should say they are pulling an Armstrong Scheme.

Ponzi may not even be the best comparator to the kind of long-term fraud that Armstrong engaged in.  A better one is probably Bernie Madoff.  The comparisons are eerily similar.  Both built empires off of modest talent originally that could never sustain the outsized and unattainable dreams they had for themselves.  So they both cut corners, small ones at first and then bigger ones along the way to keep the lie going and to keep the money flowing.  It wasn’t enough for either to simply build a small fortune for themselves by defrauding others while remaining off the radar screen.  They both had to live large, build bigger until eventually the energy and level of deception it took to maintain the fundamental lie collapsed by its own weight on their thick skulls and amoral souls.

But the American people are a gullible and forgiving sort.  There will be columns like this one trying their best to remind people of the seriousness of Armstrong’s crimes.  They won’t do much good.  Armstrong will face a mountain of legal trouble as those he’s wronged line up against him to reclaim all they lost by daring to confront one of the biggest liars, cheats and frauds in American history.  Yet as sure as I’m writing this is as sure as I am that eventually the pendulum will swing back in Armstrong’s direction.  His calculating, devious mind is counting on it and there’s no reason to bet against him on that. 

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency did everyone a huge favor by spelling out in abject, crystal clear detail the extent of Armstrong’s cheating and yet it’s instructive to note how many people still came to Armstrong’s defense.  The most flagrant has been Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post columnist and a rider on the Armstrong gravy train as the co-author of two Armstrong books of lies, particularly when she wrote a mystifying defense of Armstrong just about a month ago.  

Styled as a thought piece meant to justify her own role in furthering Armstrong’s fraudulent narrative, Jenkins gave Armstrong a pass despite the mountains of evidence against him by hinting first of a hatchet job by the USADA in their pursuit of Armstrong (a high class way of parroting Armstrong’s charge that it was a witch hunt, proving as always that she and Iran’s Minister of Information had more in common than even she thought) as well as a more pointed indictment of the unfairness of drug testing in general (another favorite Armstrong target).  It was clear from the column, just as it’s been clear for years, that Jenkins was too seduced by Armstrong and all his hollow, grandiose statements about competing to see the fraud for what he was.  She was not a journalist in any sense of the word but a fan girl whose credibility and position was used by Armstrong to provide him the cover he needed to further his grand myth. To paraphrase Ms. Jenkins and her column, maybe I’m not mad at Sally Jenkins because I understand how even with all the professional advances a woman like Jenkins can make as a sports journalist a good looking man can usually get what he wants from her just by charming her with the words she wants to hear.

Jenkins and her school girl crush have forever ruined her credibility and for that she should be summarily fired by the Post.  If she had a shred of dignity, she’d resign before they have to make that choice but I suspect she too is so steeped in denial that she doesn’t realize how shameless she became in order to protect a criminal.  Jenkins won’t lose her job and she won’t resign but more to the point does anyone think that Armstrong cares about the fate of someone like Jenkins either way?  Armstrong has already proven he doesn’t care about anyone but Lance Armstrong because he’s as fully entrenched now in controlling the uncontrollable damage his crimes have caused as he was in perpetrating those crimes in the first place.

Another acolyte was Buzz Bissinger, the opinionated loudmouth writer of Friday Night Lights who wrote a fawning piece about Armstrong this past August for Newsweek.  Bissinger bought into the lies, something he now strongly regrets.  Writing for the Daily Beast on Monday, Bissinger now says he was conned by Armstrong and that virtually nothing Armstrong says to Oprah or anyone else should be believed.  Good for Bissinger for seeing the light.

There will be some handwringing certainly by Armstrong defenders as they try to contextualize him in much the same way that Joe Paterno defenders still fight tirelessly to contextualize him.  Armstrong and his Lance Armstrong Foundation (recently renamed the LiveStrong Foundation in order to distance itself from such a world class creep) certainly did some good in the world for cancer victims.  But let’s not forget that this good was furthered mostly by true believers in the Armstrong myth and not Armstrong himself.  Every step he took, every breath he uttered was built on lies and even though those lies pushed others to do good in his name they can never be seen as justifying his underlying deceptions.  Every action he took supposedly in the service of others was merely part of the scam, meant to deflect attention away from the shady, immoral and unethical way he built his narrative in the first place. 

Armstrong gets a pass on nothing.  He can and probably should ask God for forgiveness.  He just shouldn’t ask or expect it from anyone else.

The "It" Factor

Before he officially took over as the new owner of the Cleveland Browns, Jimmy Haslam III went on a tour to visit his soon-to-be partners in the money printing business better known as the NFL.  With the hiring of Rob Chudzinski as the new head coach, it’s apparent what Haslam learned on that tour: it’s more important to hire a guy that looks like he has that new car smell then one who actually does. 

It’s why, really, Chip Kelly did Haslam and team president (CEO? Czar? I forget his title) Joe Banner a favor by taking his fat butt back to Oregon.  Kelly would have been an interloper to the ways of the NFL where stripes are better earned over the many miles traveled as a low paid assistant first.  No one wants a repeat of the Lane Kiffin/Oakland Raiders experience, including Haslam.

All that said, Chudzinski may be a surprise of a hire and with a barely indistinguishable resume from the recently-fired Pat Shurmur but he does have a certain sort of “it” factor, if Susie Spanos is any sort of judge.  Let me explain.

Shortly after Chudzinski was hired by the Browns in 2007 as the offensive coordinator, I was at a wedding in California for the daughter of a close friend.  Also on the invite list was Dean Spanos, the owner of the San Diego Chargers, and his wife, Susie. 

At the reception the father of the bride introduced me to Dean and his wife as “a close friend from Cleveland.”  Dean seemed more interested in the nearby jumbo shrimp platter and made a beeline for it almost immediately.  Susie stayed behind for a moment to chat. 

She said “you must be a Browns fan” to which I nodded affirmatively, if not embarrassingly.  Then she said “you got a good man in Chud.  He’ll do a great job for you guys in Cleveland.”  I told her that I hoped that was the case because the Browns then, as now, could use all the help they could get.  She said Chud would certainly help and that the Chargers hated to lose him.  Then as she turned to join her husband who looked to be into his 6^th or 7^th piece of shrimp by then she turned to me, smiled the  toothy white-capped smile of the moneyed and gracious, and said “you watch.  Someday Chud will be a head coach.  Maybe in Cleveland.”

Brilliant woman.  Maybe arrived on Thursday when the Browns confirmed Chudzinski’s hiring and I immediately thought back to that conversation with Susie Spanos.  More outrageous predictions have been made but you have to give the woman credit.  She was years ahead of the curve on this one. She probably should have said something to her husband.  The Chargers are still looking for a head coach even as the Browns have theirs.

The fact that the Browns hired Chudzinski and the Chargers did not does beg the question as to why.  The answer though lies probably in Chudzinski’s relationship with Norv Turner, the beleaguered and recently fired coach of those Chargers.  According to the rumor, Chudzinski plans on bringing Turner to Cleveland as offensive coordinator.  Even if that rumor isn’t true it says enough about the relationship between the two that Chudzinski’s hiring by the Chargers would have been impossible.  Even in the re-tread warmed over world of the NFL, there isn’t enough snake oil to convince Chargers fans that Chudzinski would represent a new start.

That doesn’t mean that Chudzinski wouldn’t be a new start for the Browns.  He is and actually brings with him a modicum of success both with the Browns and elsewhere.  With Chudzinski as offensive coordinator for those two years, the Browns won 14 games which is just slightly below the two year totals of Eric Mangini and Pat Shurmur, combined.  Chudzinski turned Derek Anderson into a one year phenom and that year still represents the Browns’ high water offensive mark since their return.

Chudzinski was fired after the next season when the promise of that 10 win season turned into a far more typical 4 win season the next.  There are reasons, there always are, for that 4 win season, there always are: injuries, malcontents (Braylon Edwards anyone?) and the like.  But ultimately the Browns failed for the reasons they usually fail, lousy leadership.  Romeo Crennel was an African-American version of Norv Turner: a highly competent coordinator who Peter Principled to head coach.   The Browns cleaned house after that season and with that through out everyone associated with it, including Chudzinski.  Maybe they should have turned to Chudzinski then but Randy Lerner being Randy Lerner fell in love with Mangini quickly who then went about setting the franchise ablaze in a two year reign of terror. Lerner fell out of love later that season and in love with Mike Holmgren and you know the rest of that story.

If Chudzinski does bring in Turner it will at the very least be an interesting experiment to see if the Chargers simply had the formula wrong all along.  It also tells you a key life lesson.  Never burn bridges because you never know when you’ll find yourself on the other side

Anyway, to get back to the original point, Chudzinski is exactly the kind of hire you’d expect a new owner working tirelessly to fit in like an old owner would make.  He is young enough to be considered on the front end of a potentially promising career but he has enough NFL experience and hence cred to be considered a safe hire.  It’s the NFL way.   There are plenty of Chudzinski’s kicking around the NFL.  Shurmur was one of them.  So was the recently fired Mike Mularkey.  In fact you can go through the ranks of the NFL head coaches right now and most of them were Chudzinski’s at one time or another.  You’ll find the occasional Jim Harbaugh in there and someone will take a chance on Bruce Arians like they the Browns and the Chiefs did on Romeo Crennel.  Trends change.  This year it’s the offensive mind that is in.  Some years they’ll look for the up and comer on defense.  Every once in awhile someone will fall in love with a loon like Chip Kelly.  But essentially the NFL hiring process is a meritocracy where you start, like Bill Cowher, as a special teams coach and work your way forward.

There’s no way to know at the moment whether Chudzinski will be successful.  I think Susie Spanos seeing a certain “it” factor in him is as good a barometer as any.  He’ll be successful, as I wrote about whoever the next Browns’ head coach would be, if the support system around him is strong.  That starts with Haslam, moves to Banner, and from there the general manager, the head coach and then the assistants. 

The Browns find themselves in the relatively early stages of putting together that puzzle.  They have the right owner in place, finally.  Banner by all accounts is highly respected.  There’s no general manager in place at the moment, which comes next. On a parallel track comes the next wave of assistants, then the draft and then training camp and then another season.  That’s when we’ll really find out if the Browns are finally on a path forward or are just playing out the first year of their usual two year cycle.

Not Feeling Very Chipper

If Cleveland Browns fans are being honest with themselves, and if there's anything Cleveland Browns fans like less than all the losing it's being honest with themselves, then they'll admit that the best thing to happen to their team this past weekend was the inability of owner Jimmy Haslam and CEO Joe Banner to secure the services of Chip Kelly as the team's 838th head coach since 1999.

Kelly might very well be a good fit for the pro game.  That's an unknown.  But there's enough checkers in his past to more than suggest that he's probably not the guy this team needs right now, or ever. 

First of all, Kelly is a guy that plays the in betweens.  He may not be a complete scoundrel but he’s nobody’s idea of an altar boy, either.  Kelly seems most comfortable when he can run his little black ops off the radar screen to the approving glance of Phil Knight at Nike.  Kelly’s a tease of sorts having flirted with the NFL a year ago as well but that’s his least objectionable quality. In the end, he’s perhaps a bit higher on the scale than a two-bit hustler but not much.

I figured that Kelly was far more serious about the NFL this year having seen how well Pete Carroll could escape the slow moving clutches of a NCAA infractions committee posse and become the toast of the NFL.  But either Kelly figures that NCAA still has its hands full with the Penn State mess and the pending litigation to get around to slapping down the Oregon program any time soon or his ego has overtaken his common sense.  Either way, Kelly left the NFL once again at the precipice to stay with the Ducks and the history he’s forged of good offenses and almost accomplishments.

Kelly’s Oregon program has featured plenty of iffy players brought to campus by even iffier handlers. The NCAA has investigated and to this point it seems that the only conclusions to draw is that it needs better ways to regulate the shady characters employed by programs like Oregon to steer questionable student/athletes to campus under the guise of providing amorphous recruiting services.  The NCAA may still come down more directly on Oregon though that outfit is so random that it really is anyone’s guess what it will do next.

But as to Kelly, is this the kind of guy you really want fronting your franchise?  It's a cutthroat business and all and often times to get to the top you have to get awfully comfortable navigating the edge of a cliff, but in Kelly's short time in Oregon the only thing he's really proven is that he can pirouette along that cliff's edge with the best of them.

The other sense you get is that he really has no particular interest in being a NFL head coach.  He just wants the people of and around Oregon to think he does.  This is the second consecutive off season he's flirted with the NFL and the second consecutive off season he ended up right where he began except with a bigger contract.  Kelly plays the game well but I'm guessing even the knuckleheads in Oregon will begin to discern the pattern.  Indeed, for all the various markers out there demonstrating the absolute corruption in college football the courting of Kelly from those more interested in wins then integrity is among the most prominent.

Besides a reputation for running a fast-paced read option offense that could embarrass bad college defenses, what exactly does Kelly bring to the NFL party anyway?  Even the worst defenses in the NFL are better by leaps and more leaps than the best college defense.  Seattle and Washington are having some success with the read option at the moment but it requires a specific type of quarterback that most teams, including Cleveland, don't have on the roster and then puts that athlete constantly in harm's way.  In a league with a salary cap where quarterbacks garner a disproportionate share of cap space, no coach with hopes for a long career can abide consistently putting their highest priced asset at risk. All you needed to do was see how much both Russell Wilson and Robert Griffin III got bounced around in Sunday's Seattle-Washington playoff game to realize that no team will be able to run a steady diet of fast-paced read option.

If anything, the injury Griffin suffered Sunday served as a reminder on how precarious it is to run the type of offense that Kelly cultivates in the NFL.  Griffin is a special athlete and Washington head coach Mike Shanahan exploited every inch of that specialness in riding Griffin to the playoffs.  But Shanahan died by the same sword he lived by most of the season when Griffin went down with an apparently even more serious knee injury than he suffered earlier in the season.  It’s an instructive knee injury in the sense that Griffin is a freak of a physical specimen.  That said he’s not any more immune to injuries than any other player counted on to orchestrate every offensive snap in the most physically demanding sport on the planet.  The NFL has flirted with running quarterbacks all throughout its history and keeps returning to a more balanced mix for a reason.  

The reasons Browns fans seem apoplectic at the moment over losing Kelly is really because they got overheated in the thought of him coming to Cleveland in the first place coupled with a lazy and ineffective local media that used speculation and guess work rather than close in reporting with real sources to build false expectations in fans desperate for any good news.  It’s actually mystifying to me why anyone would think that Kelly would be some sort of all healing balm to a franchise that has literally cornered the market on bad decision making.  I’ve not used the restroom facilities inside the Berea complex but I’m betting that they don’t even flush properly.

But again, if Browns fans stop and really consider the situation carefully they'll realize that Kelly offered no greater promise and arguably less than, say, Butch Davis and we know how that turned out.

A competent coaching staff will do wonders for this franchise but there are no magic bullets.  Kelly struck me as someone who always fired blanks anyway so the fact that he's out of the picture is probably more a reason to celebrate than cry.

The question now turns to which sap gets to wear the banner of “1^st runner up” in the retooled, renewed, rebooted search for the team’s second choice or, as the Browns’ public relations department will soon refer to him, “the guy we really wanted all along.”

It could be a recently fired retread but I’d be suspicious if only because of how well that all worked out with Eric Mangini.  It could also be an up and coming assistant, you know, the next great offensive or defensive mind in the game.  That kind of sounds like the search for a more legitimate version of Pat Shurmur, doesn’t it?  Or, they could also go for the long time assistant who everyone acknowledges should have gotten his shot years ago but just didn’t, sort of like Romeo Crennel and Bud Carson.

When it gets right down to it, there aren’t any good options just debating points over the best of the worst options which is what Haslam probably realized about 15 minutes after Kelly called on Saturday to say that he’d be a little late to dinner.

Picking a successful head coach in the NFL trends far more to luck than anyone will admit.  You could look at almost any of the Browns’ previous 648 head coaches since 1999 and make a case as to why he was a good hire, except for Mangini.  That none of them worked out was more a team effort than a steady case of individual failures.  If Haslam and Banner really want whoever is next in the barrel to be successful they better make sure he’s surrounded by utter competence throughout for it will be that support team more than anything else that will determine the fate of the pending intended.