A Word to President Holmgren

Dear Mr. Holmgren,

Hey, welcome to Cleveland!  A place where nobody wouldn't be glad to see a Super Bowl-ringed guy called "The Big Show" come in as President of its Browns.

Except that we've never won anything here, Mr. Big Show.  Really.  Never.  And not just that, we lose in outrageously and excruciatingly hard ways.  We've seen things here that you wouldn't believe.

We know it wasn't your first choice to come here to Cleveland, and that you're a West Coast guy, so you might not have noticed just what a mess it's been here for so long, and how much it bothers us that just when we finally think we have a Coach who might know something about cleaning it up, folks want to run him out of town just because he didn't clean it up overnight.  We'd hate to see the same thing happen to you, and even though the major dirty work that Coach Mangini's already done in his short time here will no doubt help you avoid such a fate, you're doomed sooner than later if you don't recognize that dirty work as having been necessary.

And we don't see how you can recognize that dirty work for what it was without giving Mangini at least one more season as coach, which would seem obvious enough, except for that we're in Brownstown. 

Before you ask just how dirty the work has been so far for Mangini here in Cleveland it might be worth thinking about what it looks like if you run him as soon as you get here.

It looks like your best excuse would be that your "football philosophy" is tied to a "coaching tree" and is so incompatible with Coach Mangini's that you could never ever work with him.  This would be a lot easier for us to accept if we didn't find it so questionable that both you and Coach Mangini would be so stubbornly attached to every one of your ideas about a game that has so many aspects and evolves so quickly. And even more if we could be more sure that your own "football philosophy" was anything much different from "Hey Brett Favre, throw the ball good," or "Hey Shaun Alexander, run the ball good behind a sweet offensive line."  Maybe that's unfair, but understand that we've never seen a coach fired because his "football philosophy" was different from a front office guy's.

We're pretty sure that's not at all why Cam Cameron was fired after his only (1-15) season as a head coach in the NFL, so it bothers us that he's the only guy you could cite as a head coach who was fired after one season by a "free-agent superstar football czar."  It's hard enough that there are so many people in Cleveland who understand how much different Mangini is from Cameron.  But what if they ask when hiring a "free-agent superstar football czar" has ever worked? Because as far as we know, Parcells time in Miami is the only potential example, and his Dolphins have never been better than mediocre.

It couldn't just be the difference between the 4-3 and 3-4 defenses. How strongly could an "offense guy" feel about that?  Didn't a "4-3 coach" named Tomlin come in and win a Super Bowl running a "3-4"? And wasn't Tomlin a "defense guy"?

Anyway, at worst we'll at least look forward to an explanation of how "football philosophies" could be so different for you to justify firing the coach.  We might at least learn something important about "football philosophy."

But for now we have a hard time understanding why you'd tie your hands behind your back from the start by firing the Coach.  Giving Mangini even a year buys you an extra one yourself, and buys you out of serious questions about arrogance, nepotism, and your track record as an executive in Seattle.  Why come right in and fire the guy who the Ghost of Brownies Present and Past want to sign up for one more year?

They don't grow on trees, do they?  The young, hungry, bright, hard-working, former Belichick-proteges?  You said it yourself, right?  "He's a good coach . . . a bright guy . . . who works very very hard at his job."  Bright and works very very hard?  And he's fired?

How many of these young, hungry, bright, very very hard working proteges of legends have shown as much progress with each of the only two teams they've ever been in charge of, anyway?  So back to that "dirty work," because we understand how hard it can be for outsiders to see how much progress has been made here in Cleveland with our Browns.  We're amazed ourselves at the remarkable convergence of the Lerner family's historically negligent custody of the Browns, and the media's historically unfair treatment of Eric Mangini's NFL career.  Only in Cleveland, of course.

But you must know that your transient anglophile billionaire boss has never enjoyed success running anything like an NFL franchise, and that his tenure in charge of the Browns has been a historic flop.  So you'll have to understand why we're suspicious of any hiring decision he makes.

And also why so many of us saw Mangini as a lucky grab for us here, on the view that a poisonous 'win-now/sell-(Favre)-jerseys/please-the-media' management approach played out to extreme ends to land him here in Cleveland.  A lot of us think Mangini got a real bad rap in losing the job he had before he came here while we're not at all sure the same is the case with you.

But lucky for you that you'll never have to go through what Mangini did as the scapegoat of the Jets' front office and New York tabloids who came to clean a historic mess in Cleveland thereby creating the opportunity for everyone to bang on the irresistable combination of three lazy memes in unison:  1) "Mangini the jerk and failure;" 2) "Cleveland, City of Losers;" and relatedly, 3) "Cleveland Browns, the Tragedy/Trainwreck."   Nobody wouldn't look to be in over his head under these circumstances.  The experience makes us like him even more.

The local hacks who've been trying to run Mangini out of town all season smell blood now, but look at the best they can do: 

"Why would 12 games of floundering followed by a four-game sprint to the finish line be such a mandate for the status quo that Holmgren shouldn't chance interrupting it?"

Punish Mangini for the mess that was here when he arrived?  Or understand what it means that the four-game sprint happened after the team resolved the quarterback mess that Phil Savage left here, and after the game plan was properly adjusted in the wake of the departure of Braylon Edwards and loss of Jamal Lewis to injury.

We assume you're intelligent enough to see that the progress shown on the field since the bye week is unmistakable.  And remember that nobody in Cleveland or anywhere else was expecting the Browns to make the playoffs this season;  And that it was surely Randy Lerner's botched hiring process with Kokinis that led to what might have been an inevitable disaster;  That nobody can legitimately claim to have known how to handle the Phil Savage-created quarterback conundrum any better than Mangini did;  And that it was good to get rid of the two biggest jerks on the team, even though it would hurt the team in short term to lose the guys who also happened to be its most physically-gifted members.  Hopefully nothing else has to be said about fining millionaires for stealing from hotels, or asking them to take a bus ride for charity.

Your boss will definitely reward you for seeing through all of this if you manage to do it.  Your boss definitely doesn't want to look like an impetuous rich kid who was so sure in making what turned out to be a publicly unpopular coaching hire only to cave to a few costumed fans less than a year later when it turned out that hard work was hard work and that things had to get better before they got worse.

And the City of Cleveland will be behind you as well along with Josh Cribbs and Jim Brown.

Do it for Cleveland. Do it for your boss. Do it for yourself. Let's see if you can't do great things with this Coach who at the very least looks like the first coach we've seen here in ten years who's not afraid to make a hard decision. One more year, at least, please. We're hoping for the best. 

Thanks,

Cleveland Frowns