The Browns win in New Orleans has really thrown the Plain Dealer’s top beat writer for a loop. Heading into last week’s game, he set himself up for the bye week by headlining a mailbag column with a question about Jim Harbaugh replacing Eric Mangini as Browns head coach. In the same column, he wholeheartedly endorses a reader’s reference to Brian Daboll as “clueless” and prints no fewer than four letters taking shots at Daboll, despite having never written a column substantiating his extreme position on the offensive coordinator. On Monday, Grossi used the headline “Defense once again showers its affection on coordinator Rob Ryan,” to lead us to the invaluable information that “Ryan “now leads Mangini in Gatorade showers, 2-1.”
It’s no secret to anybody who’s paying any attention that Grossi has been trying to run Mangini out of town not just since the beginning of this season, but from the beginning of Mangini’s tenure in Cleveland. Unable to acknowledge the progress of a football team under this coach, there’s nothing left for him to do but fan the flames of controversy, like with his latest on Seneca Wallace:
Here’s the headline:
“Seneca Wallace says Cleveland Browns need to choose one QB, when all are healthy.”
Of course, no one has ever expressed a contrary position, and there’s no reasonable person who would. But Grossi wants to write about a fight, so here’s his lede:
The boot came off his injured right ankle. Now it appears that Seneca Wallace is taking the gloves off, as well.
Fight! And here’s how it starts, in response to a reporter asking Wallace if “he made a strong statement for keeping the job before he suffered a high ankle sprain in the first half of the Atlanta game”:
“Yeah, I feel that way,” Wallace said. “At the end of the day, it comes down to the coaches. Whoever’s doing the job the best, moving the team, scoring points, making the right decisions, then that should be the guy.”
If you’re following so far, the reporter asked the quarterback if he made a good case to be the starter, and the quarterback said “yes,” before acknowledging that he’s not the one who gets to decide who the starter is:
“It comes down to Coach’s decision,” he said. “I can’t stand here and say this guy’s gonna be the starter. I don’t know. This whole thing, the last couple years around here, it seems like it’s been quarterback by committee, so who knows? We have to get a guy in there who runs the offense the best and continue to score points, and we’ll win the games.” …
Here’s where it’s a shame that we weren’t in the locker room to hear the entire conversation, because we can only guess that Grossi brought up “the couple years around here” before Wallace did,* but this must be where the gloves came off, with the passing reference to the quarterback mess that Phil Savage left for the new regime last season. Not a good idea for Wallace to have mentioned it himself, but it’s easy enough to understand why he would. This is the closest he’s been to a regular starting gig in his eight-year career; he was sidelined for two weeks due to an injury, and has good reason to believe he’s vastly outperformed rookie Colt McCoy, who took his place; Yet there’s a groundswell of public support for McCoy to start the Browns’ next game, even though Wallace is healthy.
So now we know that Wallace can be baited into making a self-interested comment in response to near-uniform public opinion that he’s less qualified to do his job than a rookie competitor who’s led the Browns offense on one meaningful scoring drive in two games, and that on a drive where the rookie didn’t complete a single pass. But have we learned anything else?
“This isn’t college,” Wallace said. “We don’t switch quarterbacks in and out. I think when it comes down to rhythm and gelling together, when you have a quarterback in for one week and then the next week it’s somebody else, that’s not a good situation. You want a guy that’s gonna be in there, be able to move the team and continue to do that week to week.”
Of course, this is nothing that isn’t assumed by any halfway-sentient football fan, so, no. We really haven’t learned a thing that we didn’t already know, including that there’s no situation in Brownstown that’s so complicated that Tony Grossi won’t try to complicate it further by fanning the flames of self-interest.
“Do ya’ think you should start, Seneca? Why? Dontcha’ think it was a real mess last year with the quarterbacks?”
What passes for a Plain Dealer sportswriter these days continues to alarm and depress, and nothing about Grossi’s reporting here gives us any reason to believe there still isn’t an important piece of paper in Berea that says:
1. Delhomme
2. Wallace
3. McCoy
*UPDATE: Here’s a video of the Wallace interview where all but one of the quotes Grossi uses above were given. The only exception, of course, is the quote where Wallace refers to the Brady Quinn/Derek Anderson quarterback controversy of “the last couple years around here.” Watch the video and see that nothing Seneca says in it could be construed as remotely controversial in response to the questions asked, especially within the context of the quotes that Grossi left out, like “I leave [the decision] up to [the coaches.] I do my job the best way I can every time I step on the field, and let my game speak for itself.” Also note that the video is unedited, and the quotes occured in real time in the same order in which they appear in Grossi’s piece, except for Grossi’s insertion of the “last couple years around here” quote in the middle. The inference that Grossi led Wallace to mention the “last couple years” is much stronger in light of this video, and the notion that Wallace “took the gloves off” here is at least ridiculous if not alarmingly dishonest.
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Pro Football Focus has the Browns ranked 18th among all NFL teams in their latest power rankings. This is the highest we’ve seen the Browns ranked anywhere since early 2008, which is at least something.
This week’s NCAA football picks will be up tomorrow morning. This is probably it for today here. Hope everyone has a decent one.
