For the second straight week, the Browns have lost to a team that was favored to beat them (favored by people at sports books who put millions of real dollars on the games, not by Plain Dealer peanut panels); and for the second straight week, we have to hear nonsensical ranting about the Browns “playing down to the competition.”
Like from Tony Grossi, of course, who ended his game wrap with a zing:
“They’ve got two games left at home. Maybe it’s a good thing they are against playoff contenders Baltimore and Pittsburgh. They play up to teams like that.”
In the reductionist’s world, where everything about a football team, including its trajectory, can only be measured in wins and losses, it’s not only possible but easy for the 2010 Browns to “play down” to another NFL team, even a team that won the AFC North last season and was expected this season to contend for the same.
See if you can follow this:
The Cleveland Browns started the 2010 season acknowledged by most pundits as one of the least-talented rosters in the NFL, coming off a painful but necessary teardown of an already thin 2009 group. The sports books had the Browns penciled in for 5.5 wins, and nobody who puts these predictions in print disagreed to any significant extent. The Browns weren’t in the top two-thirds of any national power rankings, and nobody anywhere expressed a reasonable expectation that the team would compete for a playoff spot. Nobody viewed this team as having anything approximating a roster balanced with quality NFL talent.
Some years are more interesting than others, of course, and this year was supposed to be a relatively boring one in Cleveland with respect to the Browns. As a result, as it would be with any team that’s not ready to win consistently, the press would have to work harder to honestly keep fans interested in their Browns coverage. The best hope in Brownstown was that the team would stay competitive from week-to-week and show signs of progress heading into Year 3 of the Mangini Era.
(Sometimes football games just aren’t as interesting as some folks would like them to be.)
Now, after fourteen games in 2010, the Browns have not only won the 5-or-so games that everyone expected from them, but have been more competitive from week-to-week than literally anyone imagined at the season’s outset. This against a schedule that’s as difficult as that faced by any team in the league; with an injury-forced three-quarterback rotation (any part of which might start only for a tiny handful of current NFL teams); with gaping roster holes at the receiver position and in the front seven; with essentially no contribution from its supposedly most electric playmaker, Josh Cribbs; And with defensive lynchpin Scott Fujita pinned to the bench with an injury for most of the season’s second half.
Yet despite all that, it’s still easier to generate content and pageviews with talk about a coach’s job security than with anything else, and there are still folks bent on prosecuting personal vendettas against the first decent head football coach that Cleveland has seen in a decade. So, of course:
- Per Dennis Manoloff, it’s “unthinkable” that the 2010 Browns could lose consecutive football games to the Bills and the Bengals;
- It’s an “embarrassment” to lose these games,according to Terry Pluto, because talent doesn’t matter, “December is supposed to be the Browns’ month”;
- Tony Grossi leads his game wrap by calling the Browns out for failing to “roll over the cupcakes,” like the ones in Cincinnati who rolled undefeated through the AFC North to win the conference last season, and who everyone expected to contend for the same this year. Eric Mangini’s future in Cleveland, to Grossi, is now “black and white.”
See, despite what every bit of preseason analysis provided, all of a sudden there are “cupcakes” who the Browns are supposed to “roll over.” Which is exactly how to punish a team and a coaching staff for outperforming preseason expectations and stealing a couple from the Patriots and Saints with trick plays and turnovers. It’s either completely insane or completely dishonest.
(Why doesn’t somebody coach these guys up?)
The primary concern here isn’t that Mike Holmgren will get swept up in the insanity. Pundits might be able to afford ignoring real world facts, at least in Cleveland, at least for now, but NFL bosses really can’t. That the sort of coverage currently led by Grossi and Co. might give Holmgren something of a PR cover to insert himself or one of “his guys” does nothing to justify the merits of or apparent dishonesty inherent in any such move. The reason the current state of coverage really bothers us so much is because it serves to replace other conversations that could lift and enlighten rather than drag us all down to the pageviews gutter. Again, one can’t fail to connect the misery of Cleveland’s professional sports teams over the last five decades with the miserable state of the press that covers them.
Anyway, about yesterday, the Bengals, like the Bills last week, weren’t going to let the Browns sneak up on them, and saw the matchup as their last best chance to get in the win column in 2010. They were the more talented team with significant mismatches to exploit. They came to play yesterday, and still only won by 2 points.
Pluto seems to want to call out the Coaching staff here:
Defensive coordinator Rob Ryan and his players had no answers for this question posed by the Bengals, “Are you strong enough and man enough to stop us?”
But nobody seems to want to entertain that the answer to that question is simply “no,” especially after all the injuries, and that this answer has little to nothing to do with the coaches. Paper beats rock beats scissors. The Browns came into this season thin in the front seven, and injuries to Fujita, Robaire Smith, and Shaun Rogers have made them much thinner. If you take the undrafted-free-agents, midseason waiver-wire pickups, and twelve-year-plus warhorses out of the front seven that played yesterday, pretty much all you have left is a 2008 sixth round pick from Iowa State. These guys play hard for the most part, but were simply pushed around yesterday by a motivated Bengals unit that finally did what it was supposed to have done all season (which also happens to be exactly what the Bengals did last season to roll to the AFC North crown).
It was enough to make Bengals running back Cedric Benson cry after the game:
Cedric Benson blinked back tears as he stood in front of his locker, still wearing his black No. 32 jersey. He couldn’t stop them all.
A lone teardrop slid down his right cheek, getting wiped away before it reached his tell-all smile.
Benson ran the Bengals out of their record-matching slump on Sunday, picking up a season-high 150 yards and scoring a touchdown as the focal point of an offense that flattened the Cleveland Browns 19-17 on Sunday. . . .
Cincinnati took a straight-ahead approach against the Browns (5-9), reverting to the run-based attack that won the AFC North last season and changed significantly after [Terrell] Owens was signed. The 37-year-old receiver became the Bengals’ most productive player while the running game broke down.
Benson didn’t understand it.
“I was sending out warning signals earlier, talking about how we’ve got to stay with the running game, just get the spark, the energy, the identity developed,” Benson said. “We kind of became a one-man show for a minute there.”
They were again on Sunday, with a different leader.
“It was exciting,” [All Pro] left tackle Andrew Whitworth said. “We’ve wanted to pound the rock like that for a while and get a chance to unleash the boss man on them, and we did.”
Even Grossi had to admit that the Bengals were better off after their leading receiver Owens went down to injury in the first quarter:
The worst thing to happen to the Browns was Terrell Owens leaving with an injury. Without T.O. complaining for the ball, Carson Palmer was able to spread it around to eight receivers and hand off to Cedric Benson.
If it wasn’t clear enough going into yesterday’s game that the Bengals terrible record was in large part a result of mismanagement of a talented roster. We can’t be the only ones wondering how much more the Bengals might have accomplished this season with Mangini at the helm. Hey, with Marvin Lewis a sure goner in Cincy at the end of this season, say Holmgren gives into his worst impulses and does the unthinkable, fires a coach of an obviously improved team two seasons into a massive rebuild? Bengals owner Mike Brown could certainly do a hell of a lot worse to replace Lewis.
Wouldn’t it be just the kind of crap . . . ?
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Here’s Grossi’s postgame summary ‘analysis’ of the Browns’ coaching yesterday:
End of the first half was horrendous. At the Bengals 37 with two minutes to go, and can’t get a field goal off? Then they kick short field goal on fourth-and-1 at beginning of fourth quarter, down, 16-7. Play for field goals, lose by two. Bottom line: The gray area is becoming black and white.
Okay, so the Browns are at the Bengals 37 with two minutes to go, and Browns pick up six yards on 1st-and-10 to get to the Bengals’ 31. On 2nd-and-4, McCoy takes an eight yard sack to set up 3rd-and-12. A five yard reception by Brian Robiskie followed by a John St. Clair false start puts the Browns back at 4th-and-12 from the Bengals’ 39. How the rookie quarterback taking the sack or St. Clair jumping is mostly or even halfway attributable to “horrendous coaching” is anyone’s guess, but our best one is that Grossi might have wanted the Browns to run the ball on 2nd-and-4 from the 31. This is our best guess because the Browns tried to pass instead, and that didn’t end up working. Everyone else seems to want the Browns to have passed the ball on 3rd-and-1 on the first fourth-quarter scoring drive though (because, of course, a run didn’t work), so who really knows. Kicking a fourth quarter field goal when you’re down nine points is a fireable offense as well, of course. Mostly if not entirely because the Browns didn’t end up winning.
Bottom line: In Tony Grossi’s world, a pair of hindsight-based second-guesses constitutes ‘analysis’ that takes us from gray to black-and-white.
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The Pittsburgh Steelers have had three head coaches since 1969. The first of those three was Chuck Noll, who won four Super Bowls. Noll’s record in his first three years were 1-13, 5-9, and 6-8.
Mangini’s career record as an NFL head coach is now 33-47. Bill Belichick’s record after five seasons was 36-44.
And we’re still trapped in Cleveland by ‘analysis’ that won’t acknowledge that talent disparities exist and matter in the NFL, ‘analysis’ by which football teams are nothing but what their number of wins and losses say they are, with no regard to the direction in which they’re moving. Thankfully, there can’t be any way that a $50 million dollar NFL executive is trapped by the same.
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Here’s an excellent read from Barry McBride at the OBR (subscription required), titled “Denying the inner Taibbi”:
As Eric Mangini was moving through his experiences with the sports media in New York and Cleveland, I’ve been moving through my own. It’s not the sort of world that welcomes interlopers. Ultimately, it’s not the competition or even being a small outlet in a world of giants that gets you down. It’s the operators outside the periphery of decency: the debtors who stiff you, driving you and your employees to the brink, the reporters who steal material from the premium areas of the site. The unreturned calls, the declarations of irrelevance, the rough shoves of the bigger bullies, the smiling stab in the back.
Or in Mangini’s case, the critics lacking perspective or empathy, the reporters more interested in their own self-advancement than the lives and careers of those they supposedly cover and the readers they serve. . . .
I’m not the OBR’s man in Berea. I don’t know Eric Mangini well. I’ve only spoken to him a few times and watched him through transcripts, web replays and audio files. But I see a change in how he accepts being a member of a team, not the young stud calling all the shots. Some self-deflating humor here and there. Some admission of mistakes. Acknowledgment of limits. Maturity. . . .
I’m undoubtedly a part of a rapidly-shrinking minority, but even after this last plummet of the roller coaster, I still regard Eric Mangini as a capable, smart, hard-working coach who is growing as a person before our eyes. Albeit one with a roster very thin in the trenches.
If the 2010 Cleveland Browns season continues its tumble, Eric Mangini may once again have to bear the weight of spittle-infused media rants and the hometown boos of the Browns faithful. I can hear the beast beginning to stir.
Along the way, someone will invariably cross the line, and go after Eric Mangini the person. But they’ll be wrong.
Read the whole thing. You could do a lot worse for the Browns fan in your life this holiday season than by way of a subscription to The OBR (but try to find out first if (s)he subscribes, because if (s)he’s literate, (s)he probably does).
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Here’s the best Bleacher Report article we’ve ever read, by Brian Klein:
“It’s impossible to bridge the gap between futility and dynasty without hitting a few bumps. The past two games represent those bumps and the answer for once is not to turn around and start over.”
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Finally, we’re back at Browns Stadium on Sunday, home for the holiday:
[Browns linebacker David] Bowens, a team captain, promised to do whatever he could to help turn things around [next week against the Ravens] the same way he did last year down the stretch.
“It’s going to start with me as one of the defensive captains, one of these leaders,” said Bowens. “I’m going to make sure that everyone’s on the same page for these last two games. It’s the least I can do for this team.”
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We’ll be back tomorrow with some inside details on the Plain Dealer’s pageview plan, some Bowl picks, and who knows what else?
