A trusted and beloved Cleveland sportswriter recently got in touch with us to share a first-hand account of an overheard conversation between The Plain Dealer’s Tony Grossi and Doug Dieken (former Browns lineman now commentator for WKYC and Sports Time Ohio (STO)) that confirms easy assumptions about what’s behind The Plain Dealer’s shameless dive for the bottom with this season’s Cleveland Browns coverage. The substance of the conversation is covered in the title of this post, it isn’t shocking or even especially surprising, and it was probably partly a joke. But any way you look at it, dots that were easy enough to connect are now significantly more so with respect to a strange and troubling set of circumstances.
Anywhere but in a lunatic’s world, there’s a general presumption against decent men losing their jobs, a presumption that holds with more force with respect to men specifically hired to accomplish especially difficult tasks. Yet the coverage of the Browns by the Plain Dealer — the City’s flagship paper and (sadly) really the only show in town — systemically and unashamedly goes out of its way to manufacture intrigue about head coach Eric Mangini’s job security (and, secondarily, quarterback controversies) at the expense of truth, reason, and untold amounts of more productive, civil, and uplifting conversation. The dishonesty underpinning this coverage is typified by a consistent refusal to even try to account for a decade of unpredecented NFL organizational incompetence and the resulting talent deficit on a roster that was near-unanimously acknowledged as one of the thinnest in the the league last season (and is positively unanimously acknowledged today as plagued with glaring critical holes at at least three positions). From this void rises the absurdly reductionist view that the only way to measure anything about a football team, including its trajectory, is by way of counting the team’s wins and losses. The very concept of a rebuilding process is made a complete impossibility by this logic, and the job security of the head coach is always the primary target. (A few specific examples are discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (really, this is just a few), and here’s a summary of some of the worst of last year’s treatment.)
Of course, when it comes to covering a football team, it’s harder to sell content about a rebuilding process than it is to sell content about anything else. For a number of reasons, a rebuilding phase is inherently less interesting than any other part of a football team’s lifecycle, and requires reporters to dig deeper and work more creatively to keep its readership engaged (or for the outlets to find talent that’s actually capable of doing this). Unless, of course, folks are okay with simply lying to accomplish the same.
Lying. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there’s no question that the newspaper industry is in a state of unprecedented upheaval. Thanks to our source, The Plain Dealer’s own desperation is now especially easy to connect with Tony Grossi and the paper’s coverage of the Browns.
Our source was at a Cleveland sports media event this summer (after LeBron’s Decision), and overheard a conversation between Dieken and Grossi where, after some glad-handing, Dieken jokingly asked Grossi what was “new in Cleveland sports.”
“All I do all day is sit in meetings about how we’re going to sell papers,” Grossi replied, “so I wouldn’t know.”
Of course. And there can’t be a question that these meetings became more frequent after LeBron skipped town.
We might be sad for Grossi if his apparent personal animosity toward the Coach didn’t make this all so much fun for him, but we can all at least feel better knowing that the incredibly dissonant racket from the Plain Dealer on the Browns is little more than the last groans of a dying dinosaur.
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As you’ll see in horrifying detail shortly below, what’s written above applies to other mainstream outlets like WKNR and the Akron Beacon Journal as well. For its part, the ABJ is probably in much worse shape than the Plain Dealer, and it’s safe to guess that ABJ columnist Marla Ridenour has been to a lot of meetings like the ones about which Grossi complained. There’s been no real reason to pay attention to Ridenour this season until yesterday, but you might remember her as the person who actually published the following sentence in what was shockingly only her second worst piece of work from last season (see here for the winner, but only if you’re feeling especially lively):
“If Mangini had hitched his wagon to [Jamal] Lewis’ star, instead of the other way around, players might have bought into Mangini’s system.”
Hoo.
Now, after lying in wait for nearly the whole of a season of marked improvement (or at least not writing anything so flamingly offensive as to catch our eye), two consecutive ticks in the loss column have given the snake clearance to strike from the tall grass. You can’t lay the treachery any thicker than this:
Mangini had just watched his offense continue to flounder no matter who starts at quarterback and his defense continue to fade.
The Browns (5-9) return home to finish the season against the division’s best, Baltimore and Pittsburgh, both 10-4. Even a split might not save Mangini now.
Unless Mangini pulls a rabbit out of his hat for the second consecutive January, it appears Browns President Mike Holmgren will thank Mangini for his services not long after the Jan. 2 finale and send him the way of Lewis, Wade Phillips and Brad Childress.
Mangini values players who are smart, tough, competitive, hard-working and selfless and love football. Those kinds of players should live for December, when the chilly air makes passing and kicking difficult, as it was Sunday. When it becomes a smash-mouth game on the offensive and defensive lines. Instead, all the smashing was being done by the Bengals, who pounded out 188 yards rushing, 150 by Cedric Benson. The Browns managed just 59 yards on the ground, all from Peyton Hillis. . . .
”From the first series, they had an excitement about them because they knew they could push them around,” Palmer said.
From that assessment, it appears Mangini’s tough, smart, hard-nosed players are lying down instead of rallying around him.
Last year the Browns rallied around Mangini — or around each other — and won the final four games. But with the exception of linebacker David Bowens, none sounded too distraught over this defeat.
”I thought early on we lacked a little bit of energy, we lacked a little bit of intensity,” said Browns rookie quarterback Colt McCoy, who returned after missing three games with a high left ankle sprain. ”And that stems from me, that stems from the older guys on this team and it stems from all of us coming together and playing with a lot of energy and a lot of focus. It’s hard to do late in the season. But if you want to be a successful football team and want to play great late in the stretch, that’s what you’ve got to do.”
McCoy included himself among the offenders, but wouldn’t fall on his sword for the rest, and perhaps rightly so at this point. Even the Browns’ best players, left tackle Joe Thomas and receiver/returner Joshua Cribbs, seem to be lacking energy this year, although Cribbs has an excuse after dislocating four toes on Nov. 14 against the New York Jets.
After that overtime loss to the Jets, the Browns were 3-6, but still looked to be peaking. That setback was preceded by stunning upsets of the Saints and Patriots. Defensive coordinator Rob Ryan was being touted as a head coaching candidate by his twin brother, Jets coach Rex Ryan. Offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, showing newfound imagination, seemed to be growing into his role. The Browns were the toast of the town.
Now Daboll has crawled back into his shell and Ryan’s bluster no longer seems to inspire. It appears the Browns peaked too soon.
Game-day adjustments seem the staff’s Achilles’ heel, which falls at the feet of Mangini. McCoy once again excelled in the two-minute drill, leading a five-play, 88-yard drive capped by a 46-yard TD toss to Brian Robiskie with 2:13 left against the Bengals. Yet when the offense lacked rhythm after its opening possession for the second consecutive week, it was left to stagnate. If McCoy can run the hurry-up in the fourth quarter, why not the second?
”The whole team has to be involved and motivated,” Hillis said. ”We have to get to that point. We’re so off and on through the whole game.”
”I told the guys after the game, ‘Just keep fighting,’ ” McCoy said. ”If we get the onside kick, you never know what happens. It shows the character of our football team. We never quit. We kept fighting to the very end. That shows what kind of class these guys have in this locker room.”
No one who ventures into their inner sanctum will question their class. But they did not fight for the entire game against a Bengals team that was perhaps another first-half touchdown away from throwing in the towel. Perhaps because the Browns no longer believe in the coaches they’re fighting for.
What can you say? It’s like the possibility that a Bengals team that was expected to contend for the division title really is bigger, stronger, and faster than the Browns never crossed Ridenour’s mind. The idea that a Bengals run game led by what was expected to be one of the league’s best offensive lines might actually show up for one last win and a little pride against a thin Browns front seven made much thinner by the loss of two of its very best players is a complete nonfactor to Ridenour’s inflammatory conclusion. It’s impossible to Ridenour that in a football game one team could beat the other one up. Not even worth bringing up.
Two team leaders say exactly what they’re supposed to say (“um, crap, that sucked, we need to try harder”), and a reporter dives out of her way to ignore the most obvious inference. Anyone who can read a newspaper can understand from real life experience that getting physically beaten up can’t really fail to lead to diminished “energy” and “intensity.” But no matter, because Ridenour is literally dying for you to think that a football team deliberately quit on its coach.
It’s hard to feel bad for Ridenour, Grossi, or any of them when it’s so easy to picture an environment where, after a football team gets beaten up because the other side is bigger, stronger and faster, the reporters’ primary focus is on something, anything, other than a quote to take out of context to attach to an improvable suggestion that the team isn’t playing for the coach. Or one where a reporter might call a colleague out for shamelessly baiting a backup quarterback into a line to twist a non-story that a backup wants to start into a statement that the quarterback has no respect for his coach. How can the kind of treachery that prevails in Cleveland, how can the day-to-day influence of these people not have an impact on the success of a football team, even if only at the margins?
Imagine if there were reporters covering the Browns team who weren’t forced to go to meetings about selling papers. Imagine reporters who actually liked their jobs, and viewed their subjects as humans instead of a means to an end? (Again, what Grossi did to Seneca Wallace here exemplifies what’s gone wrong.)
There’s no way to avoid connecting the pathetic state of this franchise over the last decade with the behavior of the folks whose job it is to shine a light on it.
David Bowens just tweeted about how “an empty Chrismas wrapping paper tube is still a light saber, no matter how old you are.” Seems like a decent guy. Accessible. Probably has a lot of useful things to say about light sabers, Christmas, family, and who knows what else? Doesn’t it all get back to football, anyway? Shouldn’t it?
“Hey, look, Jon Gruden’s kid just went on the radio!”
Hey, look, we’re much less certain about Eric Mangini’s abilities as an NFL head coach than we are about there being a right and wrong way to do business and to treat people. Part of this involves ideas about what it means for an organization to hire a man, as qualified as anyone, to complete a Herculean task, then fire him just as he’s getting started, long before anyone could have finished the job, and as he was making obvious measurable progress in doing it. There’s also something about the way the local press has so dishonestly ganged up on this guy that makes him easier to get behind. That something that should be dying thinks it can save itself by killing him seems to say a lot about what should be allowed to live here, if there really has to be a choice.
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*Some of our most dense commenters have come out of the woodwork recently to gloat about the recent Browns losses, suggesting that we’ve “painted ourselves into a corner,” or “backed the wrong horse” by supporting Mangini in his first two years in Cleveland. It’s especially dense, and sad, because no matter what Holmgren decides (or has decided) to do, there will still be a right and wrong ways to do business and to treat people, and we’ll continue write consistently about what those ways might be here. All the more fun because no matter what Holmgren does, there will be an Eric Mangini-coached football team somewhere soon enough for us to keep our eye on.
