“Ask Pat. Ask Pat. … You’re either with us or you’re not.” — Mike Holmgren
“He is very, very defensive today. … An instant classic.” – Tony Grossi, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[S]marmy, arrogant, patronizing, defensive, annoying, standoffish, defiant. In a word: unhinged. I still like Holmgren — but come on.” – Dennis Manoloff, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Holmgren did not seem very happy about being pressed into doing his job.” — Marla Ridenour, Akron Beacon Journal
“Well then … ” – Pat McManamon, Fox Sports Ohio
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If you want to get right to the transcript of the disaster that unfolded in Berea yesterday, scroll down past the second animated LOLrus below. But it should be noted here first that there were people who actually did raise questions and concerns back in 2009 about Randy Lerner’s decision to hire Mike Holmgren in the first place. These questions related to the wisdom of an historically incompetent owner in reacting to a plainly self-serving and morally bankrupt protest by an illiterate yet incredibly successful publicity whore by handing 50 million dollars and the keys to the kingdom to the biggest available brand name, who amazingly happened to be a guy who’d never had any measurable success in such a role.
While anyone might have raised those questions, and everyone should have, very few people actually did. Tony Grossi, Marla Ridenour, and Pat McManamon were not those people.
To the contrary, Ridenour, McManamon, and especially Grossi were some of the biggest enablers of the move in the press, which met the Browns head coach who Holmgren fired, Eric Mangini, with little but the most treacherous grade school playground politics from the start. Fueled by old-guard arrogance, laziness, a “small-city” inferiority complex, and profoundly warped and outdated views on what kind of information is “owed” to the press by an NFL football coach, and to the citizenry by the press, these folks wanted nothing but to see Mangini gone as soon as he got here, and saw the name brand “proven winner” Holmgren as a panacea. They laid down the palms for Holmgren when he arrived, and took mind-bending liberties with truth and objectivity to avoid batting an eyelash at his canning Mangini for “not winning enough” in 2010.
So here we are. And Grossi’s unrestrained glee at Holmgren’s discomfort yesterday really says it all. “An instant classic!”
If you’re looking for dispositive proof that an institution is broken, Grossi couldn’t be more right. But the fact that a region could be getting exponentially more out of its relationship with a football team has long gone without saying. Which is why Browns fan’s first response to all of this can only be to laugh.
Which is much more a function of the relationship between the franchise and the press than of our assessment of the prospects of the Holmgren regime. But more to the latter subject, a few more things should be noted:
Mainly just that when Mangini was here, we could at least see thing moving in a certain direction. Even at the lowest point of the Mangini era, the 1-11 start in his first season here, it was easy enough to see organizational decisions (and the win-loss record) as a function of a set of stated core values that the coach came in with, and as part of a courageous, long-viewed and necessary teardown of an organizational culture that had long gone to rot, something necessary to reverse a decade of unprecedented failure. This all got much easier to see when the Browns ended Mangini’s first season with a dominant four-game win streak (a modern franchise record) that included the franchise’s only win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the last nine years; and then even easier in 2010 when Mangini “took a team that didn’t have an abundance of talent but did have an abundance of injuries, as well as the NFL’s toughest schedule, and made it a factor” — “one of the league’s toughest outs.” It was a season that included stunning shutdowns of two of the very best offenses in the NFL, and with the snaps for the Browns taken by a rotating carousel of three quarterbacks who wouldn’t have started for another team in the league.
This was a guy who’d won three Super Bowl rings on Bill Belichick’s staff in New England, the protege of the greatest NFL head coach of this era, “the one Belichick loved the most.” The same guy who was fired by Holmgren after a season in which the Browns outstripped all reasonable expectations, again, because he “didn’t win enough.”
So now it’s all Fifty-Million-Dollar Mike’s show. And now we’ve got Pat Shurmur on the sideline, a supposed guru of the West Coast Offense, who’s got the team on pace to score some 50 points fewer than last year’s did despite playing in at least four times as much garbage time. Now we’ve got a season in which the Browns have barely managed to compete against anything but the league’s worst. We’ve also got yesterday’s incredible press conference. And Holmgren is upset that we’re upset.
So first the Colt McCoy concussion stuff.
“If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.”
Was McCoy examined and tested for a concussion?
“No, he was not. … One of the things troubling to me is the [team's medical staff is] getting slammed pretty good, along with the head coach. … Why wasn’t a SCAT test administered at that time? … [The medical staff's] reaction to the way Colt was reacting did not dictate that. They did not see the play. … If you see the hit, you think, ‘Goodness gracious,’ but they did not see the hit. … It seems inconceivable but nobody alerted anyone.”
Yes yes yes inconceivable. Inconceivable that nobody alerted anyone that James Harrison had deanimated the team’s quarterback on the field while the game was going on. Inconceivable that anyone would have had to alert anyone. Inconceivable that with head injuries subject to such unprecedented hot-button scrutiny in today’s NFL, that the Browns would err on the side of “permanent disability risk.” A process failure. And also a perfectly conceivable sign that things are moving way too fast for the rookie head coach who, process failures notwithstanding, still has final responsibility for what happens on the field, including which Browns players go on to it. Which all goes a long way to explain why the organization has been getting “slammed so good” about all this.
Holmgren refuses to answer why Seneca Wallace was not kept in the game or his feelings about it.
“Ask Pat,” is all he’d say. “Ask Pat.”
Ask Pat, because Pat is the one who decides who goes out on the field and who doesn’t, of course. But Colt didn’t end up dying out there so we can write this one off as a rookie mistake. Fine. A major relief. As much as a grownup might have avoided loads of angst here by saying as much on Monday, and/or by way of “a well-written news release that the Browns were unable to comment on details of McCoy’s concussion until the league inquiry was complete.” Process failure. Rookie mistake. Let’s move on:
Holmgren [was] extremely defensive and intermingling admonishments to media that “It’s not business as usual with the Cleveland Browns.”
So how isn’t it actually worse than “business as usual”?
“It seems as though it’s business as usual, which is very easy to write and say. But I’m telling you, it is not. And you can choose to believe me or you can say, ‘Nah, I’ve heard it before.’ That’s your choice. But when it does happen, don’t come to me for extra tickets for a playoff game or something. You’re either with us or you’re not. And I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I feel, not everybody … no I won’t. I’m telling you, it’s different now.”
No need to go over the background here again. Things are getting better because Fifty-Million-Dollar Mike says so. You scrubs are either with us or you’re not. If you don’t recognize full-on bunker mentality as leadership, Berea is not the place for you. Don’t even think about asking for playoff tickets.
Playoff tickets.
Wait. Holmgren did end up following up on why this season is so much better than we realize:
Offensively, if you just look at our games this season, if we did we did two things better. If we do two things better we have a chance to be 7-6 or something and people would be feeling a little bit better about themselves. I know the coaches would. If we would have just been able to snap the damn ball and catch a few more passes.
The missed snap against the Rams was tough for sure. As for the rest, maybe Phil Dawson hits a 55-yard field goal into the wind in Cincinnati, Maybe the Bengals don’t end up going on to score anyway even if they hadn’t caught the Browns napping with the long touchdown in Week 1. And it’s really hard to get too worked up about the dropped passes.
But the real problem here is that this team is a lot closer to 2-11 than they are to 7-6, and 2-11 is exactly what the the Browns would be if not for two plays in the Jags and Seahawks games, or if Seattle and Jacksonville hadn’t otherwise come out against them with the equivalent of severely neurologically impaired toddlers at the quarterback position. At 2-11, people would actually be feeling a lot worse here, if that can be imagined. Which doesn’t even get into questions about what things would look like if we had to play against a schedule like last year’s. But please do snap the damn ball and catch a few more passes. No excuses.
Except for the other thing:
The other thing is we’re implementing a new system, new coach, new young quarterback, all those things that you’ve heard before, but they’re real. That’s real. We’ll have a good offseason, we’re going to have a good draft. If we didn’t score some more points next year, I’d be very, very concerned …
Right well I mean shit who wouldn’t be extremely concerned how does anybody keep his job in Berea if this team doesn’t “score some more points next year”? This is one of the worst offensive seasons in Cleveland Browns history. But here we are in a league that gives losers every advantage, where it’s hard not to make the playoffs by accident at least once every three seasons, and next year, in the fourth year out from Mangini’s ’09 house-cleaning, Browns fan will be looking to “score more points.” Maybe we’ll get to go 6-10, too. Of course, a lot harder to take with our imaginations as free as they are to run wild about the likelihood that Mangini would have had the Browns in the playoff hunt this season. But about that guy:
“I made a decision on why I treated the first year a certain way and I’m not having any regrets about that … But this is like the second first year and you can say ‘Well, you wasted a year.’ Well, we know that now; I suppose you could say that now. But at the time, I don’t regret the decision I made.”
No regrets, of course. And of course it’s fine if Holmgren doesn’t want to admit that Mangini never had a chance from the start with him. But an honest leader might at least point out that he wasted a year of the football coach’s life, too, and with so many head coaching vacancies popping open, an honest leader might have referred back to “philosophical differences” to give a public vote of confidence to that coach who got jobbed so badly here. But then, an honest leader wouldn’t be worried about what a fool he might be made to look like when Mangini does return to the NFL sidelines.
So let’s get testy, people!
Before he was through, Holmgren got testy with a follow-up question about “business as usual” and stopped another in mid-sentence with “You’re not gonna ask me a question I already answered, are you?”
See, so it’s really not that Fifty-Million-Dollar Mike won’t eventually get this thing turned around against all history, impossible odds and nature. It’s the fact that fifty-million dollars can’t buy us a leader who can manage to hide his sense of entitlement to so much more public patience than what he showed for the guy he fired here.
But maybe a certain degree of intellectual honesty isn’t necessary to take an NFL organization to the highest level. As much as we sort of hate to think so, we can really only hope for now. Or laugh. Because “Pat Shurmur is a very, very competent young head coach who will be here for a long time.”
Cheddar Bay tomorrow, scrubs. With or against us, hup, hup. Happy Thursday.
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*A full transcript of the press conference is here. Grossi’s annotated lowlights are here.
**Thanks to @geronimobydick for cranking up the meme generator.
