Cleveland Browns - Not Much More to Say

I was going to write a long post about the Browns and the fact that Randy Lerner actually watched a game and was disgusted as the rest of us have been for the 7 weeks prior to that. I had some sage advice for him. I'm glad I waited because I ran across a blog post, Coming Out Of The Closet by Gary Benz, that expressed the same idea but much more articulately. It's a must read.

His basic point and my unwritten one is the same - the only way for the Browns organization to turn itself around is for Mr. Lerner to take ownership of it. I don't mean property law ownership, but deep down emotional, spirtual, intellectual ownership of the team and the organization. I don't know where I read it but it was basically that what he thought he was doing with Manigini was cleaning out the organization and hoping to bring in a new philosophy.

And my first reaction and all subsequent reactions have been the same... he's got it wrong. It's his team, it needs to be his philosophy. Until he gets it, the team is not going anywhere. Hopefully Randy reads Gary's piece. Of course, Dan Gilbert hinted at exactly the same on that twit Triv's show this evening.

Kokinis Gone

So imagine this. I head home after work and get stuck in traffic caused by a fatal car crash on I-90. So I'm thinking about what I'm going to post, and listening Dan Gilbert saying something very similar while pimping Issue #3. An hour and half later I get home, and before eating check my twitterpeeps. What do I see? (Besides Gary's post, I mean) Kokinis has been fired/resigned, however they're going to spin it. But he apparently no longer a part of the Cleveland Browns organization. It's every where now, theobr, wfny, wkyc, clevelandleader and cleveland.com amongst others.

While I don't disagree with this move and the upcoming firing of Brian Daboll, it's still just window dressing. Last year I wanted to fire Romeo at the bye week. We already knew he was gone at that point and the most important thing was taking the time to build a team of people to take full advantage of the draft.

Prevailing wisdom prevailed(redundant?) and they waited. And while I'm not convinced that the draft was a bust, I'm still annoyed they took two receivers over Rey Malauga(sp?). What did happen is that Randy hurried into a hiring of a coach first, the organization a second-thought. And it's my be that prevailing wisdom will win out once again.

And once again I think it's a mistake. I actually believe that Mangini will be a good coach at some point, but not at this time. And in the end, Mangini is responsible for the hiring of Daboll, Kokinis, the QB nightmare and pretty much everything else. And most importantly I don't believe him. I don't believe anything he says at this point.

I specifically remember that during one of the games that the announcers said that Mangini stated they would use the wildcat a lot. They in fact only used it once or twice. Similar to the whole "who's the QB" fiasco prior to game 1, he's more interested in misdirection. Good teams can tell you exactly what they are going to do, and even if you know they do it anyway. The said thing is that after the game he said the probably could have used the wildcat some more.

Another misdirection gone awry.

So yes, I'll repeat what I said back on September 27th, Eric Mangini should be fired. It'll give Randy some time to read and execute on Gary's advice. If he does, things will improve with or without Mangini.

After reading Gary's post, there's not much more to say about the Browns. It's in Randy Lerner's hands.