This time it’s supposed to be different.
Brand-name Super Bowl winner Mike Holmgren is in charge now, and he’s got his guy now as the new head coach. Since Art Modell took the real Browns to Baltimore, we’ve weathered 12 seasons that produced two winning records and zero playoff wins; in the NFL, parity is the rule and the Cleveland Browns are the exception.
Yet here we are, being asked to buy into the league’s corporate media consensus once again. And the consensus is as uniform as ever. The NFL’s ever-explosive popularity, combined with a job market for journalists that’s never been so uncertain, has created a hothouse for safe and easily digestible opinions on the league — and a tendency toward conformity in the press. So it’s probably inevitable that as much as the word “fan” presupposes a measure of insanity, I’m finding it as hard as ever to back the Browns.
Carmen Policy, Phil Savage, and Romeo Crennel were all brand-name Super Bowl winners too when they were tapped to bring the new Browns to glory. Even NCAA champ Butch Davis was a popular choice when he took over in 2001. By 2010, it might have been clear that building an NFL winner in Cleveland would require something other than following the model that’s failed the Browns so consistently for so long.
And it ought to have been especially clear, given the Browns’ restoration to relevance in 2010 with head coach Eric Mangini at the helm.
Mangini, of course, was the very opposite of the NFL press consensus. Producing two winning seasons in three years while toiling for the Jets at ground zero of NFL corporate whoredom, Mangini had been nakedly sacrificed for the failures of his quarterback, league idol Brett Favre.
The New York media never forgave Mangini’s mentor, Bill Belichick, for his open disdain for the hacks who chronicled the league and for spurning New York for New England. And they took it out hard on the legend’s protégé. The Jets’ front office, meanwhile, was all too happy to take advantage of Mangini’s whipping-boy status when the Favre experiment they forced on him failed spectacularly.
When Mangini was immediately given the chance to right another NFL ship in Cleveland, it should have been the beginning of a uniquely uplifting sports story. The Browns had finally broken the cycle of playing to a New York-driven mandate that had never and could never work in Cleveland.
The cable-newsification that was ruining everything else in America wasn’t going to ruin the Cleveland Browns. Whatever New York had on Cleveland, a certain talented young football coach was going to be given the space to do his job here, which would show something important that Cleveland had on New York (and by extension, the forces of evil at large).
If only the possibility of any such differences between Cleveland and New York hadn’t long been lost on the credentialed local press, not a single member of which bothered to sniff the angle that we might have gotten a bargain on a guy who’d gotten a bad rap in the Big Apple.
How we moved so quickly from here to President Holmgren and his decision to fire Mangini after only two seasons is a subject that will keep historians and scientists busy for decades. But the upshot is that Browns fans aren’t just being asked to buy into the newest brand-name product once again — we’re being asked to do this after having just fired a head coach who, finally, was doing something that was working.
Nobody who paid attention last season would argue with CBS’ Clark Judge that 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.”
So much for all that, and for the presumption of job security for a decent man who’s making obvious progress at what’s proven over the last decade-plus to be an historically difficult job.
If Holmgren does manage to restore the Browns to a bona fide Super Bowl contender, all will be forgiven, at the cost of my realizing that I can’t summon as much insanity for NFL football as I used to.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2011.
A little late for a Mangini apologist column, no? Look, I backed Eric when he was the coach of the Cleveland Browns…but he’s not anymore. Is Pat Shurmur the answer? We don’t know that answer yet, but I know that back to back 5-11 seasons isn’t “…finally, doing something that was working”. I also know that Mike Holmgren, a respected football man, chose Shurmur to lead this team.
There seemed to be a lot of writing here, with not much said.
When Mangini was coach, he took Pete into his office, sat him down on his lap, and made him feel like a real special media type person. So now we get an endless array of Mangini revisionist columns on how “coach” was wronged by Holmgren and the media and is a misunderstood genius who would have led us to glory if only Randy Lerner hadn’t made the biggest mistake of his life. I particularly enjoy Pete’s use of the media as a scapegoat for Mangini’s failure, but then his selective citation to the occasional positive media portrayal (CBS’ Clark Judge) as proof that he got a raw deal.
Job security for a second 5-11 season in a row that ended in 5 straight losses? On what planet is that something an NFL coach can expect? And had Mangini’s hand picked GM not been such a colossal, spectacular failure, Holmgren never would have been brought in. Eric has only himself to blame for getting fired-again.
Hopefully this story line ends soon and Pete can get to LeBron apology columns.
did cleve fan nail it or what??
the kokinis hiring was beyond disaster. how does one explain that??
you could blame lerner for even allowing mangenius to have that authority,
but to use it to hire who??? hard to comprehend!!
plus the drafts were horrible and the offenses worse!!
he had to go!!
You guys can repeat “5-11, 5-11” all you want, but nobody who watched the games and saw what the coach was working with wouldn’t say the team was improved significantly from year 1 to year 2. If you think my use of the Clark Judge piece is selective citation, why can’t you cite a piece that more persuasively comes out the other way?
The bottom line is that Mangini was the first good coach one we’ve had here in ten-plus years, and we fired him while he was in the middle of doing a good job coaching. Maybe it works out, but I’m not thrilled at all with setting that kind of precedent. I don’t know why anyone would be.
Also, BMA, Carmen Policy, Romeo Crennel, Phil Savage, Butch Davis … those guys were all “respected football men” when they were brought in to save the Browns.
Anybody who hasn’t seen it should google “Mangenius Interrupted” and have a good read.
After Shurmur…..Tressell?
We will have to agree to disagree on whether Mangini “…was in the middle of doing a good job coaching”, but you can’t deny the fact that his tenure is over and it’s time to look forward…not backwards. An article like this just takes away from the excitement of a new season. The Browns have moved on, and now, so should you.