Good write up. I wonder if any high ups in the Brown’s FO reads these articles.

They should.

Forgot to add this point:

Granted, the drop in production also correlates with the loss of players over time (Jurevicius, Winslow, Tucker, a “better” Lewis), but if a QB depends solely on his supporting cast, he’s not the answer.

Very nice summary.

I agree it is time to see Brady Quinn again but I don’t think he should start against the Ravens at home. There are apt to be a lot of other factors that will make that game a pressure cooker not to mention the fact that the Ravens are good and the Browns are bad. I think coach Mangini should start Quinn against the Lions and leave him in for the rest of the season. If Quinn cannot show us more than he did in the first couple of games against the likes of the Chiefs, Raiders and Jags, then he ain’t the guy.

Since Anderson has eliminated any chance of even a high school team picking him up, it is time to showcase Quinn. This last half of the season can either watch him grow to the QB the team wants or at least get him out there for others to see.

One way or the other, he needs to bring up some kind of value. This will be the best way to make it happen. Lets get something out of the remainder of the season.

by the way, as a matter of simple math (assuming all snaps are evenly distributed across the season, which is obviously not the reality), if brady were to play all the rest of this year’s games he’d be at approximately 65.6% of the snaps (2.5+8/16).

From Football Outsiders’ Walkthrough:

The Stat: Cleveland’s 2.55 yards per pass attempt on third down.

The Breakdown: The Browns are a bad stat factory, churning out mystifyingly awful numbers every week. Their passing statistics on third down are bad even by their standards. Derek Anderson completes just 32.1 percent of his third-down passes, netting just 12 first downs in 56 attempts. At 2.55 yards per third down pass, the Browns are worse than the Lions (4.33), Rams (4.65) and Raiders (3.32).

Check out the Browns’ third down passing breakdowns over the last three games:

Against the Steelers: 1-of-7 for one yard, one touchdown, two sacks, two fumbles lost, one interception, and one first down.
Against the Packers: 4-of-9 for 27 yards, one interception, one sack, one fumble lost (one recovered), and two first downs
Against the Bears: 1-of-7 for 10 yards, one interception, one fumble, no first downs.

The three-game totals: 6-of-23, 38 yards, one touchdown, three interceptions, three sacks, four fumbles, three first downs. The three sacks lost 27 yards, so the Browns netted 11 yards on 26 pass attempts, or 0.423 yards per attempt. Suddenly, that 2.55 figure we started with looks pretty good.

Oddly enough, the Browns average 5.17 yards per third down carry, and they are 10-of-19 on third down rushing conversions. The team has had some success with Josh Cribbs’ “Golden Flash” Wildcat plays and Jerome Harrison draws on third down. It’s easy to see why Eric Mangini would resort to such tactics when you see the passing breakdowns.

The Implications: The Browns have been held under seven points in nine of their last 14 games. That’s a pretty big implication.

The Future: Eventually, Brady Quinn will win back the starting job, and the Browns offense will start creeping back toward the bottom of the league average. Right? Right? Someone please tell me that’s right.

— to the point that he should be deemed as one of the worst starting quarterbacks of all time.

OUCH! IT BURNS!

you’re left pining for the Tim Couch/ Holcomb days.

drafting a quarterback in the first round of the 2010 NFL Draft

I honestly don’t know if this would be a good idea.

I said it back then, but I was lambasted for being a killjoy throwing a wet rag over a deceiving 10-6 season. For starters, we in the AFC North had a ridicuosly easy schedule. I know, the NFL is the NFL, but we played the AFC East, where only the Patriots were any good, and the NFC West, where no one was good, even the Division winner Seattle, was soft as church music. In fact, Seattle was the only winning team the Browns beat that year, which should tell you that 2007 might be a mirage. Also, two team in our Division the Bengals and the Ravens, were also down.

To Anderson in particular, a great majority of his numbers came in the first half (5 TDs against the horrible Bengals, etc.). In the second half of the season, after tape got around the league, Anderson had already stopped being an effective quarterback. He still ended up with enough numbers overall, against all those bad teams, to make the Pro Bowl. If you recall his games later in that season, he was not a Pro Bowl quarterback. He was Fool’s Gold. There are still a lot of Browns fans who bring up the old “Anderson was a Pro Bowl quarterback in 2007.” Those people are jousting at windmills.

Brady Quinn played two and a half games this season. He played against arguably the three toughest defenses in the NFL this year, or at least three of the best, and then got benched during a panic attack. He needs to be in the games developing relationships with Massaqous and Robiskie and Heiden. The Browns aren’t going anywhere this year. Those four guys, along with the linemen, need to be best friends. They need to be taking snaps. They need to be developing and improving.

That 2007 season was the worst thing that could have happened to Cleveland. It gave people a false impression of Anderson, who cannot play quarterback in this league, and set Quinn back two years. In fact, Cleveland would have been far better off playing Quinn from the get-go in 2007. Quinn would have been far more developed. Instead, they set him back again at halftime of Game Three this year.

Put Quinn in the game right now and hope that by the end of the year, you see some sparkle that will get you excited about 2010.

Looks like Mangini’s grand plan is coming together, eh eh… Play Anderson enough and the fans will never call for him to play again. Now, Quinn can play without any worry of the fans calling for DA. Now Quinn can have the cushion he needs to grow into the role.

Am I the only one who sees the method to Mangini’s madness?!?!? Just you wait. I can see EM pulling out a cigar at the end of the season saying, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

this is why DA needs to sit on the bench and quinn needs to start for the rest of the season. if he continues to play, DA’s going to have the worst passer rating of a starting qb in a long time. i think he’s already beat ryan leaf.

but, mangini seems to have some sort of attachment to DA if he still hasn’t benched him after these awful performances. so come MNF, we’ll all be calling for DA’s head again.

In pre season we came to the conclusion that Karma predicts neither Derek Anderson nor Brady Quinn will have productive careers with the Cleveland Browns. Fate has proven our prognostication to be accurate.
The franchise is obligated to play one or the other, because their contractual obligations indicate that their performance based pay is directly relatable to the other player´s failure. The contents of their contracts brings them into a direct correlation, that we can not deny. Neither player can be motivated to lead the club at any time, if their salaries are subject to such extreme fluctuation, not based on success but the other player´s failure.
At this point their individual performances have declined to such a degree, that starting Brett Ratliff finally seems warranted. We hope they can renegotiate their contracts with a fair franchise to their liking.

In other news, Randy Lerner wants to be involved with the transition to a presentable NFL franchise. We trust him to be a valuable asset in the process. We would however enjoy if he was a little bit more candid with the press and not eschew the attention the media can bestow.
We would appreciate if Eric Mangini can bear the brunt of leading the team in these times of turmoil. We want him to be part of this franchise, and a graduation from coaching duties into the front office seems plausible. We do require him to make some changes regarding his loyalties in the coaching staff. We realize bringing personnel from the New York Jets helped ease his transition, but we want people representative of a broader spectrum.
The media office will cooperate with the media. If you have questions regarding the immediate future please ask to speak to Mr. Lerner or coach Mangini, or issue a shoutout in the usual media outlets.

Cole: When you’re looking at quarterbacks, what do you examine most?

Belichick: One of the things we saw last year with (Matt) Cassel when we put him out there: … You put a guy in there who hasn’t played, the first couple of weeks you wonder if you made the right decision. And then, as they grow in the offense and they control it and it’s their offense and their team, sometimes those players go from here (holds his hand low) to here (holds his hand high) and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they just muddle along and they never grow. Cassel grew from the San Diego game last year to the Miami game to the San Francisco game. There were a few plays at first and then it was, "Hey, this guy is a legitimate starting NFL quarterback." The funny thing is that happened after Cassel wasn’t really that great in preseason. He was OK, but nothing like what we saw in the season.

It changed when he took all the walkthroughs. He was the guy in the meetings, he took all the reps in practice, he was the guy with the game plan, he was the guy saying, "Hey, I don’t like this route, I like this." He had the input and it was catered to him, just like how Brady says, "I don’t like that play." OK, we’ve got plenty of other plays. But that might be a play that Cassel likes running, but he doesn’t say anything because he’s not the quarterback at the time. When he became the quarterback, he started talking about it and saying what he liked. I think all quarterbacks go through that. So where they are now and where they are going to be, as they grow into it and the coaches figure out who they are, sometimes the only way you find out is to actually let them do it.

A few years ago, when we drafted Quinn, Kirk herbstriet said the browns should just draft Troy Smith. Since they blew it the first time, and if Quinn flops, they should really try and get Smith from Bmore rather than draft another flop.

Cole: So accuracy and decision-making are the most important things?

*Belichick: * For me, yeah.

*Cole: *Can you even distinguish between the two?

Belichick: What’s one without the other? If you make the wrong decision, you’ve got problems, and if you can’t throw the ball, even if you make the right decision, you’ve got problems. So if you’ve got those two, you’ve got Joe Montana. If you can’t do one of those two, then what’s the future? … If you have those two things, you have a quarterback. If you don’t have those two things, you’re going to have to dumb it down. You’re either going to have to limit the decisions he makes or take the accuracy element out of it by either not throwing over 10 yards or not throwing outside the numbers. You’re going to have to do something that changes the way you play offense.

As GM I would like to express an interest in the following quarterbacks:
1. Jared Zabransky, Boise State-Edmonton Eskimos
2. David Carr, Fresno State-New York Giants
3. Chris Pizzotti, Harvard-New York Jets
4. Bill Volek, Fresno State-San Diego Chargers
5. Rex Grossman, Florida-Houston Texans
6. David Greene, Georgia-retired from the Indianapolis Colts, would be considered.
(7.) Darrell Hackney, Alabama Birmingham-released by the Florida Tuskers, is an exciting player for a temporary starting designation.
I would commend any of these players to start over Derek Anderson or Brady Quinn.