Talking Cleveland Browns With Football Outsiders

I think we will see a step back on D, for sure. Ryan elevated our defense.

But whatever Colt learned isn’t all of a sudden irrelevant in this new system. NFL coaches are all very similar, and it’s still the same game. Some of the philosophy will be different (i.e. how they treat the added risk of passing the ball, how aggressive to be, how much a play that gains nothing hurts the offense, etc.) and the terminology will be different, but it’s still football.

He absolutely was. I liked Mangini a lot as a coach and I think he did really good things for us. The media was riduculously harsh on him because he didn’t feed their gossip train and I loved it. I loved the toughness and discipline he brought to the team. I loved the simulated noise at practice, the running laps punishments, and the information he didn’t release about injuries. I loved that he demanded intelligence from our team and made us tough for anyone to beat, even when the talent disparity was against us.

The problem was the organizational structure. I was not comfortable with Mangini as the “czar” or whatever you want to call it—and I don’t think Lerner was either. And the guy we brought in happened to be of a different football background than Mangini—if it would have been Parcells I think Mangini might still be here. I think Holmgren was willing to let Mangini do things differently than the WCO Walsh tree does as long as he saw an improvement in the record and he didn’t. Not to mention the complete reversal of the previous year’s end of season trend. It’s like Rich Rod letting Ryan Mallett go; Mallett was a great college QB, Rich just needed Denard Robinson.

Our poor record was probably due to luck and untimely mistakes that were out of Mangini’s control as much as anything else, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. If Chansi doesn’t fumble, if we don’t let MJD go 90 bajillion yards at the end of the game,if Eric Wright gets burned only twice and breaks up one pass to Boldin, if Seneca doesn’t throw a pick-6 against KC, etc. many of the games we lost could be said to have come down to one play. Mangini didn’t screw up, he actually had us in position to win around 12 games last year—and that’s damn good considering where we were when he took over. But fairly or not in this league, the HC is responsible for wins and losses when all is said and done. We didn’t make the plays and the other teams did.

I don’t like that we fired Mangini, and I do think it was a bit unfair to him, but I can see why they did it. And I think it might be best for the organization long-term to have the familiarity that we now do—if we can win enough games to keep this regime intact, I expect great thib. I wish Holmgren would have done it a year earlier if he was going to do can Mangini anyway, but hindsight is 20/20.

It was definitely a part of it. If Holmgren didn’t like Mangini from the get go, he could have fired him—in fact that’s what everyone expected. People were surprised he gave Mangini a chance to prove himself.

Eric made the team competitive, but he just didn’t win enough games. I think Holmgren would have overlooked the coaching background differences if Mangini would have proved that the odd marriage could have worked by winning. It would have been insanely stupid to keep him on for that second year if there was no long-term chance of him staying.

Feces has it’s ups and downs.

No thanks.