Eric Mangini Playing Same Old Game with Cleveland Browns Quarterbacks

As the Cleveland Browns OTAs progress, it's amusing how head coaches like Eric Mangini already want to revert to midseason form when it comes to playing head games with their opponents.

Mangini was quoted as saying he might end up using both Jake Delhomme and Seneca Wallace behind center this year.

"Seneca gives you some flexibility to do some things," Mangini said in The Plain Dealer article. "Just like Jake has certain things that he does. If you can incorporate them both in a plan that makes sense, that works, then that could be a good thing."

Mangini went on to discuss using Joshua Cribbs and how mixing and matching the three players will put pressure on opposing defenses to keep up.

This all sounds really great, but don't get your hopes up that Mangini finally has found the elusive solution to only using one quarterback. It's been tried before and it never works. It was tried in Cleveland last year and the results were horrendous, to put it mildly.

Mangini loves to lie.

There's no other way to put that, and I mean it in an affectionate way, but there it is. That being said, Mangini isn't really fibbing when he made that statement, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Mangini will say anything to give his team any kind of competitive advantage he can, and walking in front of the press and saying he'll throw two or three guys behind center at any given time is just one of the means of doing that.

Jake Delhomme is the starting quarterback, and you need to look no further than team president Mike Holmgren's comments shortly after he took the job when he stated the team would choose a starting quarterback and "throw every resource" behind that guy.

What Mangini is really saying when he talks about using Delhomme and Wallace and Cribbs is the Wildcat formations should become a lot more dynamic this year. The Browns' Wildcat plays should involve more than Cribbs taking the ball from center and then just running it.

Hopefully, we'll see Wallace to Cribbs, or Cribbs to Wallace. There might even be a Delhomme to Wallace and vice versa play.

That's how you put pressure on the defense, keep them guessing, which is all Mangini really is trying to do.

That's important to point out because if Mangini is trying to repeat the games he played last year, the only person he ended up fooling was himself, and that's the last thing anyone following this team needs to live through again.