Praying That the Cleveland Browns Finally Have a System

Stop me if you have heard this one before, Cleveland fans: The Browns are an organizational mess.

Add to all the losing that goes on in Cleveland the fact that all sports fans in general and Browns fans in particular are typically complainers, and chances are someone has at some time complained to you about the Browns as an organization: “Owner Randy Lerner is not visible enough”; “The team has no identity”; and “It was wrong for the Browns to hire their head coach before their general manager.”

Ask a Browns fan what they would like to see the Browns become and they will most likely say the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team that wins year after year, that loses players and coaches all of the time, yet seems to always have someone to fill the vacancies.

How do the Steelers do this? The popular opinion is that the Steelers have a system in place so that when they go to look for a replacement, they know what they are looking for and they find it. They rarely miss in the early rounds of the draft, and they rarely miss with free agents and trades.

The Steelers seem to have a prototype for what they want and when selecting personnel, they simply find the person who matches that prototype. It is not as simple as that, those doing the evaluation have to know what they are looking at, but just look at the success they continue to have at linebacker, defensive back, running back, and even head coach!

So for the Browns to become an organization like the Pittsburgh Steelers, they need to do the same thing: Determine what they want their franchise to be and then find the right people to plug in. In other words, develop a system.

But who says the Browns have not done exactly that this offseason and even prior to the end of the season when it was apparent that a change was going to have to come? Maybe they have. Big emphasis on “maybe”, but, still, there are signs that they have.

We do not know for sure. The owner does not say that they have and to be honest, who cares what the owner says anyway? The owner is not going to say, “We have no idea what we are doing from day to day,” so who besides the media cares to hear from him? Most Browns fans have become the proverbial Missourian: “Show me.”

So, has Randy Lerner put together a system as the Steelers have? Not the same system the Steelers have, but a system? If they have, then the hiring of Eric Mangini before the hiring of GM George Kokinis is irrelevant. Maybe they know what they want in a GM and what they want in a head coach.

Maybe they know what kind of team they want to be and they are finding the pieces to fit that puzzle.

It is pure speculation to say that is the case, and even if it is, fans have no reason to believe that Lerner is any good at building a successful organization. He did not in his first try. Yet, the cry after the firing of Crennel was “no rookie head coaches!” Why? Because rookies make rookie mistakes.

The fans and Randy Lerner wanted a head coach who had been through the process once before, who had made those mistakes, and who had learned from that experience.

Why would this argument not be valid for an owner as well? Randy Lerner took over his father’s organization, prepared or not, and he made personnel decisions that seemed to be based on previous success and/or pedigree: Romeo Crennel, who had coached under Bill Belichick and wore five Super Bowl rings, and Phil Savage, who had worked with the great Ozzie Newsome.

That did not work out for this organization. So maybe Lerner has learned something from that mistake. Does anyone think that the hiring of Eric Mangini was because of pedigree? Surely it helped that he coached for Belichick, but it seems more likely that he was hired because of his style of coaching, including the fact that he is a disciplinarian.

That is a sign that the Browns are picking people based on an overall philosophy.

If they were once-again searching by pedigree, then they would have skipped Mangini and went right after former Vice President of Player Personnel with the New England Patriots Scott Pioli.

The Patriots are another organization, just like the Steelers, who seem to have a philosophy and seem able to plug in parts and continue having success. The Browns did not hire Pioli.

Why? Could it be that Pioli did not fit the Browns prototype?

The argument against hiring a head coach before a GM is a typical one, but it is not a great one. What would happen if, say, a team did poorly because of personnel picks made by the GM?

And let us say that despite the personnel, the coach did an excellent job with what he had, keeping the team in games they had no right being in, but, the team still lost so the owner decided to fire the GM?

Does he then also have to fire the coach because a team cannot hire a GM when they already have a coach in place? Would you want to see a good coach fired because the GM is no good?

Maybe, you say, the new GM would want a different type of person to coach the team. Okay, but if that is the case, it does not sound like the team has an organizational system. It sounds like they would base their system on the individual GM’s style instead of on an organizational approach, the very thing everyone is complaining about now.

None of this is to say that the Browns and Randy Lerner are on the right path. None of this is to say that the Browns have established a system. It is just saying that maybe they have. It is easy to be a Browns fan and be pessimistic.

In addition to the losing this team has accomplished since returning, many—the national media included—expected good things from this team in 2008 but instead the team fell flat on its face, be that the fault of Crennel or injuries or personnel decisions.

It would be nice to have some assurances that a system has been instituted, but truth be told, the only way we will know is to give it time. That hurts, but that is just the way it is.

Now, Cleveland fans, stop me if you have heard this one before: Cleveland Indians owner Larry Dolan is cheap...