Cleveland Browns Midweek Thoughts: James Davis and Brad Childress

With everyone talking about a quarterback competition, nobody seems to realize we have an emerging running back competition.

Rookie running back James Davis announced his presence to the world last Saturday night by breaking through the line and tearing it up for an 81-yard score.

Davis was a late round draft pick that may now be considered a steal if he can keep that kind of production going into the regular season.

As delightful as it was to watch Davis on Saturday, it was equally as painful watching Jamal Lewis. The offensive line actually opened several holes for Lewis to run through. The problem was by the time Lewis got to those holes, they already had been closed.

It is fundamentally unfair that a guy who only is 30 years old already has lost a step and that his career probably is over after this season. But it’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Lewis was already showing signs of losing a step last year.

Davis, on the other hand, is as fresh as they come, and now the Browns have to contemplate keeping three running backs on the roster, along with Jerome Harrison. Where Noah Herron fits into all of this is something we’re all going to have to wait and see.

Harrison has been persona non grata this preseason due to an undisclosed injury, and the latest news out of Berea is this injury will keep him out of this weekend’s game versus Tennessee.

With Harrison out, that gives Davis that many more touches to prove to Mangini he’ll be the guy to go to should Lewis continue to regress.

The thing with Davis is, he hits the holes and appears to have that quality that makes defenders miss him. The last time we saw those kinds of qualities in a Cleveland backfield was with Eric Metcalf.

It’s still too early to anoint Davis the next Walter Payton, but he was breaking for big runs all throughout camp, and now he did it in a game. The next step is to do it during the regular season against a defense like the Steelers, but the Titans this week also will be a good test.

I think head coach Eric Mangini has a tougher decision ahead of him deciding on what to do with his running backs than how the quarterback situation is going to play out.

I said back in June that the quarterback competition most likely was a complete farce. Brady Quinn fits every single adjective Mangini has ever used to describe what he looks for in a quarterback.

As for the “competition,” it was horribly one-sided last week, upon further review. I thought it wasn’t exactly fair at the time, but after watching the game again, Quinn was barely in the game due to John St. Clair single-handedly killing two drives.

Mangini has said numerous times the one thing he hated more than anything else as a defensive coordinator was not knowing who the starting quarterback was going to be for that week’s opponent.

This tells me that not only will he not name his starting quarterback this week until an hour before the game starts, he’ll probably not name the “winner” of his little competition until one hour before kickoff versus the Vikings.

If I have one problem with Mangini right now, it’s his misplaced desire for secrecy. He does things that I think he believes are clever and that help the team. All he really ends up doing is looking paranoid.

Mangini’s heart is in the right place, but like his mentor Bill Belichick, he’s never learned that at some point, you go from protective to just absurd ridiculosity.

Back to the Vikings, I want to be a fly on the wall during the meetings the Vikings coaching staff are having for week one. I can just imagine Vikings head coach Brad Childress absolutely not quaking in his boots over either quarterback.

Childress has seen the tape. If Derek Anderson wins the competition, all he has to do is keep the pressure on him and Anderson will throw an interception. This is not a debatable point. It will happen.

Anderson looked “not bad” last week. But I’ve been down this road before and I know where it leads. Anderson is not going to ever be anything more than what he’s already been, and that’s not good enough.

Quinn may not be the answer either, but he just hasn’t played in enough games for me to say anything definitive. You have to give Quinn the starts, because if you do and he doesn’t live up to his potential, there are about three or four good quarterbacks looking to enter the draft next year.

Should Quinn win this competition, all the Vikings have to do is take out the middle of the field and force Quinn to dink and dunk, relying on their corners to shut it all down. Let’s be honest here, other than Joshua Cribbs and Mike Furrey, who’s going to catch the ball?

Braylon Edwards is no threat, Mohamed Massaquoi and Brian Robiskie are rookies, and if Mangini insists on starting Lewis at running back, he’ll never make it through the line.

I imagine assistant head coach/defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier isn’t too worried about who’s behind center because his defense will be too busy running through our lousy excuse for a line and sacking whoever is unlucky enough to be back there.

All Childress has to worry about is Favre, but that’s another story for another day.