Eric Mangini Working To Get Cleveland Browns Ready for Kansas City Chiefs

As if the loss to Tampa Bay this past Sunday wasn't brutal enough, the Kansas City Chiefs defense looked pretty good Monday night against the San Diego Chargers.

The Chiefs pulled out a 21-14 victory over the Chargers on Monday Night Football, and capped the game with an impressive goal line stand.

The Browns, meanwhile, found another way to lose a game this week.

Head Coach Eric Mangini spread the blame around concerning the loss, and that's the correct thing to do because that loss was a team effort.

While Rob Ryan's defensive unit looked pretty solid, except for some coverage breakdowns late in the game that probably can be attributed to fatigue, the offense completely disappeared as Brian Daboll seemingly threw the playbook out in favor of a vanilla three-and-out offense a Pop Warner team would've had no trouble defending.

What should be scaring the Browns coaching staff, and the rabid Cleveland Browns fanbase is the way the Chiefs came out and scrapped and fought to take a victory from the Chargers.

That team never gave up and fought to the very last second.

The Browns just wilted on Sunday, collapsing like a house of cards as the "woe is us" complex invaded the sidelines.

There was a feeling, beginning about halfway through the third quarter of the Bucs game, that the Browns were just going to let it all slip away. Browns fans have seen this before, and the familiar patterns began asserting themselves just after halftime.

So to say Mangini has a lot of work to do would be an understatement.

Not only does Mangini have to get this team ready to play what appears to be a much-improved Chiefs team, he has to once again try and rid the locker room of its losing malaise.

And it's not just the players he has to worry about, it's some of the coaching staff as well, who need to quit worrying about "not losing" and start playing to win.

While it's far too early to seriously roll out the "Let's fire the bums!" bandwagons, the truth is the Browns just lost one of the easiest games on their schedule, and now the Chiefs game doesn't look as easy as it did on Saturday afternoon.

Team President Mike Holmgren made a gutsy decision keeping Mangini and his staff intact after the 5-11 season in 2009. While the team ended on a four-game winning streak, the previous 11 games featured some of the worst football Cleveland fans ever have been forced to witness.

If this team sinks back into 2009 form with an offense that doesn't score and a team that finds new ways to lose games in the first half of the 2010 campaign, fans won't have to roll out a "Fire Mangini," or "Fire Daboll" bandwagon because they'll be cooling their heels in their backyard swimming pools by midseason.