This is a simple question, really, from a very tired and overworked young man.
Should anyone on the planet be surprised the Browns haven’t been able to hire an Offensive Coordinator yet?
I don’t think so.
Why?
Because who wants to be an Offensive Coordinator on a team where they aren’t even going to get to call the plays?
Even better, the guy calling the plays instead is a rookie Head Coach.
Even better still, the guy calling the plays is a rookie Head Coach with only two years of experience as an Offensive Coordinator.
For the St. Louis Rams.
This remains one of the strangest things about the Shurmur hire, frankly.
Why did Mike Holmgren feel the need to accept the idea of Shurmur calling his own plays?
In my mind, this looks like a categorically terrible idea. Shurmur has never been a Head Coach in the NFL before. What is the point of giving him play calling duties when he is already going to have to figure out how to juggle more responsibility than he has ever had before?
Is it because he’s such a remarkable play caller?
I find this hard to believe.
And I’m sure a lot of Offensive Coordinator candidates are asking themselves the same, or similar, questions.
Moreover, even if an Offensive Coordinator were comfortable with the idea of coordinating an offense for which they do not call the plays - what this would entail, I’m not quite sure - they would have to be relatively uncomfortable with the notion that they have almost no chance of promotion. You don’t get a head coaching job by being an Offensive Coordinator and not calling the plays.
The person who calls the plays gets all of the credit.
Does taking a job that someone else will get all of the credit for sound like a good idea to you?
It doesn’t to me.
It seems then that the Browns will either have to hire someone who is awfully desperate - or they’re just going to have to hire from the very bottom of the barrel, like somebody who’s currently stuck at the junior college or high school level.
Although a lot of Browns fans are excited by the possibility that Colt McCoy could finally be The Guy,a lot of analysts have agreed that there’s a dark shadow hovering over him. People love his leadership. They love his work ethic. They love his intelligence and the way he performed under pressure. But from Tony Grossi onward, the word is that McCoy’s arm strength is “a concern” moving forward.
This notion irritates the hell out of me. Not because I’m blindly onboard with Colt McCoy, but because one of my pet peeves in sports is the tendency for people to believe that as soon as an athlete begins his second year, his strengths and weaknesses are frozen in place. He will never become significantly better at anything than what he already is. It’s as if a timer gets started on the day the athlete is drafted, and as soon as it goes off a couple of years later, the cement has set.
I’ll admit that by and large, huge improvements are not the norm. (Holland, feel free to jump in and drop some knowledge on the remarkable year-to-year consistency in NBA players’ stats.) However, if you’re looking at the right types of athletes, you can find plenty of examples of major strides being made.
For instance, let’s switch sports briefly. Steve Nash’s FT% for 2 of his first 3 years in the NBA was ~82.5%. In year 4, he improved to 88.2% and has never dropped below that rate in the succeeding 11 years. In fact, he’s shot 90% or better in 8 of those 11 years.
Returning to the NFL, Drew Brees showed similarly significant statistical improvement a few years into his professional career. In his first three seasons in the league, Brees’ completion percentages were 55.6%, 60.8%, and 57.6% respectively. In his fourth year, his completion percentage jumped to 65.5%. From year 4 to the present, his average annual completion percentage is 66.5%, and his worst year in that span is a still-impressive 64.3%.
What do these two athletes share in common? They were both undersized. Neither was born with the type of overwhelming athleticism that you’d see in, say, LeBron or Mike Vick. And both are renowned for their incredible hard work and dedication to the game.
All of these characteristics are (supposedly) true of Colt McCoy as well.
However, people may look at FT% in basketball and completion % in the NFL and say that those are somehow different than arm strength. They’re about skill and precision, not brute force. Learned, not innate qualities.
Somehow, arm strength is just regarded as being different.
But this past Monday, NFL correspondent Michael Lombardi wrote a column praising Aaron Rodgers. This, in itself, is not special, as the sports media has now universally agreed that Rodgers is The Next Great Quarterback. Even casual NFL fans have elevated him to elite status. In fact, I’m fairly certain that there are babies all over Wisconsin who have delayed trying to crawl so that they can learn to do Rodgers’s “championship belt” gesture instead.
What makes Lombardi’s column worth mentioning in this context is the following passage:
The one noticeable area of improvement from his time in college to now is his arm strength. He never displayed this type of rocket or the ability to throw the ball from every angle. He had a good arm, now he has a powerful arm. Part of the reason for the increased velocity is that in college he…appeared as if the weight room was for linemen, not quarterbacks. Now he looks like he enjoys the weight room and has made his meek body into one that can take a hit and drive the football.
This officially marks the first time that I have ever seen a respectable NFL analyst make the argument that a quarterback’s arm strength can be significantly improved once he reaches the pro ranks. In other words, thanks to Lombardi, I can now point to a highly regarded expert who shares my opinion that this arm strength conundrum is garbage.
Does this mean that I believe a 90 lb chess champ could transform himself into a guy who can throw a football through a bank vault the way Rodgers can? Not necessarily, no. I think there’s some level of proficiency in a specialized field like this that can’t be acquired artificially. But I do believe that it means a pro athlete can go from being decent at something to being very good to great at that same thing—provided he really, truly goes after it.
Clearly, McCoy has some arm strength already. He wouldn’t have been a 4 year starter at Texas and a third round pick in the NFL (Holmgren’s quarterback-induced hard-on aside) if he didn’t. The question becomes, will he have the dedication and work ethic to make the same types of serious improvements that players like Nash, Brees, and Rodgers have made? If so, the Browns may truly have a solution at the QB spot. If not, then it’s back to the drawing board again.
But for now, take some comfort in the fact that Aaron Rodgers has shown that the arm strength issue is not, in fact, genetic-or-bust.
In a tweet last week, LeCharles Bentley suggested that there were parallels between Mike Holmgren’s decision to hire Pat Shurmur as head coach of the Cleveland Browns and LeBron James’s decision to leave the Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.
The implication here, of course, is that Holmgren decided a long time ago that Eric Mangini would be fired and that Shurmur would replace him - just like LeBron almost certainly knew he would leave Cleveland for Miami far before July 1st, 2010.
Bentley’s argument then, if I’m interpreting the tweet correctly, is that if people are going to be angry about LeBron’s course of action, they should be equally angry with the path that Holmgren took.
I respect Bentley’s opinion more than any other talking head or radio personality in Cleveland. He offers specific insight about football that only an ex-player can give (as opposed to the gross, watered down generalizations a lot of former jocks toss out). He also has a true point of view. Almost nobody has that. I will choose to distill Bentley’s defining P.O.V. as pro-player / anti-ownership … or pro-worker / anti-management if you prefer to look at it as such.
It follows then that the overarching point Bentley is trying to make is fairly obvious: fans treat players one way and treat management another. When players exercise power they are derided for not being loyal. When ownership exercises power it is applauded for being firm. Fans want disciplinarians as coaches - but would never want their boss to be a disciplinarian.
Overall, I largely agree.
However, with all of that in mind, LeCharles is grabbing at straws by comparing Holmgren with James.
In the case of LeBron, fans of the Cavaliers were going to hate that he left no matter where he went or how he decided to do it. Watching the Cavs play this year, it’s easy to see why. By leaving Cleveland, LeBron very literally removed the joy that once came from watching the Cavaliers. Largely because of LeBron, one rather pleasurable extracurricular activity for Clevelanders … poof. Gone.
Not much fun.
But what angered people even more was their belief that LeBron let his decision to leave Cleveland show up in his performance on the court (read: the Eastern Conference Semifinals). The matter of LeBron having decided years ago that he, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh would team up in Miami was inconsequential - until it had an effect on how he conducted the one aspect of his business that could not be hidden from the fan base.
Anyone who has ever coasted during the last week of elementary school really shouldn’t complain about LeBron’s behavior. The same goes for anyone who didn’t try so hard in Algebra once they were admitted to college, or took the easy way out on difficult tasks during the last two weeks at a job. The only difference between you and LeBron is that millions of people care about his work. Maybe ten or fifteen people at most care about yours.
We could debate whether LeBron has a higher level of responsibility than me or you for a long ass period of time.
We won’t do that now.
Let’s look at Holmgren instead.
It’s hard to see the precise parallels between his situation and LeBron’s, even if we are to assume that Bentley is right and Holmgren decided … before the start of this season? … that Shurmur would be his head coach in 2011.
What impact did that decision have on the product the Browns put on the field in 2010?
Would the team really have won significantly more games with Shurmur than they did with Mangini?
Should fans be insulted that Holmgren “lied” to them, saying he wanted to give Mangini the best shot he could to make things work if he really did not?
If you’re truthfully surprised or actually upset that a pro sports executive, professional athlete, or hell, any person in the public eye lied to you at a press conference or in an interview, then you haven’t been paying attention for much of your adult life.
Ultimately, the notion that both Holmgren and LeBron “played us” may be true - but as far as Holmgren goes, we have to ask, “To what effect?” LeBron’s back room dealings impacted the playoffs and a real chance at a championship. What impact did Holmgren’s scheming have? Is the charge that he wasted this season by keeping Mangini around? Maybe … I’m just not sure the season would have been “found” if Shurmur or anyone else had been the coach instead of Mangini.
The link jumps to an excerpt from a book called Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won, by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. The book itself is billed as “Freakonomics for sports.” I just read another excerpt on a different topic in the new issue of Sports Illustrated last night have been really impressed with it so far.
The excerpt in question here is titled “The Curse of the No. 1 Draft Pick.” In it, Moskowitz and Wertheim provide data to support the notion that the best possible move for any NFL team picking in the top 10 is for them to trade down. This seemed like a relevant topic to consider today, as the conference championship match-ups were set while the Browns were busy trying to put together another new coaching staff.
The two strongest parts of Moskowitz’s and Wertheim’s argument are that evidence shows teams wanting to move up pay entirely too highly for the right to do so (in both compensatory picks and salary for their targeted player), and that in each draft class there is only a marginal difference in value between the top 4 players at any given position. In fact, when it’s all said and done, they argue that the first pick in the 2nd round carries more value than the 1st overall pick.
The ideas themselves aren’t necessarily new, but I applaud Moskowitz and Wertheim for using data to make the case. Admittedly, their argument will lose a little of its strength next season—whenever “next season” begins—because a new CBA is almost guaranteed to include a rookie wage scale that reduces the discrepancy between salaries for top picks versus lower picks.
Still, with the Browns holding the sixth pick and fans clamoring for a big name college player to start solving their problems, this study serves as more evidence that the best move for the health of the franchise is to pull a Belichick: Take advantage of an overzealous (probably QB-needy) team to stockpile picks and players, load up with talent at a higher rate than everyone else, and start blowing the doors off over the course of a few years.
You could say that this strategy didn’t work out so well for Belichick today. But keep in mind that the Patriots—who went 14-2 this year—have 3 of the top 34 picks in the next draft because of the strategy Moskowitz and Wertheim suggest as the norm. They can’t win every year, but they are going to continue to be really good for a really long time. That sustainable success is exactly what the Browns need to become relevant again. We’ll find out whether or not they recognize it.
One reason I think they very well may: the other team cited as the greatest champion of this strategy is Andy Reid’s Eagles, AKA Tom Heckert’s and Pat Shurmur’s Eagles. Let’s hope it all stays in the family tree.
The first, as all of you can guess, I’m sure, is the Cavs’ 55 point loss to the Lakers from Tuesday.
The second is the Cavs’ 68 point victory over the Miami Heat on December 17, 1991.
This is simply a reminder that, in sports, like in many things, success comes and goes. Players get old. They get hurt. They get traded. Coaches are fired. Owners sell the team. Fans stop buying season tickets. They stop watching games. They stop reading every story ever written about NBA basketball.
This is the natural cycle of things. The Cavs will, barring a true catastrophe, be back. We just don’t know how long it will take. But if it’s 20 years then so be it. I have a pretty good idea that in that time, somewhere, the Browns time will come. Or the Indians will win a division or two. Maybe both the Browns and the Indians will compete for a championship. Who knows. In Cleveland, at least, we have three teams to go through the cycle.
