As the level of chatter around the Browns’ now-vacant head coaching position rises, there’s another way that Eric Mangini’s recent dismissal is significant for the organization.
Whatever its contents may be, from here on out Mike Holmgren is officially the man holding the bag.
Holmgren has been in his presidential role with the Browns for a little more than a year. But the 2010 season was a hybrid of sorts. Holmgren was steering the ship, but the ship itself and the staff onboard were inherited from someone else.
Holmgren kept Mangini on for a sophomore year, but Randy Lerner was the one who hired him in the first place. Mangini, in turn, had sole discretion over his coordinators and assistant coaches.
Holmgren installed Tom Heckert as the GM, but their dual imprint on the personnel was limited to one draft and a handful of free agent signings. The bulk of the players on this year’s team were still there thanks to Mangini.
This situation created a sizable safety net for Holmgren. Mangini was still the head coach; Mangini was still responsible for the coaching staff; and Mangini was still the mastermind behind most of the roster. Everyone knew this, from the fans to the journalists.
So when the team nose-dived yet again, where was the criticism directed? Mangini. It seemed like this was the case even when a player brought in under Holmgren’s watch—specifically, Jake Delhomme—could be singled out as a prime reason for some of the team’s more disappointing losses.
In jettisoning Mangini, Holmgren has essentially thrown away his flak jacket. From the front office to the sidelines to the center of the field, the team is now completely his.
We’re already seeing the consequences of this new reality. Even after the Ravens game in week 16, fans and local sports personalities were clamoring for Holmgren to come down from the owner’s box and take up the play-call sheet again. When he announced in his press conference on Monday that that wasn’t going to happen (for now), the backlash began. When the new head coach is actually hired, it’ll continue, even if the choice is a superstar name like Jon Gruden (who, by the way, I am not endorsing). It’ll build even more violently if the selection is a current assistant with a previous and disastrous head coaching stint on his resume (see: Mike Mularkey, Marty Mornhinweg).
When will it end? In the two months between the Browns’ first Super Bowl win and the following season’s draft. Anything else is fair game for Cleveland sports fanatics. As evidence, I will always remember reading a Plain Dealer online “Cavs comment of the day” from the 2008-2009 season where the reader proclaimed the squad to be “the worst 65-win team [he’d] ever seen.” Yes, it was about a different sport, but the mentality here is the same regardless of the shape of the ball—and in most cases, regardless of whether we’re talking about Cleveland or any other sports city in America. People just dig complaining and criticizing.
The reality is that everyone living vicariously through the Browns’ performance will be satisfied with nothing less than perfection. I doubt Holmgren is a stranger to this concept. He did suffer through some hard times in Seattle when he was performing the dual duties of coach and GM, after all. I assume that he’s ready for the angry mob to take aim at him again now that he has a blank organizational slate to work with.
Even though Holmgren has already been on the job for a year, he truly starts earning his paycheck now. Let’s see how he does.
There are plenty of reasons to wonder whether or not Eric Mangini deserves to keep his job as head coach of the Cleveland Browns - an offense that isn’t productive and isn’t fun to watch chief amongst them - but I would argue that there is one overarching reason why Mangini, unfortunately, must be removed from his position:
Mangini has a fatal flaw. He wants to play close games.
You can see evidence of Mangini’s “keep it close” approach in nearly every facet of every Browns game. Be it the team’s infamous bend but don’t break defense - which may or may not be a product of a slow D only being able to cover a short field - or, more obviously, the offense’s consistent desire to run out the clock at the end of the half instead of putting up max points, there is evidence to support the idea that Mangini actually strives to play tight games.
Listening to Mangini and Colt McCoy talk about what they were thinking at the end of the first half against Baltimore, it was exceedingly clear to me that Mangini’s philosophy was that scoring any number of points was fine so long as the Ravens didn’t get the ball back. The implication is obvious: Mangini wasn’t thinking about winning; he was thinking about staying close.
The notion of a pro coach subscribing to this philosophy is incredibly insane to me. If theres one thing most of us should realize by now it is that Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey was right - good teams don’t win close games, they avoid them. In close games anything can happen. Random, lucky shit takes over. Sundiata Gaines - a player who is no longer in the NBA - hits a bomb from behind the arc to crush the Cavaliers (see: last season Cavs v. Jazz). And in the NFL one loss means a whole lot more than one loss in the NBA.
Some might argue that Mangini’s desire to play close games implies that he doesn’t believe he has a good team. That he feels the Browns can’t win unless they luck out. But if this is true then what does it say about the progress Mangini has made in two years? It certainly doesn’t say anything positive. And just as importantly, is there any reason for us to believe Mangini is going to move away from this philosophy moving forward? If the Browns played well enough to destroy the Patriots, shouldn’t they be good enough to not have to play a close game against Buffalo?
It’s this philosophy, not any win-loss record, that necessitates Mangini be removed in order for the Browns to improve moving forward.
After the Browns dropped consecutive disappointing road games to 2-win teams, the sports punditry seems to have decided once again that Eric Mangini is running out the clock on death row.
I’m still not entirely sure that I agree with this opinion or, if it is true, the actual decision. As Mike pointed out earlier, good teams require continuity, and firing a coach every two to three seasons is a pretty huge impediment to continuity. It’s also no secret that the Browns’ are still lacking in the personnel department, and they’ve had a rash of injuries to make matters worse. In light of all that, dumping Mangini seems at best a grey area.
Still, nothing reflects more poorly on a coach than losing games to teams like Buffalo and Cincinnati. Even if the Browns somehow manage to beat either Baltimore or Pittsburgh in the final two weeks, losses in games like the previous two carry a stench that clings to the head coach.
With all that in mind, the punditry has begun flinging around names for possible Mangini replacements. There’s almost universal agreement that whomever would come in would be a client of Bob LaMont, Holmgren’s agent and possible shadow President of the team. But aside from John Gruden (who still may not coach at all next season), the other early favorite appears to be Carolina’s John Fox.
Fox is one of those coaches who the NFL analyst community loves unconditionally. They talk about what a great motivator he is, what a sharp football mind he has—all kinds of intangibles that would make him a steal for any organization.
This is precisely the problem for laymen like us, though. Coaching is essentially all intangibles, and everyone but the players is cut off from most of those. We’re not in the locker room; we don’t know what the players think of the coach; we can’t access the X’s and O’s side of what he provides. Hell, most of the time we don’t even get to see what formations he’s running out on defense since the standard NFL camera angle doesn’t show the secondary.
Really, there’s only one quantitative measure that people like you and me can use to try to decide whether or not a coach is “good”: his win-loss record. So the question is, does John Fox’s record support the euphoria from the NFL congregation?
Counting the current season, John Fox has coached Carolina for 9 years. To date, he’s compiled a 73-69 record (51.4% wins) with the very real probability that Carolina loses its final two games of the season and drops that record to 73-71. In short, through his career, Fox is a .500 coach.
What about the topic of consistency? Well, here’s a year-by-year recap of the Panthers under Fox:
2002: 7-9, missed playoffs
2003: 11-5, lost to NE in Super Bowl
2004: 7-9, missed playoffs
2005: 11-5, lost to SEA in NFC Championship game
2006: 8-8, missed playoffs
2007: 7-9, missed playoffs
2008: 12-4, lost to ARI in NFC Divisional game
2009: 8-8, missed playoffs
2010: 2-12 (currently), worst record in the league
There are two ways to look at the above. One is that with the exception of this season, Fox has never won fewer than 7 games, and 44.4% of his teams have made it to the playoffs.
The second is that his career is marked by a serious yo-yo effect. Fox’s Panthers (which sounds like a villainous faction in a Disney movie) have never posted consecutive winning seasons. Further, every time they’ve made it to the playoffs, they’ve performed worse than the previous time. Super Bowl losers in 2003, booted from the NFC Championship game in 2005, blown out in the Divisional round in 2008.
Call me a pessimist if you will, but this doesn’t exactly give me a great deal of confidence that Fox is the guy to turn the Browns around at a coaching level.
In fact, it reminds me of a disturbing parallel. It was less than a year ago when the members of the NFL analyst fraternity collectively started touching themselves over Washington’s hiring of the great Mike Shanahan. I am on record as being critical of Shanahan’s godly status in the football world, at least based on recent reality. For all the clamor about his defense and rushing expertise, he won a grand total of 2 playoff games in the 10 years after John Elway retired. Flash forward to today: Washington is not only tied for last place in the NFC East at 5-9, but their personnel situation and Shanahan’s handling of players like McNabb and Haynesworth has been almost universally panned.
The truly scary part: even in the post-Elway era, Shanahan’s ten-year record with the Broncos (91-69) was still significantly better than Fox’s nine years in Carolina, regardless of what happens in the final two games of the 2010 season.
I’m not saying definitively that Fox is a bad candidate. On some level, coaching is sorcery. But I am saying that based on the only hard facts we have available, I think it would be wise for Browns fans to be skeptical.
As I concluded in the coaching post I linked to regarding Shanahan, the goal for GMs around the league should be to find the next great coach, not hire some guy beloved by the old guard who’s had some past success. Analysts talk all the time about how the keys to the AFC North are smash-mouth defense and a good running game. It’s rarely mentioned that the consistent rulers of the division, Baltimore and Pittsburgh, not only have good-to-great young QBs, they also have (supposedly) two of the great young coaches in the league in Mike Tomlin and John Harbaugh—both of whom were hired out of obscurity and initially met with skepticism around the pundit community. If Mangini is fired, the Browns’ brain trust would do well to keep that in mind.
Even casual Browns fans had to have been shocked by Eric Mangini yesterday. He did something so utterly out of character, so foreign to my understanding of his coaching philosophy, so staggeringly unexpected that I’m still trying to come to terms with it.
That’s right: he named Colt McCoy the starter not only for this Sunday vs the Bengals…but for the remainder of the 2010 season.
You read that correctly. Three. Whole. Games. Without. Speculation.
As much as I agree with the choice to play McCoy over…well, everyone else, I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed in Mangini on this one. It’s not about the decision, it’s about the announcement.
Frankly, I think it’s the first clear indication that he’s concerned about his job security.
Mangini is not a perfect coach by any stretch of the imagination. He’s still young, and he’s still learning. But one aspect I’ve always liked about him is his unflinching belief in a small set of core values: discipline, hard work, and intelligence.
The last of these is the most important to the issue at hand. Mangini is a guy who believes that you can win by outsmarting your opponent. It’s one of the big reasons he made Alex Mack, the winner of the Draddy Trophy, AKA the “academic Heisman,” his first draft choice in Cleveland. It’s the reason he constantly refers to watching tape as being “in the classroom.”
Most of all, though, it’s the reason that he reveals as little as possible about his starting quarterback on a week-to-week basis.
As we all know by now, Mangini believes that his team builds an advantage in every minute he forces an opposing coaching staff to waste preparing for a player who might not actually play. His James Bond-like resistance to divulging the identity of his starting QB has become an almost weekly sideshow for the past two seasons. It’s just a small part of the puzzle that led Michael Lombardi to dub Mangini “The Secret.”
In that sense, it’s mind-blowing to get an answer from Mangini on a Thursday as to who the starter will be this week, let alone for the next two beyond it.
It also indicates at least one of three things: first, that Mangini is clearly convinced that McCoy is the best quarterback he has; second, that his confidence in his belief system has been shaken enough that he’s abandoning one of his core coaching principles; and third, that he’s realized it may be smart for his job prospects to give Holmgren something he wants by auditioning McCoy in winter weather.
My read is that number one and number three are true. I’m not convinced of two, simply because of this: I believe that Mangini is smart enough to know that it’s preferable to have a quarterback good enough to be a foregone conclusion than it is to create mystery over two jokers.
I don’t think Mangini is wholly convinced that McCoy is the franchise just yet. But I do think that he’s convinced that, out of the names on his depth chart, McCoy has the best shot at it. Officially naming him the starter for the rest of the season is a small concession to Holmgren and Heckert that could potentially pay great dividends.
My prediction: if the Browns can manage to beat Cincinnati and play both Baltimore and Pittsburgh tough, Mangini will sacrifice Daboll at the Altar of Holmgren and keep his job for next season. Making this move with McCoy now puts him in the best position for that outcome. We’ll know in about four weeks whether or not it pays off for him.
