Quinn out, Anderson back in for Browns

His biggest play last Sunday was his last big play of the season.

Sure, Brady Quinn, the Notre Dame poster boy, finished out the game, turning his 24-yard bootleg into what would be the game-winning points. But Quinn also hurt his right foot on the play, and the injury has ended his season.

His getting hurt was the last thing Browns coach Eric Mangini wanted.

Make no mistake here, Quinn wasn't Mangini's ideal quarterback. No other alternative on the Browns is. But Quinn was Mangini's best option, considering those alternatives. Now with Quinn sidelined, Mangini has to use Derek Anderson, whose return to the lineup threatens to revive the quarterback controversy that began this season.

Read more ...

Even in Browns win, Quinn provides little help

Not sure what to make of the Browns these days. Now, I can't see this team as among the league's elites, regardless of how many games it runs off as this season of disappointment staggers to a conclusion.

But these Browns are showing life, a pulse that belies their 3-10 record. They haven't quit on their embattled coach, whose tenure at the team's helm might be a new general manager away from its end.

The hand coach Eric Mangini was dealt might not be one any coach should have been told to play. Mangini was brought in to put together a puzzle that had pieces missing. He inherited a football team with little talent, and he had a quarterback controversy that never did sort itself out.

Mangini didn't help matters with his waffling on Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn, a strategy that didn't engender confidence in either man. Both have played like quarterbacks with no belief in themselves.

The job is now in Quinn's hands -- again. But what Quinn has shown in his last three games, two of which were wins -- suggests he holds a loose grip on it. He has played like a quarterback with no feel for the position and no confidence.

Look at his latest performance. In a 41-34 win Sunday, Quinn was -- how to put it kindly -- a caretaker. His contribution to the win was a 24-yard bootleg that kept alive a fourth-quarter drive which led to the winning touchdown.

Take away that run, and the Browns would have been better off sticking Josh Cribbs behind center. Quinn completed 10 passes, a measly total in a game that saw the Browns score 41 points. His quarterback rating was 27.7. His passing yards came to 66. That's no misprint: 66 yards.

Read more ...

Justice is served: 3 up and 3 down ...

THREE UP ... 1. Can't wait to see middleweight champ Kelly Pavlik back in the ring. His absence hasn't helped the sweet science -- nor Kelly's bank account. There are big-money paydays out there for good fighters, and tough guy like Pavlik (aka "The Ghost"), sidelined 10 months with a string of injuries, should scoop up some of it. So news that he'll be fighting Miguel Espino on Dec. 19 is something to applaud.

2. I have a friend who lives and dies with the Raiders, so he has to be pleased that Bruce Gradkowski, the AFC Player of the Week, has emerged as the team's quarterback of the future. NFL teams have had their hits and misses at that position in recent years, so maybe instead of wasting No. 1 picks on quarterbacks, teams might be wiser to follow what the Raiders did: look for somebody else's discard. Who wouldn't take "Grad" over JaMarcus Russell, Matt Leinart or Brady Quinn?

3. I'm betting freshman John Wall will do a 'Melo Anthony: play one season in college, win a NCAA title and then head to the NBA. In this early hoops season, Wall has been as solid as the Great Wall and hotter than a wall of fire. There might be a better freshman than Wall, but he hasn't shown himself yet. Enjoy looking at this "great" Wall in "Bluegrass Country" while you can.

THREE DOWN ... 1. Some crooner once sang about fools falling in love, but someone also should have sang about how fools act like fools, as Greg Baker, the executive director of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, did when he signaled that the museum will jettison the figure who helped build the institution. Essentially, Baker slammed the museum's front door in the face of Buck O'Neil.

Read more ...

Browns need 'great' mind now, not later

I hope Jim Brown wasn't lying. I mean, just the thought of a "great football mind" talking to Browns owner Randy Lerner, as Brown claimed the other day, is almost too delicious to consider.

You hope that's the case, if you consider yourself a Browns fans. You keep all your fingers crossed that Lerner will, finally, put his beleaguered franchise in the hands of a "great" mind who won't mismanage it.

Yet you find yourself saying: Haven't we heard all of this before? Weren't Phil Savage, Romeo Crennell, George Kokinis and coach Eric Mangini supposed to be great football minds, too?

And look at what they wrought.

Nowhere in this process of resurrecting the storied franchise that Art Modell had spirited off to Baltimore has the Lerner family, which was complicit in the team's leaving town in the first place, done well in putting together a quality organization. The family might know banking and credit cards, but the Lerners have no clue how to build an NFL team.

If they did, we wouldn't be here again. Essentially, the Lerners have returned Browns fans to 1999, the season the reincarnation of the Browns returned to town.

The franchise came back with great promise, rekindling an affair with a city that loved them as much ever. There was no ill-will toward the franchise. No one bemoaned what the Ravens, the old Browns, had become.

Read more ...

For Browns, No. 3 can be best of all QBs

What I'll remember most about the Browns' 30-6 nightmare 11 days ago in Soldiers Field will be a pass play in the fourth quarter: Quarterback Derek Anderson, under siege in his end zone and trying to escape the rush, cocks his right arm and floats a pass nowhere near anybody wearing a Browns uniform.

Defensive back Charles Tillman dives for Anderson's floater, catches the ball while tumbling to the turf, scrambles to his feet and races toward the goal line. Tillman fends off tacklers along the way before rumbling into the end zone. It was another touchdown for the Bears, and another interception for Anderson.

More interesting to me, the pass was Anderson's last. Coach Eric Mangini, frustrated, pulled Anderson and replaced him with the prodigal son Brady Quinn.

It seems now as if Mangini's switch to Quinn will become permanent. He couldn't do worse than Anderson. For whatever else Anderson might be in life -- a good son, a solid citizen and a first-rate teammate -- he was a pathetic excuse for an NFL quarterback.

Look, Mangini could only trot out a disaster like Anderson for so long. At some point, the dour, dim-witted coach had to realize that a quarterback who ended a game with a QB rating of 10.5 wasn't good enough to stand behind center.

All of Anderson's performances this season had been noteworthy for their ineptitude, but his sorry play hit rock bottom against the Bears. In my mind, it was fool's thinking to keep using Anderson and then expect a better result.

To steal a few words from retired NFL coach Denny Green, Anderson was who I thought he was: a scatter-armed quarterback who couldn't hit the Gulf of Mexico if he stood on a dock in Key West, Fla.

I'm not, of course, an NFL coach; don't play one for TV either. What I am is someone who has watched and written about enough NFL games to know ineptitude when I see it. I have witnessed plenty of it while rooting for the Browns.

They have gone through more QBs than Madonna has gone through lovers. From Tim Couch to Trent Dilfer to Jeff Garcia to an endless line of others whose play fell below mediocre.

Browns fans have never made peace with mediocrity, despite the fact that's all they've witnessed since the team's rebirth a decade ago. They won't make peace with it now.

Their shouts to bench Anderson had been louder this week than they were in the bye week, and the tone-deaf Mangini couldn't ignore them.

Under ordinary circumstances, his decision would have been easier. He'd have let the job stay in Quinn's hands without much thought.

Quinn, no star in the marking, isn't the answer. He had opened the '09 season with the job, but he showed he didn't have the skills to hold on to it.

Did his skills somehow improve while tethered to the Browns bench? How much better is Quinn now?

Well, that's a separate question altogether, and the answer collides with a bigger concern for Mangini: using Quinn could end up costing the team $11 million in contract incentives.

On a team with more holes than a brick building in Baghdad, Mangini can't afford the salary-cap hit playing Quinn might cost the team. He won't do markedly better than Anderson, anyway. Peyton Manning, Drew Brees or Tom Brady might be unable to play well for this collection of talent Mangini has at his quarterback's disposal.

Quinn isn't Manning, Brees or Brady. He never will be. Neither will Anderson, which is the damnable part of it for Browns fans. They want better, but better was never going to come with Anderson at quarterback.

Nor with Brady Quinn.

After observing another dispiriting loss, Mangini should keep Quinn on the bench next to Anderson and put his faith in Brett Ratliff, the team's No. 3 QB. Ratliff's the horror show in orange and brown that nobody has seen yet.

Browns owner looks for a 'real' GM

The rumored names are intriguing: Bill Cowher, Tony Dungy, Jon Gruden, Mike Holmgren, maybe others. All have the authority of success behind them. Each of these men has a Super Bowl ring, plus an aura of credibility coming with them.

But a couple of their names have been thrown around before. Not even a year ago, they were delicious thoughts for Browns fans to eat up like a mountain of Hershey's chocolate. The names sounded too surreal to be more than a maddening tease. And they were. The chocolate melted, leaving Browns owner Randy Lerner to sell Ex-Lax as an alternative.

Now, Ex-Lax might be what Lerner, the billionaire sportsman, needs for the franchise he inherited to excrete the pile of dung that runs it.

Fans here are inured to the rot inside the Browns organization, and they are hopeful, finally, that Lerner will start to sate their appetite for winning football by building an organization on a sturdier foundation. He can only do so with enlightened leadership at the top -- with a real football man to run all aspects of Lerner's football organization.

The man to do so is not named Eric Mangini, the ineffectual coach and Lerner confidant. Mangini is plunging the organization to depths not seen in the NFL since the early years of the Tampa Buccaneers. He's doing it with the openness of a KGB operative, using his players and the public as if they were pieces in a private chess match.

Nothing marks incompetence like secrecy, and with the turmoil inside the Lerner's franchise these days, transparency is the proper approach to prevent a public insurrection.

As much as Lerner and fans might not want to admit it, the Browns are starting from scratch -- again. There will be no one-season turnaround for this disaster of an NFL franchise. Its revival is a four- or five-year project, and Lerner can't count on fans sticking around if he doesn't take bold actions now.

No reason to dwell on the George Kokinis affair; the firing was a bold move, if not altogether sensible. His hiring was botched as well. Kokinis didn't look like a bad hire; by all accounts, he was a capable football man. But from what insights there are into the Browns organization, Lerner never handed Kokinis the reins. The owner left Mangini to guide the football side of the team, the same mistake Lerner made when he hired Butch Davis, a first-time NFL coach, and let him run the franchise into the turf.

Lerner made a different mistake when hiring Phil Savage and Romeo Crennel so maybe that indicates he's growing into the role of a owner. Now, however, he has no room for another mistake. He has no goodwill in the bank to rely on in a community weary of his mistakes and his team's futility. The fans in Cleveland want to see good, solid NFL football. A winning record would be nice, too.

Can winning football even be thinkable under Lerner's stewardship?

It is difficult to know what Lerner's plans are. Rumors about his intentions trickle out here and there. Most of the recent talk has been aimed at discrediting Kokinis, a strategy that might make legitimate candidates to run the franchise hesitant to consider the job. They won't want to worry about an owner with an unclear vision; they don't need a meddlesome owner in the background either; and they shouldn't be saddled with a coach who has been the problem, not a solution.

Cowher, Dungy, Gruden, Holmgren ... one of those names might be a chance for Lerner to get it right. Each person has his appeal. But to Browns fans, each promises what Mangini never could: hope for the future.

If fans don't have hope, they have no reasons to spend their cash on a lousy team. For they can watch a lousy sports franchise for a lot less money at nearby Progressive Field.

Ginn Jr. puts his name back in spotlight

The name “Ginn” might be as popular to sports fans on the East Side of Cleveland as any last name since “Brown” – as in Jim Brown.

Unlike the name Brown, the last name Ginn has nothing to do with the Cleveland Browns. The prestige the name carries comes from great high school football. The name is stamped everywhere on perhaps the most successful all-black football program in the Midwest.

The program at Glenville High is the handiwork of one man, a man who played football for the school in the early 1970s. His name is Ted Ginn Sr., and his coaching and mentoring have sent a stream of black players to elite college programs like Ohio State and Michigan.

Coach Ginn has a fistful of talented teens headed to major colleges from his current Tarblooders, a team that’s a legitimate contender for the state title in Ohio’s big school division. You can’t talk about high-school football on this side of the city without hearing Ginn’s name.

What Ginn has done with the Tarblooders is a miracle – if it isn’t, it’ll serve as one until an according-to-Hoyle miracle comes along. He has made a name for himself – and for his football program.

No telling how much bigger his name might be if his most famous alum were to live up to his potential. His name is Ted Ginn, too. He has “junior” at the end of his, and he was the most talented player to ever come out of the Cleveland Public Schools.

Some people might argue that Troy Smith was better. They would be right if they were talking about what Smith did after Glenville. He won the Heisman Trophy at Ohio State in 2007, and he’s earning a living as a backup QB in the NFL.

In high school, Smith was no Ginn. Few in the country were. He was the most electric player this region had ever seen, and his play at Ohio State, where he teamed with Smith, was every bit as high voltage as what he had done in high school.

Ted Ginn Jr. was expected to take that same star power to the pros. He was, after all, No. 1 draft pick. He would do more for the Ginn last name, people said, than have it be remembered for the charter school Ginn Sr. founded. Ginn Academy is a wonderful legacy, but it can never bring the last name the universal fame that comes from starring in the NFL.

Three years into his pro career, Ginn Jr., a fleet wide receiver and kick returner, is far from an NFL star; he has been, as one Dolphins legend has put it, an "embarrassment." He’s been a much maligned talent in Miami – gifted player unable to live up to his pedigree.

His critics have called him soft and undisciplined, likely to drop a pass than catch it. They are right. His contributions to the Dolphins have been so minimal that a person would be hard-put to find his name when combing through game statistics.

He looked as if he was just another in a long line of No. 1 disappointments – until Sunday.

In a 30-25 win over the Jets, Ted Ginn Jr. played like Ted Ginn Jr. was always supposed to play. He returned pair of kickoffs for touchdowns, a feat that earned Ginn more attention in one day than he had gotten in his entire NFL career.

People were talking about Ginn Jr., talking about him the way they talked about him in high school and in college. Ginn Jr., 24, was a highlight on SportsCenter, drawing what he hadn’t been able to: praise.

Glenville alums noticed. His day in the spotlight was where most of them thought he should have been all along. They believed the Ginn name had magic attached to it.

It does, no matter what Ted Ginn Jr. does in Miami. He can never get away from that last name here.

His father’s success will assure that. For Ted Ginn Sr. continues to roll out talent at Glenville, talent that owes its development to a 50-something man whose son tries to carry their last name beyond this city’s East Side.

Browns have two QBs, none worth a darn

Browns coach Eric Mangini has faced the one thing he started the 2009 season trying hard to avoid. He has a quarterback controversy on his hands.

I can’t be hypercritical of his reluctance to entrust the job to anybody on his roster. Mangini had to pick among two pitiful options, and he picked Brady Quinn, a man whose skills aren't good enough to lead an NFL team to glory. Nothing Quinn did this season has proved this statement to be false; at best, he has shown he can be a backup for a bad team.

So how about Derek Anderson? Can he do any better than Quinn?

That’s the question Mangini and Browns fans sought answers to after Quinn, the Golden Boy from Notre Dame, played himself to the bench Sunday against the Ravens. Quinn, a former No. 1 pick, looked as inept as anybody who has played quarterback for the Browns since their reincarnation a decade ago.

The organization has been spitting out quarterbacks like Pez candy, and except for the Pro Bowl season Anderson put together in ’07, no one has taken ownership of the position long term. Quinn didn’t.

How bad Quinn has been is reflected in one set of numbers: 0-3.

I wish I could say his numbers were deceiving – that the Browns sported a won-loss record that misrepresented Quinn’s performance. But awful-and-3 is what the team has been under Quinn’s watch, which often reminded people of the defunct Tim Couch and Charlie Frye eras.

The Quinn era might be behind Browns fans -- thank goodness. But the way Mangini works, no one can be certain of it. He might still see a need to prove Quinn wasn’t a wasted a first-round pick, though wasted draft choices aren’t strangers to Mangini. Just look at his first draft as Browns coach. It didn’t yield much talent that is contributing.

That leaves Mangini to rely on Romeo Crennell's leftovers, and most of them had shown for years they didn’t amount to much – Anderson included.

Don't be seduced by Anderson’s 2007 success. It could have been just a confluence of extraordinary events, not necessarily an indication of his ability.

Uncertainty, however, remains on the latter point, but as bad as Quinn is, the ironfisted Mangini, a weak branch of the Bill Parcells coaching tree, might have a hard time justifying a decision to give Anderson the bulk of the playing time.

When Mangini benched Quinn after his disaster of a first half, the job seemed to belong to Anderson. But he took the field and also imploded in this 34-3 loss, which should get the merry-go-round at quarterback spinning again. Does Mangini turn next to Brett Ratliff, the third-string QB?

Regardless of whom Mangini settles on, he won’t have a productive quarterback until he surrounds him with more skilled pieces. He needs a fast, durable running back, a game-breaking wide receiver, a tight end who can block and catch and a stronger, more dependable right side of the offensive line.

It wouldn’t hurt the Browns if he could build a defense with the ability to stop opposing teams from turning a game into a scoring-fest. With either Quinn or Anderson, Mangini hasn’t put together a team that can pile up the points.

He might never have a team here that can do that, and he certainly won’t have one until he finds a quarterback who’s capable of running an offense effectively.

Neither Quinn nor Anderson has proved he can.

(Photo of Eric Mangini by bkrieger02's photostream)

Quinn or Anderson? Pick one, Mangini

Eric Mangini must be out of his mind.

Now, I'm not trying to tell the man how to coach the Browns. He's got the credentials for that job; I don't. But it doesn't take a doctorate in the art of football to figure out it's wiser to make a decision now rather than later.

The decision that people in Cleveland await is the one Mangini has to make about who will be his starting quarterback. Since training camp opened in July, he's juggled Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson like a clown does tennis balls. Neither man has a sense of what the coach is looking for in this quarterback derby. Nor do Browns fans.

The secrecy that marks Mangini's button-down coaching style is unsettling. Fans like answers; they like to know what direction a team is going. But Mangini is navigating the football terrain as if he doesn't have a compass on what works in Cleveland.

I understand if he doesn't like the quarterbacks he inherited. He's been smart to take that approach when looking at the long term, because both quarterbacks are flawed. Quinn and Anderson haven't convinced anybody they can be the next Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. In Cleveland, they'd settle for anybody not named Tim Couch or Charlie Frye.

And Quinn and Anderson are those two anybodies.

Of course, they are all Mangini has to work with, and he's hamstrung both men with his own indecision. With the season opener 10 days away, he's fostered little confidence in whoever he hands the quarterback's job to.

At some point, he will have to pick between the two men, which probably makes their preseason performances tonight against the Bears the last chance to secure the job. The consensus of people who cover the team daily -- and they seem to have no more insight than the man behind the counter at the neighborhood 7/Eleven does -- is that the untested Quinn is ahead of Anderson, a Pro Bowler two seasons ago.

Yet what that consensus means is nothing, because Mangini holds the only opinion that matters. And he ain't talking yet.