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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Browns owner takes steps to clean up mess

Somebody had to pay for this mess.

The excuses for what has been the worst season since the Browns returned from NFL exile didn't resonant anymore. Their fans had tired weeks ago -- actually, seasons ago -- of seeing bad football in Cleveland.

They had put up with Chris Palmer, Butch Davis, Romeo Crennel, coaches who rode into town with credentials that inflated their ability. Yet as bad as each of these men was, all were better than the man owner Randy Lerner picked to replace Crennel.

But even Lerner was smart enough this time to realize the major problems with his Browns aren't inside their coaching ranks but in his front office. It has been as dysfunctional as the Clampett family in "The Beverly Hillbillies." His front office might be better compared to "The Addams Family," a much more frightful clan than Jed, Daisy May, Elly May and Jethro Bodine.

What Lerner had pieced together was a horror story with more of the Addams than of the Clampetts. And it's a story that had become more unsettling as the weeks went by. At some point, people had to wonder if Lerner, a rich man with a temperate disposition, would run out of patience with what he was seeing .

That time came Sunday in Chicago.

By all accounts, Lerner liked nothing he saw in the team his late father left to him. The younger Lerner was to serve as its steward, a job he has mishandled from the start.

In the 30-6 loss to the Bears, the team Lerner owns malfunctioned on offense, wore down on defense and had a special teams that did nothing special.

Lerner could take no more. He said as much after the game. So he tried the best fix he could. He couldn't fire the entire team, not this deep into an NFL season. So he took a meat cleaver to his front office. He cut ties Monday with general manager George Kokinis, handpicked for the job by coach Eric Mangini.

In a press release, Lerner said: "Cleveland Browns general manager George Kokinis is no longer actively involved with the organization. ... "

It’s not proper in polite company to applaud when a man has lost his job. In this economy, a firing is a reason for mourning -- a wake if that’s all right to hold in peculiar circumstances like these.

Kokinis, an invisible leader, gets nothing of the sort. His behind can’t get out of town soon enough for Clevelanders, and more than of few of them would like to see the man responsible for pushing him for the job in the first place join him on the unemployment line.

No newspaper, TV station or Internet site has reported that Mangini’s butt is soon to go. He might well hold until his job for a few weeks longer, but the extraordinary influence Lerner gave him in the offseason has been chipped away.

The chipping started when Lerner hired Bernie Kosar, the retired Browns icon, as a consultant last month; it continued when Lerner fired one of Mangini’s top lieutenants in Erin O’Brien; and the latest chip into Mangini’s power was the biggest blow of all: the firing of Kokinis.

Lerner’s moves were the most vivid signs that he plans to lead this team. He’s decided to take an iron hand to a situation that has caromed out of control; he's looking for strong leadership from someone.

He is not the man to run a football operation.

To his credit, Lerner has never pretended to be. He’s the scion of a billionaire; his background is in banking, which doesn't teach a man much about reconstructing an NFL franchise.

But what he will do in his latest remake of the Browns is find a seasoned football man to lord over his organization. Lerner might do whomever he hires a favor if he fires the dictatorial Mangini first.

Call 'em the 'Clowns' and not the Browns

I heard someone say time is a terrible thing to waste. Don’t call me on who said it, ’cause I can’t remember. But whoever did has a point.

Trust me here.

I came to that conclusion after watching the Browns on TV this afternoon, which showed two things: No. 1, I place little value on my time; or No. 2, I have no life.

Now, I’d like to believe I do have a life – a wonderful life, too. No. 1 isn’t an appealing choice either, but I’m guessing it’s the more accurate of the two since I did sit in front of my television and watch the Browns lose, 31-3, to the Packers.

To call it a loss would be an act of charity. For the word “loss” might suggest the Browns showed up to play. They didn’t.

I've seen a lot of NFL games on TV in my life – hundreds; and I've seen a lot of sorry NFL teams -- tens. Heck, last season I drove to Detroit and sat in Ford Field as the Lions lost to the Titans on Thanksgiving Day. I don’t need to remind anybody that the Lions went winless that season.

Coach Eric Mangini’s Browns, now 1-6, can’t match that futility, although I'm not certain the Buccaneers (or the Titans) won’t. Not that it would matter to me; I don’t root for the Bucs. So were they to go 0-for-this-season-and-next, I wouldn’t have one sleepless night. I don’t have a second to spend on watching them play – win, lose or draw.

Besides, I’m sure their fans have as little patience for what’s happening in Tampa as I have for what’s happening here in Cleveland. Bad football is bad football, and I’m seeing plenty of it.

My frustration with these Browns is that they seem not to be getting better. Their offensive line, jerry-rigged from the start, is porous. Coach Mangini has assembled a collection of 300-pound Clydesdales who are allowing defensive linemen to take dead aim at quarterback Derek Anderson, who risks each week seeing his name on the injured reserve.

The few times Anderson has gotten to look down field he’s found no receiver open. Where have you gone, Braylon Edwards?

Yeah, you can’t catch a cold, but at least you served as a legitimate deep threat. You could get open, something that I can’t say about the men left to fill your spot.

But if missing you were the lone problem, I doubt I’d be as disappointed in what I’m witnessing. As shaky as you were, you did make plays once in a while. Nobody else can.

The team has no offense, no defense and no imagination. The Browns can’t block; they can’t tackle; and, well, they have no talent.

Even the quality of their coaching and the front office is suspect, a sad thought moving forward.

For Browns fans like me, the NFL is a long, grinding season, and I don’t know what we will have to look forward to as the rest of this season runs its course.

No reason to dream of the postseason; no reason to dream of many more victories then the one victory the team has, though I do give the Browns a chance to beat the Lions when the two teams meet later this season.

Until then, I won’t waste more time on what will be repeats of what I saw today: a stumbling, bumbling football team that should let its players audition for the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Send in the Clowns, and Mangini can play ringmaster.

A solid D plus a late TO = an ugly W

You hardly know what to make of a win that looked much like a loss, but if you’re somebody who cheers for the Cleveland Browns, you’ll settle for a 6-3 victory regardless of how ugly it looked. Think about it: The Browns had been rolling nightmarishly toward a futility that would match what the Detroit Lions did a season ago. Sixteen losses, although hardly guaranteed, did seem reachable, and coach Eric Mangini and the Browns did nothing Sunday to suggest they could win a game. They dropped passes, slogged around in the wind and, essentially, played as if it were an exhibition game. One thing that helped the Browns was a Buffalo Bills team that couldn’t get out of its way. The Bills stumbled and false-started from the opening whistle to the game’s end. Yet they might have escaped with a win (or a tie) if a muffed punt hadn’t set the Browns up for Billy Cuniff's game-winning field goal with 23 seconds left. The muff was a gift from the football lords, the sort bestowed on a hapless team like the Browns. They can’t beat many opponents on merit alone. Even in this victory, the Browns didn’t show that their short-term future under Mangini was overly promising. They didn’t self-destruct totally, but they didn’t do much to win the game with fine play. While it might be fitting to applaud the defense for its play, but to be overly kind to the defense would be to give too much credit to the Bills. To put it bluntly, they fielded an offensive line that couldn’t stop a Division III defense. How these Bills (1-4) had beaten anybody this season is a question that can’t easily be answered, not based on their performance Sunday. If the Bills aren’t the worst NFL team, they find themselves in the same league as the winless St. Louis Rams and Oakland Raiders. The three of them will be lucky to combine to win as many games as the Indianapolis Colts. It’s no Herculean chore to deconstruct a lousy team like the Bills, because they did so many things wrong that it would be silly to dwell on the few things they might have done right. The chore is to figure out, even with all the mistakes the Bills made, how the Browns couldn’t turn the game into a blowup. That, too, isn’t a chore. For the figuring can start with what has been one of the glaring weaknesses for the Browns this season: a bad quarterback. Browns fans have seen sorry play from quarterbacks for most of this decade, but few quarterbacks, not even the flawed Tim Couch or the inept Charlie Frye, had a game like Derek Anderson did and came away a winner. Anderson completed two of 17 passes for 23 yards. In Anderson’s defense, his receivers dropped a half-dozen passes, and maybe his statistics might have been more pleasing had those passes been caught. But he looked as shaky as he has been since Romeo Crennell -- and then Mangini -- refused to anoint Anderson the unquestioned starter for what he did in 2007 when his confident was sky high. Still, Anderson deserved some credit for not losing this game. Mind you, he did nothing to win it, but against a pitiful excuse for an NFL team like the Bills, he spared the Browns a possible loss simply because he kept turnovers to a minimum (one). When you’re a football team careening toward 16 losses, an ugly win halts a date with NFL infamy. Browns fans don’t have to worry anymore about matching what the Lions did, but can those fans, after witnessing the horror show that Anderson directed in Buffalo, think that anything better than a 15-loss season awaits them?

Browns fans never warm to Braylon's drama

Braylon Edwards came to Cleveland in 2005 totting more baggage than a Pullman porter. He was a Michigan man, and Michigan men don't receive the warmest of receptions in what is Ohio State country.

Yet Browns fans aren't so closed-minded as not to give a Michigan man like Edwards a chance to prove his mettle, even if doing so might offend the late Woody Hayes. For they wouldn't care if the man came straight from the netherworld if he could throw, catch or tackle.

It didn't take long to discover that Edwards, a No. 1 draft choice, couldn't do any of these at an elite level.

He never blossomed into the football star people hoped he would become. While his talk was big and bold and brash, his play was small and inconsistent, which is to be expected from somebody who once suited up for the Maize and Blue.

Sorry if my partisanship got the better of me. It's just that my Scarlet and Gray roots don't allow me to be as forgiving as most people when judging a player from the University of Michigan. To satisfy me, Edwards would have needed to be the second coming of Jerry Rice (or Cris Carter). By the end, Edwards proved he was the second coming of Jerry Lewis, a comical joke of a football player who didn't play to his skill set.

His athleticism wasn't an issue, because Edwards was tall and lean and swift. He moved with the swift grace of a Broadway dancer, but he was soft as a goosedown pillow. Throw a ball over the middle and Edwards was more likely to duck than stretch his arms to catch it. And ask him to make a big catch late, and he'd be missing in action.

What doomed him in Cleveland, however, was his appetite for the nightlife.

He loved the fame; he craved it more than he wanted the team to succeed. Mention his name to people who know him, and they claimed he envied the adulation the fans here lavished on LeBron James. Edwards never understood it, much the way that Kellen Winslow Jr. never understood it or this market.

Envy can be a toxic emotion, because it debases a man. It forces him to do things he wouldn't normally do. Fine, perhaps if he's a person who lives his life outside the limelight. But when he's a public personality, he can't afford to let envy push him to behavior that speaks poorly of the community and the team he represents.

Edwards might find punching people in the face acceptable in Ann Arbor; he would never find it acceptable in Cleveland (or in other the NFL cities). Here, they expect more from their "stars," although they've found their expectations unfulfilled since their beloved Browns returned to town a decade ago.

Through those dark years, their fans have wanted a reason to cheer for anybody who could play worth a darn. They longed for Edwards to be that player, so they gave him as fair a shake as he could expect. In return, he did nothing to deserve their cheers. He disappointed fans at every turn.

His last disappointment cost him his career as a Cleveland Brown, though I doubt Edwards will lose one night's sleep thinking about it. He will wake up tomorrow prepared to go to another workout with the New York Jets. He will be just another player coach Eric Mangini has shipped to his former team. None of the others have been missed, and neither will a prima donna like Braylon Edwards.

The decision to trade him shouldn't cause a ripple in Cleveland. Good riddance, fans say. They already know that the 2009 season is sinking like the Titanic, and their Browns can finish last without the underachieving Edwards in the lineup. The team is playing for next season and a high-draft choice, a familiar theme in Cleveland where most pro teams are playing for things other than championships.

How the players who are coming to the Browns in the Edwards trade will help isn't something I want to speculate about. None are stars; mostly they are just loose pieces to plug small leaks here and there. They aren't long-term acquisitions of importance.

Obviously, nobody wants to hear talk about next season with this season still fresh. Harsh reality might be tough to deal with in October, but how does late season failure help energize fans? They know the score as well as Mangini does.

He didn't inherit much when he arrived, and he hasn't added much talent since. Mangini has figured out, regardless of what Edwards does for the Jets, the Browns are better off without Edwards than with him.

I agree.

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)

Mangini's Browns no better than Crennell's

It might not matter who coaches the Cleveland Browns these days, because the coach has absolutely nothing to work with. The team was closer to being decent when it returned to town 10 years ago than it is today.

This second incarnation of the Browns, a franchise the NFL recreated from scraps after Art Modell spirited the original off to Baltimore in 1995, hasn’t been much to talk about. Nor is the team’s most recent performance: a 27-6 loss Sunday to the Broncos.

Losing to the Broncos is not unusual; those old Browns did so with regularity. But at least they routinely made a game of things in Denver; at least they went onto the field and looked like a polished NFL team.

Not much in these Browns resembles a polished team. They started the ’09 season with another coach, having hired and then jettisoned past coaches as if holding auditions for "American Idol."

Somebody named Eric Mangini, whom the Jets fired after last season, runs the show now. Since his arrival, Mangini has tried to instill discipline. His hard-driving style contrasts sharply with his predecessor Romeo Crennell's, whose approach mirrored a doting father’s.

No one on this Browns roster will warm to Mangini like a “father,” partly because he’s not much older than the men he coaches. He’s the sternest of taskmasters, a coach from the Bill Belichick School of Coaching, a school whose philosophy brooks no foolishness.

Crennell was also from the Belichick school, which serves as a reminder that not all graduates of Harvard and Yale will end up as successes. Crennell wasn’t, not with the Browns anyway.

To say Mangini has failed would be to judge him before all the tests have been taken. The early evaluation of his work, however, would earn the coach a failing grade.

The sample of his work here is too small: two games with 14 more to go this season. But in those two games – both ugly losses -- it’s been hard to see the product as any better than what Crennell or Butch Davis put on the football field.

The holes in Mangini’s team are everywhere, starting with a quarterback whose play has been tentative and uninspired. As with the coach, putting a letter grade on Brady Quinn now would be unfair. He remains little more than an untutored rookie.

From what Quinn has shown in his two starts, he’s not quite ready for the job. Does anybody think Mangini has a better option than Quinn on the bench?

The last thing Mangini needs is a quarterback controversy, so no need to dust off Derek Anderson’s name from the depth chart, even when some Browns fans might be calling for it.

To play musical chairs with his quarterbacks will merely complicate Mangini’s job, which is to return the Browns to glory, to revisit the days of Otto Graham, Jim Brown, Paul Warfield, Leroy Kelly, Brian Sipe, Bernie Kosar -- times when pride was as much a part of the organization as its orange helmets.

Since its rebirth a decade ago, the Browns have given their fans little to be proud of, and this season seems to hint thus fair that pride might have to go into hiding as it looks at another losing season.

The last thing Mangini wants is a quarterback controversy, so no need to dust off former Pro Bowler Derek Anderson’s name from the depth chart, even when some Browns fans might be calling for it.

To play musical chairs with his quarterbacks will merely complicate Mangini’s job, which is to return the Browns to glory, to recapture the championship days of Otto Graham, Jim Brown, Paul Warfield, Brian Sipe, Bernie Kosar -- times when pride was as much a part of the organization as its orange helmets.

Since its rebirth a decade ago, the Browns have given their fans so little to be proud of, and this season seems to hint thus far that pride might have to go into hiding again as it looks at another losing season.

Wait to see Quinn? No, not worth it

So, Brown fans waited for this?

For two years, they have clamored for Brady Quinn to take the reins of the team’s offense. Quinn, a first-round refugee of the Phil Savage regime, had the pedigree: an Ohioan, a Notre Dame alum with the golden boy’s persona.

Derek Anderson, Quinn’s rival for the job, was the rifle-armed gunslinger from Oregon – the outsider who never caught the fancy of Browns fans. For no matter what he did -- and Anderson did plenty during his Pro Bowl season of 2007 – he couldn’t get out from under Quinn’s shadow.

Now, he’s the backup, a quarterback whose credentials for NFL success look a lot flashier than Quinn's. He lost the starter’s job in a competition that was anything but open. How could Anderson expect to overtake a No. 1 pick?

As Anderson watched Sunday from the bench, Quinn produced a performance that reminded people of football’s past in Cleveland – oh, not the glory days of Otto Graham, Brian Sipe and Bernie Kosar, those old Browns stars; but the depressing days of futility under Tim Couch, Jeff Garcia and Charlie Frye.

Quinn kicked off the Eric Mangini era the same way as the Chris Palmer, Butch Davis and Romeo Crennell eras began: with a 34-20 loss.

It would be unfair to blame quarterbacks solely for how those eras started, and it would be unfair to blame Quinn solely for how the Mangini era began.

But his play contributed to the sorry beginning; it suggested to no one he could be the next Tom Brady, Drew Brees or Peyton Manning.

Instead of confident and cool, Quinn was tentative, seemingly unsure of what he wanted to do with the offense. He made bad passes here and there, and he didn’t do a thing to stretch the Vikings defense.

What he also didn’t do was show the take-charge mentality that seems to be part of a good quarterback’s DNA. Maybe that leadership can be cultivated. It certainly isn’t something Quinn can go to Sam’s Club and buy off the shelf.

Still, it was his show – finally.

Yet to say his play against Brett Favre and the Vikings should define him is unfair. Quinn is still green as NFL quarterbacks go, and he has time to grow into the position.

Time, however, isn’t something Browns fans might afford him. If he is to thrive under the pressure cooker of quarterbacking a team whose fans demand so much, Brady Quinn will need to play less like a cast member of the “Brady Bunch” and more like a Brady named Tom.

(Photo of Brady Quinn at practice by John K's photostream)