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.

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.