CLEVELAND, Ohio (TheOBR.com) Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
THE DAILY BLOVIATION
I don’t feel like I am, but the calendar doesn’t lie: I’m getting kinda old. I’m in my 60s now.
Like a lot of people approaching gray hair and other indicators of ripe old age, I have a pill box. I have some morning pills I take and some evening pills I take. Every Monday, I fill up the pill box, and every morning and evening, I have about ten different alarms set on my phone and computer telling me to actually take the pills. Because otherwise I’ll forget.
That’s how I measure the passage of time, as my pill box empties a little more each day. Last night, I took my pills with my mind reeling about the fact that it was Wednesday night already. Christmas is coming, and I still have more to do. There’s so much stuff that needs to be done around the OBR that the days fly by.
And then, next Monday, I’ll fill up the pill box again and once more be astonished at how the week flies by. Repeat, repeat, repeat, hopefully for many more weeks to come.
I’ve been lucky with my health so far, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be an Ohio State fan and see three national championships in my adult life. There have been enough that I’ve become skilled at being very obnoxious about it, constantly working in references to the “national champion Ohio State Buckeyes” every chance I get. That claim may be obsolete in just a few weeks, so I have to use it while I can. Even obnoxiousness has an expiration date.
I can’t look back and complain that I never got to enjoy one of my sports teams winning it all.
Fans who build their hopes around the Cleveland Browns haven’t been so lucky. The team last won a championship in 1964, meaning that people my age were too young to remember the last time the Browns won it all. Instead, our memories are built around close-misses and brief moments of glory extinguished in the playoffs.
This morning, I read yet more stories calling for Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski’s scalp because his undermanned squad has gone 6-25 over the last two years. The Athletic’s Jason Lloyd is very impatient with the Browns and their situation, laying on the misery thickly throughout this latest opinion piece: “The Watson trade was clearly the pivot point for this franchise in every way possible. That Watson will still be here, and Stefanski could be gone, is disgraceful, but that’s the perfect word to summarize the Browns over the last 25 years.”
That’s some fantastic word-smithing there, but nothing approaching empathy for the team’s situation, or Stefanski’s. He’s upset with Stefanski’s non-answers in pressers and overall lack of success and concludes, using rebuilding after the devastation of a hurricane as an example, that it’s “Time to get the shovels and hammers and start over again.”
Personally, I can be a bit of an optimist. I don’t see the next hurricane as inevitable, even though the Browns haven’t put together a string of competitive seasons in years. While many Browns fans are raging against any perceived mistake Stefanski makes these days, I see him more as an “acceptable” coach in a horrible situation brought on by a franchise-altering mistake in 2022. He’s had some self-imposed mistakes as well, perhaps enough to doom him, but I still think the lack of draft choices from the Watson trade put the team in a next-to-impossible competitive position. He was in on it from the get-go.
In firing the head coach, you create your own hurricane. The new coach often brings different philosophies and starts looking for different skills in players on the roster. The Browns are currently carrying a player, Zak Zinter, who was drafted as a new offensive line coach had a somewhat different philosophy for a year. Then the team went back to its old philosophy, and Zinter’s skillset wasn’t as prized. Now he’s inactive on gameday if the rest of the offensive line is healthy. Again, is that Stefanski’s fault? Maybe he wears part of the blame, the question is whether he should be dumped for self-doubt, vacillation about playcalling, and mistakes in hiring assistant coaches.
Wasted time. Wasted effort.
Fireable offenses or learning experiences?
Like other cranky old men, I’m out of patience. I’m out of patience with constant rebuilds, constant roster changes. Some people will look at situations like Mike Vrabel or Curt Cignetti reviving a program in a year, and assume that can happen here. But Cignetti brought with him a busload of players from his previous stops. Mike Vrabel had Drake Maye ready to emerge. Neither circumstance seems to apply to Cleveland.
I don’t want another three-year plan. I’m too old for that. I want the team to reload on the offensive side of the ball as quickly and as aggressively as possible and not reboot itself, so I’m slow to join the chorus screaming for the latest coach to be run out of town. These days, I could be labeled a “sycophant for the regime,” like I was in a recent YouTube comment. I have zero allegiance on a personal level to anyone working for the franchise, and no reason to resist change other than that I simply don’t want to waste time; I want this team to be as competitive as possible, as fast as possible.
Every day, the pill box empties a little more; every year is an opportunity lost. Perhaps if I were younger and more confident that time is on my side, I’d be more aggressive and willing to accept a reboot. But we’ve waited long enough, and the fastest path to success lies in hoping that the experience that the team has grown these past six years is starting to pay off with better drafts and smarter moves. I think I see some of that. Then again, that may just be the pills working. Some of them are pretty strong.
I think that hope is more rational than hoping that an Indiana Hoosiers or New England Patriots situation emerges.
But now the alarms are going off. It’s time to take my morning pills. I feel an urgency alongside the hope, and that urgency makes me want to avoid self-imposed delays by changing everything the moment the season ends.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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How come Grandmas get all the love and affection, but no one is willing to listen to the sage advice of old men like me? I’m full of advice. And other stuff, too. I’m practically filled to the brim with learned lessons and rapidly decaying biological goop. I’m going to grab a bottle of bourbon, stand out in my yard, and see if anyone wants my advice. That will go over well with the neighbors.
WRAPPING UP
When not putting “CVS Pharmacy” into the favorites on his phone, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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