Browns Questions With Dawgs By Nature

When an opposing team doesn’t score very often (in this case the Chiefs), it’s hard to read without watching them every week. Although the Browns have been worse off overall offensively than KC, seeing our product every week, I have a good grasp of what’s gone wrong.

Therefore, I’ll go with a fairly obvious one: get the ball to Dwayne Bowe. In two of the games the Chiefs have won — at Washington and at Oakland — it seems like he was targeted more often. While Cleveland played excellent man-to-man coverage against the Steelers, we were torched by the Chargers the week before that and by the Lions a few weeks before that. With Bowe returning from suspension, it seems like the right time for the Chiefs to throw a few new wrinkles into their offense again, which I’m sure Rob Ryan will have less to go off of.

It might seem more obvious for the Chiefs to run the ball, but I always like to think of our low-ranked run defense as being skewed. Our defense always gives up a lot of rushing yards in the second half if we’re already out of a game. Therefore, running the ball shouldn’t be the “primary” gameplan for the Chiefs.

1. pass protect
2. beat our DBs deep
3. attack the right side of our line
4. double Josh Cribbs whenever he is in the backfield, and don’t kick it to him.

We thought Eric Mangini lost this team earlier in the season. The team was giving up in the third and fourth quarters of games. After our defense would fight their hearts out for the first half, only to be down 13-0, they would almost say “eff it” in the second half (though I’m sure fatigue played a major role) and the effort just wasn’t nearly as strong.

Since the bye week, and since our team has lost some of our starters to the injured reserve, things have slowly changed. Now we’re showing more fight — see our close shootout against Detroit. As deflating as that was, two weeks ago when we were down big to the Chargers, we almost pulled off a big rally in the fourth quarter. Last week, our defense played all four quarters and we continued keeping our offensive turnover rate down.

The young players that are all playing now are very hungry — I think they are emotionally excited from the Pittsburgh win, but I don’t think they are experienced enough to go and think, “ok, that’s all we needed to do, pack it up boys!” I think they’ll be looking to continue removing the embarrassment this franchise suffered the whole first half of the season.

I think they will play hard. Everyone nationally and locally has been trashing the team, Mangini, and the organization as a whole. I think they would love to end the season looking like an improved football team, which would really help us going forward.

As Chris points out, we are playing a lot of young guys, and some of the key characteristics Mangini has been looking for in players are having a high-motor, good work ethic, and caring about the game of football. (Hence our getting rid of guys like Braylon and Winslow, despite their talent)

Whether or not effort alone will be able to get us Ws, I can’t say. But, I’d rather go down giving it everything than lose with guys that consistently don’t play up to their potential.

I’m sure there are 31 other teams in the league who would love to sign him. Don’t get your hopes up though — Eric Mangini and company finally gave some verbal indication that Cribbs will be taken care of. I’m expecting a big contract extension coming soon, possibly before the end of the season.

Approval rating is low. Real low. It probably is up a bit after beating the steelers, though.

I don’t think he deserves all the flack he’s gotten. He has tried to build the team the right way. High character guys, hard workers, intelligent people who are “football players”, and to whom the game of football is important.

He’s had to make hard decisions in getting rid of some of our most talented guys who clearly didn’t care about the game (it was rumored that Braylon was trying to network for modeling contracts during games), and it has made our team worse in the short term.

But, as much as people don’t like it, I believe he is doing things the right way. The problem is that we clearly lack many impact players on either side of the ball. I think that he’s torn down the foundation and now has to get a chance to build it up again.

I am not entirely sold on him as being “the guy” but I don’t think we should fire him before he gets a chance to really show what he can do. We need a new offensive coordinator, though.

The funny thing? I had a first-round bye and have Jamaal Charles in my league. I was wondering what realistic expectation you guys have for Charles against our defense, because I might have to decide between Charles and Quinton Gather in my Flex position :p

From what I’ve gathered, Charles seems good at popping a big run and is good catching the ball out of the backfield. Two weeks ago, Tomlinson, Sproles, and even the fullback Tolbert were able to run screens on us all game. If Charles has success, it might come more through the air. Combined on the ground and the air, he’ll probably have a decent fantasy day against us…unless you guys shift more attention in the gameplan to Bowe now that he’s back.

Hopefully, with lots of Josh Cribbs. He ran some triple option stuff out of the wildcat like Miami does with the jet sweep coming in motion, he’s lined up at WR, RB, and even thrown a pass to Quinn. He also is a pretty good blocker in space.

Our WRs aren’t that great, but I do like our RBs. We have a poor man’s Sproles in Jerome Harrison, and a young undrafted rookie in Chris Jennings, who has some speed and some size. Also, look for TE Evan Moore to work the middle of the field. Quinn seems to have some chemistry with him, and he appears to have pretty good hands.

Whenever I watch Brady, he does some things that are great. He uses the hard count well, he seems to know what the defense is doing, and sometimes he will throw one of those balls on a rope with pinpoint accuracy. But then, he will throw some balls really inaccurately—behind a guy, way out of reach, etc.

So I don’t know. The potential is definitely there. He really hasn’t been given an extended period of time as a starter. Now that he has had some of that, he’s definitely looked improved as you point out, and he has been able to avoid turnovers.

If I were in charge, my plan would be to stick with him, give him a public vote of confidence, let him develop some chemistry with our receivers and let him get comfortable in an offense while using our draft picks on other positions. After a year or two, hopefully we’d have a defense good enough to be consistently good, a solid running game, and an answer as to whether or not Quinn is the guy. At that point if he wasn’t, we could start drafting 1st rounders to find the franchise guy.

Williams played some both inside and outside. He was always a good athlete, but for whatever reason couldn’t make it on the field or make a whole ton of plays once he got there.

I think Wimbley is doing a pretty good job. He had a great first year, but his numbers and play have been down the past few years and I really don’t think the coaches were pushing him.

This year, his sack numbers are up (6.5 so far), and more importantly I think he is a guy who “does his job”. He is really good in coverage for a 260lber, and he is starting to do more than just try to run around the OT. The one knock on him I would have without doing a full Football Outsiders-type analysis would be his apparent lack of “splash” plays, where he just flat out dominates the opposition.

Done again, I would probably take Ngata over him, but he’s a good player.

I didn’t like the way his defenses were run, but I don’t know how much control he really had. He seemed to allow his DC to have a lot of control, and I get the feeling that Phil Savage was making those hires (or at least had a lot of input).

For a year or so we had a solid scheme under Todd Grantham. It wasn’t great, and certainly not my preference, but it was ok. Under Mel Tucker our defense was ineffective, frustrating, and never really changed. We dropped 8 and rushed 3 far too much to have a chance at being successful in the NFL. We tried the same stuff and had the same problems game after game after game.

I think Romeo could be a good DC, especially if he was paired with more of a defensive-minded hardass at HC. He was pretty soft on our guys and didn’t seem to push them too much (i.e. making Wimbley learn more than one pass rushing move) which they loved, but we didn’t.