Cleveland – There’s a lot of football left in the season.
At one point there was a lot of the ship deck left on the doomed USS Edmund Fitzgerald, too.
Some organizations get better than they deserve. Some get worse. Not the Browns. They’re getting exactly what they invited.
Any team can lose a game at home. The record at the stadium since the alleged return of pro football to the lakefront – 18-41 – is rather substantial proof. But the Browns also managed to lose a crowd Sunday, not easy to do in a city drunk on football and brewer’s yeast.
It’s almost unheard of before the clocks get turned back. In a 17-7 loss featuring 165 yards of offense, the clocks were apparently turned back to the days of ex-quarterback Spergon Wynn.
The locker room might soon follow on the missing-persons report, at least that half of it still without toe tags.
The other half, the offense, already was dead on arrival Sunday. Once Browns coach Romeo Crennel decided against enacting any serious change during the bye week, it was obvious that the behind-the-scenes attention he turned on game planning and play calling would amount to mortician’s work.
Didn’t the offense look like itself?
Yes, unfortunately, an exact replica.
Amazing what two weeks of a formaldehyde drip can do for a team.
You already know what Crennel is going to do about this. Not much. His message to the team Sunday was to “hang together.” Which is another way of asking everybody to cram into the same lifeboat.
Phil Savage? Randy Lerner? Whether scouting Clemson-Georgia Tech or the English Premier League is otherwise occupying their respective calendars, who knows? But neither used the occasion of the bye week to sell faith to the people who keep shelling out season-ticket money year after year for one of the worst products in sports.
It’s all on Crennel, who wouldn’t be the first head coach to resist making an in-season coaching change. But his blind spot isn’t specific to this season and it isn’t his alone.
Savage let an experienced backup quarterback leave because of the offensive mess in Berea. Head coach and GM somehow put their heads together, or not, and decided they didn’t need to keep Trent Dilfer or bring in an adequate replacement.
Sunday the Browns were one groggy Charlie Frye answer away from watching Derek Anderson run the team against the Denver defense. Frye missed only one play after suffering a “mild” concussion. His quick return wasn’t necessarily good news given his performance.
“He was able to answer some questions,” Crennel said. “He knew where he was.”
He might have time to address some follow-up questions – “Do you regret being here?” – if the Browns had an able backup they trusted. Instead, Frye threw himself directly into more waves of Denver pass rushers.
None of the supposed playmakers, Frye included, sounded particularly enthusiastic about the bye-week tweaking. Now we see why.
Denver had allowed only one touchdown. The Browns drove all of 18 yards for their only score. When you rank 31st in offense one year and scrape bottom the next, the trouble isn’t opponent-specific.
Crennel promised the Browns would turn their attention on offense to what they do best. What they do best is throw short and run shorter.
And they’ll do it in a season grown longer than the fourth-quarter traffic jam outside the stadium.
