I opened my Internet browser thinking, "I'm going to write about the Browns." The Browns fed me another turd sandwich today, and it's topical, so it makes sense to write about it. But I sat here for about five minutes just thinking of an angle. I wanted to pick on someone or something. I wanted to write an opinion on what needs to be done to fix this mess or something that looks positive. Here's the only angle I could come up with:
If you're a Browns fan, kill yourself.
That's all I've got. I watched the game, and I formed a hateful opinion of pretty much anyone on our sideline. I listened to talk radio and heard all of the various gripes. The Browns problems are this. The Browns problems are that.
What everyone needs to fully realize is there's no objective way to measure the failures of this team or how to correct them. And that is the most depressing realization of them all.
For example, why did the Indians have a losing season? Well, the bullpen wasn't good. Important players regressed or got hurt. And the economic inequities in baseball prevented certain baseball decisions.
You can point to specific areas. Improve the bullpen, replace Fausto and Jhonny or get them on track, and suddenly the team is improved.
Maybe that's only my perspective, or too simplistic an explanation. But the Indians have places to hang your hat. They have a lot of good position players, and they have a shrewd front office. The front office might misfire here or there, but they have a plan that they back up with reason and logic.
With the Browns, everyone has a different angry perspective. Are you the guy that says it's the quarterbacks? The lack of offensive personnel around them? Are you the guy that blames the porous defense that never seems to go away? Are you the guy that blames the coordinators for the awful gameplans and execution? Are you the guy that blames Eric Mangini? These are his guys, his plan and he needs to be fired for making a terrible team even worse? Are you the guy that blames Randy Lerner for consistently hiring the wrong guys?
Here's my point: That's a lot of guys. Those are a lot of failures. And all of them could be valid. None of them can be refuted, not with any real evidence.
I wish this was a science experiment in a lab. That way, we could change out different variables to see how it affected the whole. One week we drop in a new QB. Then next week we leave in that QB and add in different receivers. The week after we leave the receivers and change the QB again. The week after we go back to the Week 2 offense and try a new offensive scheme. And so on and so on. Pretty soon, after all the mixing and matching, we'd have concrete answers for what's truly detrimental to the team are and how these problems need to be fixed.
Unfortunately, even this ideal scientific solution to the problem would take roughly 673 weeks before it had an answer and a way to implement it.
In real life, we're just walking into a dark bathroom and pissing everywhere until we hear water. Blind stabs. Confusion. One big mess.
Some problems may be the root of the bigger problem and some could be the result of the other problems. But we don't know; we can't know; and we all need to realize this and kill ourselves.
It's the only sure way out of this mess.
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