CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The first month of the Browns' season began with a scattering of empty seats and ended with a full scale fourth-quarter evacuation in a lopsided loss to Tennessee.
In other years, Sunday's bye would've still come too early, disrupting the daily rhythm from which improvement flows and leaving too long of a grind on the back end. Not this season. This break was welcome, but its benefits will last only if the Browns make the re-start a fresh one by deciding to call an end to the extended preseason on display the first four games.
That's what it was, right? If not, forget what former general manager Phil Savage said about Browns' fans expecting rain clouds even on sunny days. Woe really is you.
If the first month wasn't about seeing which players fit into Pat Shurmur's version of the West Coast offense, then you are left to face difficult questions -- beyond what exactly is Shurmur's version of the West Coast offense. It begs tough questions about the new head coach, Colt McCoy, Peyton Hillis, Evan Moore's usefulness outside the red zone and whether Brian Robiskie has pictures of somebody.
Shurmur is 2-2 as a rookie head coach. So to be fair it's not as if winning has been mutually exclusive to the ongoing auditions, unofficially titled, "So You Think You Can Play."
Shurmur's record isn't the issue. Eric Mangini -- the old flame your parents made you stop seeing went 1-11 before winning as many games as Shurmur. It's just that too many curious decisions and play calls have given pause to wonder. Not just about the organizational mission but about having a green head coach serving a dual role as offensive coordinator, too.
You can sell patience to a fan base only so long. It's a harder sell to one given so few reasons to believe since 1999. The empty seats are evidence. But you can do it, as Mangini proved. You just can't sell a season as a glorified tryout, especially when so many don't seem to buy the offensive philosophy at the heart of it.
People understand the lockout disrupted the Browns' schedule and stunted their growth. Nobody ever bought into the magical powers of Camp Colt as some sort of football Hogwarts. They get it. They're not expecting to win the division, not even a division with one good team in Baltimore.
They can see Shurmur has a mandate to play the young guys. They saw this team do nothing much in free agency. If they didn't grasp what was happening when Tom Heckert passed on wide receiver Julio Jones for an interior lineman and a No. 1 next year, they should've got it when, in the second round, he drafted a raw and talented wideout who missed his final year of college football.
So spare the lecture about people being unrealistic. They understandably need to see more promising signs over the next 12 weeks.
• That McCoy is the right quarterback.
• That the West Coast offense can fly when the wind kicks up and the snow blows. That it can bring you back from a big deficit against Pittsburgh and Baltimore.
• That Hillis, who fits well in the WCO, is in the team's plans. (To that end, it would help to hear from team president Mike Holmgren for the same reason Mark Shapiro tried to deflect criticisms about the Indians' direction over the years. Holmgren can bring a lot to the discussion. He won with this offense in a bad climate, after all. Not to mention, he made Hillis a public issue.)
No one expects immediate answers. Fewer have hung hopes high for a winning season. But it's hardly unfair to expect more cohesive approach to game planning and use of personnel than we saw in the first month.
The Browns' youth is a disadvantage. It's also mitigated in part by a schedule that includes Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco, St. Louis, Jacksonville, Cincinnati and Arizona. They're going to be in a number of winnable games. The bye is behind them.
So, hopefully, is the exhibition portion of their season.
http://www.cleveland.com/budshaw/index.ssf/2011/10/with_fans_fretting_its_time_fo.html
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