By Bill Livingston, The Plain Dealer
The game is faster, the players bigger, the collisions more violent today than ever in the NFL. Yet the players were tougher in the old days, say the players of the old days.
Former Browns Hanford Dixon and Bob Golic criticized current Brown Peyton Hillis, who said he could not play against Miami almost two weeks ago because he had lost 10 to 12 pounds while battling strep throat. 
Said a former NFL lineman I know, who never played with the Browns: "I played with strep throat, too. They gave me IVs and told me to go get 'em. I lost significant weight, too."
It's unclear how mucking it up in the line translates to taking the hits Hillis takes. It seems like he takes at least three (a couple of tacklers and the ground) on every carry and often a lot more. His punishing running style is perfect for a blue-collar town that has seen its favorite team outmuscled by hated rivals like Pittsburgh and Baltimore for years.
Simply as a physical issue, it really doesn't work to call Hillis soft after watching him butt into a knot of Indianapolis players, then bounce off them and race to the end zone for the clinching touchdown in the second game of the season, or to watch him take hit after hit, churning forward, legs driving, in search of extra yards last season as the feature back in the anemic Browns offense.
It does work, however, if critics graft the modern pathologies of greed and selfishness onto the story -- an option that grew more attractive after Hillis' agent said he advised him not to play in the Miami game. Mike Holmgren, Brown supremo, said weeks ago that he was "trying like crazy" on ESPN's "Mike and Mike in the Morning" to get Hillis, who is playing for the four-year minimum of $600,000, to agree to a contract extension. Nothing has been finalized.
It seemed like a very odd thing to say, given the shift to a more finesse, short-passing offense, given the restored health of promising running back Montario Hardesty as a player who could share the load and given the often dismal histories in this city of players too soon rewarded with big contracts. That would include Grady Sizemore, Fausto Carmona, and Reuben Droughns.
The timing of Holmgren's comments were a disconnect with the reality of the offensive planning, other than Hillis has very soft hands that allowed him to catch 61 passes last season.
But there is no disconnect with Hillis' game. He has shown no evidence of malingering, so it is hard to believe he refused to push himself because the big rush to sign him stalled.
The belief here is that Hillis realizes the value of his presence, even if he was mainly a decoy, and that he missed the game because he was really ill. Also, while no one is 100 percent healthy in the NFL, severely diminished playing capacity will be punished severely by today's better athletes.
A more ridiculous theory floating around is that Hillis is a victim of the "Madden Jinx" ever since he became popular enough to be voted onto the cover of the John Madden video game for this season. Perhaps the circumstances that made Hillis such a force will not be repeated with the new regime. Perhaps he is only a very good player, not a game-changer. Perhaps the Browns simply don't have enough talent around him. Each argument has some truth to it.
It also would have helped, with a whole bye week for this slur on Hillis to smear its way along, if new coach Pat Shurmur, after the Miami game, which the Browns won, had said something more emphatic than: "Peyton was sick. That was my understanding." But that is what Shurmur said, not "Peyton was sick and should have stayed in bed."
Holmgren's premature disclosure of his plans for Hillis set the terms of the debate. Shurmur's comments did little to change it. This is a controversy the Browns' front office brought on itself.
Link: http://www.cleveland.com/livingston/index.ssf/2011/10/all_the_talk_of_peyton_hillis.html
No comments:
Post a Comment