Cleveland Browns bucking trend to combat losing ways
By Roger Cohen
Dec 14, 2014; Cleveland, OH, USA; Cleveland Browns head coach Mike Pettine during the second quarter against the Cincinnati Bengals at FirstEnergy Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
Who knew?
Turns out it wasn’t Alex Mack’s busted leg, Brian Hoyer’s interception blizzard, Johnny Manziel’s meltdown, Billy Cundiff’s shanks or even Textgate.
It took The Wall Street Journal and a PR campaign to uncover the reason why last year’s Cleveland Browns wasted a promising 7-4 start and turned it into another dismal last place AFC North finish. Our beloved Brownies wrote coaching notes by hand. (Wonder if general manager Ray Farmer would have gotten four games for paper airplaning, instead of texting, those messages to the sidelines?)
Talk about your throwback franchises – the Browns are turning back the clock on the digital revolution by reverting to paper and pencils. Today, in modern America, where every 5-year-old wields an iPad and a 4G smartphone, our Browns sharpen their skills with a No. 2 from Staples.
Cowboys = America’s Team. Giants =Big Blue. Seattle’s got their 12th Man. Your Cleveland Browns – The Luddites.
A front-page story in The Washington Post last week featured how the paper industry is funding a multi-million dollar PR campaign touting the benefits of writing stuff down “old school,” citing our Browns as a successful case history. Memo to my association pals at the Paper and Packaging Board: you may want to reconsider your celebrity endorser.
Making the Browns the poster child for the Power of Pencil and Paper is like Alec Baldwin shilling for Weight Watchers. But then, Baldwin’s dieting record may be better than the Browns these past two decades.
At the same time, every other NFL team appears to be jumping over one another in a gridiron nuclear arms race to adopt virtual reality to train their quarterbacks. The reigning Super Bowl champion Patriots will likely go 4-0 by computer programming Jimmy Garoppolo to duplicate every micro-movement, smarmy smirk and all, of suspended Tom Brady. (Now if they could virtually replicate Giselle …)
Of course, in typical Cleveland bad karma timing, not only did we have to suffer the pre-genius Belichick, we had him at the dawn of the email era. A virtual-reality armed Belichick might have turned Todd Philcox into a Hall of Famer.
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I’m a “paper and pencil” guy myself (I had multiple Dawg Pound Daily editors quit trying to train me how to type on this site), so I’m all in with head coach Mike Pettine. If he thinks writing it down beats tapping on a screen, then he’s earned our trust. Anything to win that title. Finger painting in the playbooks might get us to 8-8.
Back to the future, baby. Faced with third-and-three, who amongst Browns Nation wouldn’t turn to Jim Brown barrelling behind pulling guards John Wooten and the late Gene Hickerson? Head coach Blanton Collier schooled that overachieving 1964 championship team scrawling plays on a chalkboard.
Back in 1964, phones had rotary dials, TVs were black and white, and people used manual typewriters. No computers or cellphones; it was a time before the then-not-yet-driving-age Al Gore had invented the Internet. Why not go back to coaching the Browns using pencils and paper?
Hell, it’s not like what they’ve been doing for the last 51 years has worked so great.