Should the Browns be worrying about a Johnny Package?
By Thomas Moore
Sep 27, 2015; Cleveland, OH, USA; Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel (2) watches the game alone on the end of the sidelines during the second half against the Oakland Raiders at FirstEnergy Stadium. The Raiders won 27-20. Mandatory Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
The Cleveland Browns have had their issues on offense during the opening weeks of the NFL season.
Heading into Sunday’s game against San Diego, the Browns are ranked 25th overall in offense, 20th in passing, 26th in rushing and 21st in scoring.
Much has been made about the decision by head coach Mike Pettine to stick with Josh McCown as the starting quarterback over Johnny Manziel, but the reality is that the offense has struggled no matter who has lined up behind center.
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Which explains, in part, why the Browns may be considering opening the Johnny Package against the Chargers.
“That is always a possibility. To say that we don’t have plays ready for Johnny Manziel against the San Diego Chargers, I would be lying to you,” offensive coordinator John DeFilippo said on Thursday. “We may use him. We may not. That is the competitive advantage of showing up and playing an opponent on Sunday. We don’t know what they are going to do, and they don’t know what we are going to do.”
“To say that we don’t have plays ready for Johnny Manziel against the San Diego Chargers, I would be lying to you.” – Offensive coordinator John DeFilippo
There is some value, we suppose, in making the Chargers have to worry about a secret “package of plays” that the Browns will unleash on Sunday. Pettine himself knows how disruptive that can be from his time as defensive coordinator with the New York Jets, who dealt with Miami’s Wildcat twice a year.
“Sure, teams might be catching up to it, but at what price?” Pettine said in a 2012 article at NFL.com. “How much of their game-plan meeting did they have to devote to it? How much of their practice time did they have to devote to it where they normally would have been working on other things they now won’t be able to run in the game?
“You have to allocate a disproportionate amount of time to prepare for it than what you might end up actually using, but if you’re not prepared for it, then a team’s going to go ahead and continue to run it until you stop it.”
That all sounds good, but while the opposing team has to spend practice time preparing for something they may never see, isn’t the same true about the Browns? With the offense having enough trouble executing the game plan without any wrinkles, should they really be taking up practice time working on a special Johnny Package?
The other problem is that quote by Pettine is from a 2012 article (which was originally written in 2009 before being updated), which has us trying to think of any team that currently is running special play packages for a player.
We’ve also been down this road just last season, when Pettine talked about using Manziel for a handful of plays over Brian Hoyer.
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“This is Brian’s job and I never think of it as a leash or we want a guy to be a game manager,” Pettine said before the start of last season. “We want him to be confident and go out and play I don’t foresee us now, especially early, being in a two-quarterback system.”
Compare that to what Pettine said last week when he announced that McCown will remain the starter.
“Any player, anytime you put a guy on a leash and in the back of his mind it’s, ‘hey, if I make one mistake I’m out,’ I don’t think that’s any way to play,” Pettine said. “In most situations that becomes self-fulfilling. He’s our starting quarterback and we’ll take the situations as they unfold.”
That doesn’t sound like a coach that wants to spend much time thinking about how to get the backup quarterback on the field.
When things are going bad, any port in a storm and all that, but as much as a Johnny Package might excite some people, the Browns may be better off just making sure they can run the regular offense before they start focusing on anything special.