It took twenty-five days, but the
Browns finally found their coach.
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This man awaits your blind acceptance. |
That's three weeks and change of
looking like the lonely 8th grader at the school dance, hands in the pockets of
his freshly pressed Dockers as the ballad-y strains of Extreme's "More
Than Words" echo through the crepe paper-strewn gymnasium. (Author's note: I'm not projecting here, just offering a very specific
metaphor. Lay off, damn ya!)
Six-hundred hours of poisonous
whispers regarding a head coaching position that's allegedly viewed by as "radioactive"
by league insiders. Thirty-six thousand minutes of Twitter filling up with easy
jokes (some made by yours truly, admittedly) taking shots at the
low-hanging fruit that is this clown
show of a franchise. It got so bad that national scribes were writing pity
columns defending the downtrodden denizens of Cleveland from mean old outsiders dogging the
city and its awful football team.
So it's somewhat of a relief that after
their exhaustive 2,160,000-second search, the Browns chose a fellow named Mike
Pettine as their seventh head coach since 1999. What do we know about Pettine?
*He's 47.
*He was a defensive coordinator with
the Buffalo Bills.
*He's bald and wears a goatee.
* He's a homo sapien who can not only convert carbon dioxide into oxygen
with the best of them, he's also "smart,
innovative and tough."
The above is about all the
information available on Pettine at the present time. However, now that we're
at the end of a hiring process that ESPN's John Clayton called
"confused" and "a mess," it's time for both fans and media
types alike to do something very difficult - give Pettine a chance.
It's going to be tough. There are
so many snarky comments still left unsaid, so many mocking memes to be
screen-printed onto t-shirts. But it's either support the hire or lie to your
friends about this being "the last straw" and you'll never watch the
Browns again, so help you god.
After all, Pettine is going to be
here for awhile. The new guy will be given a longer leash than the previous
coach, at least, barring an 0-16 season and Joe Haden drowning a hooker in the
training room hot tub.
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"Shemp me? Shmep you!" |
Let's say you've made your peace
with Pettine. Not too hard. He just got here and has yet to waste two timeouts
heading into halftime. Now it's time to swallow an even tougher pill and give
this embattled front office a bit of leeway heading into 2014.
They've got draft picks, free agent
cash, a handful of All Pros already on the roster, and a chance to buff their
terrible image problem. Perhaps they'll make a Belichickean leap in competence
over the next few months and stumble into a star quarterback that changes this
franchise's ill fortunes. Maybe they'll become draft geniuses and build a
system that's able to plug in the next guy on the depth chart and make him a
star.
The odds of any of this happening
aren't great, of course, but a new coaching hire and new offseason bring us the
sweet siren song of hope. For an organization that hasn't won a playoff game in
20 years (or 630 million seconds) there's not much else to offer.