The Eric Mangini Project

When I first heard about the Brown's supposed interest in Mangini my heart skipped a beat(in a bad way), I stopped breathing(in a bad way) and was so pissed off that I had to randomly piss people off just to get back at the Football Gods. I sincerely thought it was a practical joke like the guy on YouTube who thought he won the lottery. I hated Mangini. I would've rather had Art Shell as Coach and your younger brother who builds a great team on Madden 09 as G.M.(oh wait, wasn't that what we had with Romeo and "FU" Savage? Right that was.) Wasn't there some way the good people of Cleveland could petition and boycott and somehow convince Mr. Randy Lerner that aside from Larry Dolan he was the LAST MAN who should be making that decision? "Must be a way of leveraging Scott Pioli", I kept on telling myself. They're not really going to hire this guy.

January 8, 2009 they did, and I, like so many of you, thought we were entering the dark ages of Cleveland Brown's football. Now I'm going to tell you why the exact opposite is true.

First, a disclaimer. This is not another Assistant Coach- Bill Belichik word association game. Everyone has grown tired of all the rotten apples of the proverbial "Bill Belichick coaching tree". This is different. In hindsight we know that Romeo had less to do with Belichick football than Michael Reghi has with talk radio( BRING IT! BRING IT! Seriously, Mike, don't ever say that again. Your embarrassing Cleveland. You really are.) Your going to tell me that this man really use to concoct defensive wizardry for Belichick? Come on, he was having a Krispy Kream eating contest with Big Willie. Charlie Weiss is nothing more than a incompetent arrogant man. It's obvious that these men were not cut out to be Head Coaches and to judge other people from the "tree" based on their performance would be idiotic. There was no question that he was extremely bright and eighteen hour a day guy. So why did I hate Mangini with such passion? Because having watched most of his games over the past three seasons there were times I felt he was more Herm Edwards and less Bill Belichick. It appeared at times that he was playing not to lose, and there is NOTHING in a Coach I hate more than that. He was schizo; he would try a onside kick to start the second half and than go conservative on play calling at the end of game. He didn't seem to have that Parcellian killer instinct aggressiveness we crave for all our coaches. And then it hit me. Where have we seen this before? Where have we seen a coach who was very bright and a bad communicator struggle so mightily to reconcile his latent aggressiveness with his fundamentalism about the game? You guessed it! Bill Belichik! Could you imagine the coach who sent his RB up the middle again and again as if he didn't have another running play in the book and made "Metcalf up the middle" a joke and a catchphrase to underscore his boring conservatism being the same coach who won multiple Super Bowls and is known for his cunning and sometimes omniscient aggressiveness? No one saw it coming and when Bill Belichick was hired by the New England Patriots in 2000, we all snickered, just as the New York Jet fans are snickering now. How's this for a prediction: The Browns will win a Super Bowl under Eric Mangini.