Even in Browns win, Quinn not much help
Not sure what to make of the Browns these days. Now, I can't see this team as among the league's elites, regardless of how many games it runs off as this season of disappointment staggers to a conclusion.
But these Browns are showing life, a pulse that belies their 3-10 record. They haven't quit on their embattled coach, whose tenure at the team's helm might be a new general manager away from its end.
The hand coach Eric Mangini was dealt might not be one any coach should have been told to play. Mangini was brought in to put together a puzzle that had pieces missing. He inherited a football team with little talent, and he had a quarterback controversy that never did sort itself out.
Mangini didn't help matters with his waffling on Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn, a strategy that didn't engender confidence in either man. Both have played like quarterbacks with no belief in themselves.
Look at his latest performance. In a 41-34 win Sunday, Quinn was - how to put it kindly - a caretaker. His contribution to the win was a 24-yard bootleg that kept alive a fourth-quarter drive which led to the winning touchdown.
Take away that run, and the Browns would have been better off sticking Josh Cribbs behind center. Quinn completed 10 passes, a measly total in a game that saw the Browns score 41 points. His quarterback rating was 27.7. His passing yards came to 66. That's no misprint: 66 yards.
In a December chill, 66 yards of passing might be acceptable, particularly in a game where defenses reigned like a warlord. But this game in Arrowhead Stadium was a scoring-fest; it was played under weather conditions that might not be out of place in late October or early November.
Browns fans welcome wins - good, bad or ugly as an armadillo. They've seen enough losses since this franchise returned from the scrap heap in 1999 to not appreciate a win.
Yet as the fans look at the long view, they are left to fret about what the future might hold.
They know organizational changes are ahead, changes that might bring them a coach whose last name isn't Mangini and whose NFL roots aren't cut from the Bill Belichick-Bill Parcells tree.
Whoever that new coach is (or if Mangini returns), he'll have to concern himself about the man at the throttle of his offense. He will have enough videotape on Quinn (and Anderson) to know quarterback is an area of weakness, and should he tie his fortunes to a lousy quarterback, he'll have no more success here than Chris Palmer, Butch Davis or Romeo Crennell, a fact not lost on Mangini.
"You can't fix all the different things to be fixed right away," he said in the Sunday editions of The Plain Dealer.
Mangini was right, of course. He's had lots to fix with this football team, even if it's playing more inspired football than it has at any other point of the season. As I see it, the fixing can start at quarterback.
For in the NFL, a team has to get more from its No. 1 quarterback than 66 yards of passing in a game where defenses were as carefree as Tiger Woods at a strip club.
Sixty-six yards from a quarterback simply won't do - not if a team's goal is to contend for Super Bowls instead of for the No. 1 overall pick in the draft.
