I don't normally make a foray into talking about sports, but I am a sometime fan of Cleveland sports teams, living as I do in Northeast Ohio. We have suffered through decades of mediocre teams, coaches, players, etc. and it gets so frustrating to see other cities teams winning championships while Cleveland's remain mired in miserable performances. This year's Cleveland Browns were no exception, finishing with a dismal 4-12 season. The new coach that they hired last year was fired after only one season. The new owner doesn't seem to have much patience for coaches, so he fires them and hires new ones once a year. That kind of instability is not going to fix what is wrong with this team. Of course, I could not figure out why this year's coach kept playing a half wit mediocre quarterback who could not throw a pass if his life depended on it and kept getting intercepted. This year's coach kept playing him anyway, hoping, I suppose, that he'd improve with time, which he didn't. It was pathetic that he kept being trotted out as starting quarterback when he was such an awful player. What I think should happen, and what may be the only way to save this team from being bought by another city and sneaked out in the middle of the night, is that the fans should buy this team and be owners like the Green Bay Packers. Fans should have the ability to hire and fire, not some billionaire looking to burnish his image and enrich his bottom line.
Right now, if I were the current owner, I'd be getting on the phone and calling Jim Tressel, currently a disgraced NCAA coach turned administrator at the University of Akron, and I would ask him to come coach the Browns. Tressel has name recognition, knows football inside and out and knows how to build a consistently winning team and would draw the fans back into the stadium. Sure, there are those who want Tressel to be the next President of the University of Akron since he's been steadily promoted up the line to be very close to the outgoing President, but if I were the current owner of the Cleveland Browns, I'd be on the phone to Coach Tressel right now asking if there was any desire on his part to leave academia and to become the next head coach of the Cleveland Browns. Give the coach the complete power to choose the players instead of leaving that power to the front office. Let the coach do his job and find the best people to put on the field. If the front office were to hire Coach Tressel and let him have complete control over his team, I'd be willing to bet that in a few years time, the Cleveland Browns would finally get their long deserved championship and the city of Cleveland would have every reason to be very grateful to Coach Tressel for getting them there. But if the first season of being coach were to turn out a bit rough, the owners would have to have complete faith that this is the guy who could, with time, turn things around. Just give these coaches time to build a winning organization instead of changing coaches once a year like what they have done since the Browns returned to Cleveland in 1999. Fifteen years of a mediocre team since its return is unacceptable. It's time to shake things up, starting with the top and working down to the bottom. I think that a complete changeover in management is called for, top to bottom, nobody spared. Dump the whole lot and start over with a clean slate with people whose only desire is to do something good for the fans of the Cleveland Browns, and not just to enrich their own bottom lines. We'll see what happens with the next coach, but I look for more years of dismal, losing teams until they can get someone in there who doesn't care about becoming rich off of owning a team. It's about the fans, not some wealthy owner who just happens to have some rather shady legal problems that may well eventually come back to haunt him and land him in prison. Fans deserve so much better. They've gotten a raw deal for so long now. Tragic in my opinion, especially for what they are forced to fork over just to buy a lousy ticket to see an even lousier team play.
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