Written by Jeff Rich

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First of all, there are no hard feelings towards Pat Shurmur.  He didn’t offer any evidence to suggest it would be a mistake to part ways, and the new regime didn’t seek any.  The Cleveland Browns are going in a new direction, which I applaud because I’ve never sensed that they’ve had any inkling of direction at all.  I realize that sounds harsh, but is there really an effective way to sugar-coat these past fourteen seasons?

One thing I’m running short on is patience.  I suppose that I’m as thick-skinned as the next Browns fan, but I dread the thought of starting over.  Just tell me there’s something in place that doesn’t need to be made-over.  Help me identify building blocks or, dare I say, a core.  What I see right now is a team that practices in Berea, and is the subject of a show on the Travel Channel, despite the fact they aren’t a very good football team.

Our eyes are open; you don’t need to be an analyst to see it.  Four or five wins per season, a few of the losses will be ultra-humiliating, and a continued dead end at the quarterback position; that’s the type of consistency that we get year in and year out.  That’s business as usual in Berea.  There is no low point, just this insane fluctuation between 11 and 12 losses that always keeps them at arm’s length from stumbling into the next big thing.

You don’t need a blog to tell you how bad your team is, so maybe there’s something to good to be said for all of this.  It’s as if, in some world, the era of Pat Shurmur—or Mike Holmgren (your choice), could somehow be a blessing of sorts.  It would have to be more than just putting the Browns in the right place at the right time for their dream candidate, but making an impact, and arguably making it a better situation for the next guy than it was for you.

Even if you had to strain yourself to do so, can the argument be made that Pat Shurmur has left the next guy a better situation than the one he assumed in 2011?  He did take over a team that just played a lame-duck season under Eric Mangini, a roster that Mike Holmgren gutted by all means necessary, and his first off-season began with a lockout to boot.  He inherited a quarterback tandem of Seneca Wallace and Colt McCoy, a receiving corps highlighted by…maybe Mo Massaquoi, and a running game of Montario Hardesty and Peyton Hillis.  He was transitioning his defense into the 3-4, which mostly featured parts drafted into a labor stoppage.

It isn’t a matter of Pat Shurmur being dealt a crummy hand; most would concede that much, mostly that he was handed a job that he wasn’t qualified for, but did are the Browns better now, and moving forward, than they were 24 months ago?  I know it’s a reach, but is it possible that we’ve raised the bar, that we start sensing a light at the end of the tunnel?  The dismissal of the Head Coach and General Manager seems be the right way to go, and we might have to allow ourselves to believe that these events are part of an ongoing process, as opposed to transitioning to a new plan.

Starting at the end, and working our back to the beginning, history tells us that few, if any, reach the promised land without the services of someone special at quarterback.  If there was one position in the NFL that Browns fans wish you could just fake it until you make it, that position would be quarterback.  Pat Shurmur wasn’t blessed with a prototype quarterback, but that’s okay, because Shurmur develops quarterbacks.  In Philadelphia, he had Donovan McNabb.  In St. Louis, he had Sam Bradford.  What he had was Colt McCoy with a half-season of game-management under his belt after being used by Mangini in a season of crisis.  Skipping the built-in excuse the lockout provides, Colt wasn’t the guy that was going to win games for Shurmur.  There were, and still are, throws he can’t make, but Shurmur isn’t the type to adjust his schemes to personnel.  Colt McCoy wasn’t his guy, but that’s okay because this build wasn’t a time sensitive issue for Mike Holmgren, who hired his pal Fritz Shurmur’s nephew in what he referred to as his second-first year.

We were always under the impression that Shurmur had time.  Time is a precious commodity that these fans can no longer tolerate.  We watched for signs, seemed to forgive another entire season that yielded no signal of the changing times in Berea, except maybe changes for the worst.  A few weeks of Seneca Wallace reminded us that Uncle Mike’s “guy” from Seattle would not be the answer either, and no Cleveland, we did not sneak the second coming of Matt Hasselbeck into Cleveland via Wallace’s 5 foot, 11 inch frame.

He won some games, but nothing offered promise.  Nothing about victories over Charlie Whitehurst’s Seahawaks or Blaine Gabbert’s Jaguars had us thinking, “Shurmur is going to special with time.”  The other victories came against teams, Miami and Indianapolis, that could have been winless if they’d have tanked just a little more.  If you’re scoring at home, that’s four wins, which might have been good enough for the third pick if an NFC North game would have gone a certain way, but it didn’t and the Browns were picking fourth.

Now, it’s certainly fair to ignore Pat Shurmur’s defense, since has Dick Jauron for that and we think of Shurmur as the Head Coach and Offensive Coordinator, but we tend to brush aside the fact that he probably makes some decisions on defense on game day.  It’s cool to joke about him being locked out of defensive meetings a la Lane Kiffin, but there’s no Al Davis in these parts to spite Pat.  Personnel moves seem to have set the table nicely for the future.  As it turned out, D’Qwell Jackson wasn’t ready to be put out of his misery, Phil Taylor and Jabaal Sheard made an immediate impact as rookies, and former Eagles filled some vacancies and complemented the youth on the team well.

When you lose 12 games, a few are bound to get ugly, but it really only happened in a 30-12 loss at Houston.  The offensive stat sheet was laughable, but the game did feature two 100-yard rushing efforts, both from the Texans.  It was interesting to see how they’d bounce back from that, and they played flat the next week in a one-point home loss to the Rams.  That was the one where the long-snapper didn’t give the greatest cold-weather kicker of all time a chance to win it in the end.  It was business usual in Berea, I was especially sure when Mike Holmgren held a press conference to say that it wasn’t business as usual.  What prompted that particular gem of a media gathering were questions about the brain of the quarterback, and whether or not the Head Coach saw the possible brain injury as a possibility or not.

I mean, it was so much to ask Pat to draw conclusions about what may have happened to his starting quarterback during a football game he was allegedly coaching that the boss had to intervene.  We learned that the media was going to have to find a new channel for obtaining playoff tickets and, more importantly, started to question who was driving the bus.  It wasn’t all on Shurumur; Shurmur’s fate speaks volumes about his competency here in Cleveland, but after 16 games in the Shurmur Era, the Browns were not better off than they were the day Eric Mangini cleaned out his desk.

There was a little more promise on the horizon for the Browns, not with wins or anything crazy like that, but offensive weapons were added and the defense would excel as a unit in their second year under Jauron.  I don’t think there was ever a real number, but 6-10 seemed like a good place for the Browns to be, if you weren’t shooting for the moon.  Take Two on Mike Holmgren’s next great quarterback was Brandon Weeden.  Their bona fide superstar on offense would be Trent Richardson, the rookie from Alabama that drew comparisons to Adrian Peterson in the circles of people who scout college players.

Year Two would be better than Year One.  Training Camp was set to begin with an understanding that Weeden’s first-round draft status defaulted him into the starting quarterback role.  Weeden’s age may have fooled everyone into believing he was ready when he wasn’t, and Shurmur may have been stuck with the situation, based on marching orders from above.  Either that or he believed that Weeden was the better option.  In any event, Weeden started the season and he stunk.

The Browns, playing without Joe Haden for four of their first five games, started the season on a five game losing streak, but it got tricky along the way.  In the losses to Cincinnati, Baltimore, and possibly even the Giants, you play the “what if” game, and Haden’s knucklehead suspension enters the equation.  I don’t put that on Shurmur, and maybe I should, but maybe this speaks to the Browns being a better product than they’ve been.  If we’re looking back, saying Haden’s absence made no difference, then even the addition of a superstar doesn’t make the Browns better, and things remain the same.

Sure, losses that offer hope still count as losses in the standings, but maybe this business as usual mantra doesn’t apply any longer.  We don’t look at 5-11 and say, “…but four of those could have gone their either way” to speak for Pat Shurmur’s cause.  The defense did more with less this year, forcing the likes of Craig Robertson and Trevin Wade into duty.  The rookies over-achieved on defense, both Billy Winn and John Hughes factored into the box-score up front, but it only translated to one more win than the year before.

Brandon Weeden never looked comfortable, never looked ready, and the numbers reflect it.  I’m curious to know if Shurmur ruined Weeded or that Weeden doesn’t really have it.  I cheer and hope it’s the former and that the soon-to-be-30-year-old has fixable problems and won’t be an obstacle going forward.  Maybe the next guy comes in and it clicks for Weeden, or maybe the ship has already sailed, but Shurmur has offered no more clarity to the quarterback position than Tom Heckert and Mike Holmgren offered him on Day 1 with McCoy and Wallace.  At least, he did bring a Shurmur system guy with him from the Rams, and Shurmur’s last act may have answered a question that no one asked.  Thad Lewis can play, and should stay in Cleveland as a backup if the organization parts ways with Weeden and McCoy.

Trent Richardson played with broken ribs all season.  Someone made a bad call there, possibly Trent himself, but he may not have been the player the Browns wanted at #3 while debilitated by the lingering injury.  He’s the real deal; we’ve seen enough to realize that, but he needs to be healthy.  Perhaps, this injury plagued season has helped adjust to the NFL speed, which he didn’t seem ready for, somewhat proving my suspicions that there’s more than bite to the whole SEC speed discussion.  They also seem to have found a formula that exploits Hardesty’s ability to burst while spelling Richardson.

While the play-calling is mostly the dregs of my entire Sunday Ticket portfolio of offenses, the occasional medium gain from Hardesty between the 20’s is a welcome change.  It’s true that Shurmur inherited a running game that wasn’t terrible in Peyton Hillis’s career-best 2010 season, but that had one-year-wonder written all over it, and the talent is now there.  On the bright side, my eyes see an outstanding offensive line that’s gotten better with the additions of Jason Pinkston and Mitchell Schwartz, even if without Pinkston for the better part of the season.  Not to go out of my way to turn a positive into a negative, but the most frustrating part of the recent shortcomings comes down to watching the Browns fail to exploit their strengths.

Now, a quarterback is going to make a bad choice and bad throws are bound to happen, but you can tell when he’s coming along, and Weeden isn’t.  With few exceptions, running backs are a dime-a-dozen in the NFL, and the Browns have to hope that Richardson is actually an exception.  Poor Richardson ended up being the bridesmaid in a draft that featured two dream brides that each could have answered the quarterback questions.  Along with Weeden, we’ll remember the first-round picks of 2012 to be the picks we didn’t trade for Robert Griffin III, unless they both do something special for the Browns, and time will have to tell whether special is in the card for Weeden, Richardson, or the Browns.

Shurmur was given a bit of an ace in the hole when the Browns were awarded Josh Gordon in the Supplemental Draft.  He’s very raw, but might have given us a glimpse of what Shurmur’s offense can be with vertical threats in the passing game.  Greg Little was better with Gordon on the field.  Rumor has it that even Mo Massaquoi made a cameo in the passing game this year as well.  The receiving corps is definitely better off, with obvious credit due to Tom Heckert for acquiring such a prize in the form of Gordon, but also Little and Travis Benajmin.  Shurmur never perfected application of such talent, but showed us enough to know some things.

The Offensive Line is very good, will likely be better in 2013 than it’s been in any year since 1999.

The most likely result of the current quarterback derby that never really happened will reveal that neither Colt McCoy or Brandon Weeden are natural fits for Pat Shurmur’s offense, but might either might be good enough to wins games for teams that don’t model themselves around how they approach the forward pass.

The receiving corps is better than the one Eric Mangini left them with, but only because the front office put some resources towards it, and Josh Gordon came so much better than advertised that it the unit just has to be better, but things are still up in the air at Tight End.  Ben Watson is great, but a part of the long-term plan, he is not.

On special teams, everyone loves Phil Dawson the way the Travel Channel loves filming him, but Shurmur doesn’t seem to get anything especially special out of his special teams.  To be fair, Brad Seely was a name we all know, whereas I had to look up Chris Tabor to get the name of the current Special Teams Coach into this space.  Reggie Hodges isn’t the same after his injury and whatever “it” was that made Joshua Cribbs special, “it” is no longer there.  Fortunately, it appears that Travis Benjamin can assume this role.  Shurmur had to fire an All-Pro long-snapper, but Christian Yount seems to be doing just fine.  We can’t really say the Special Teams are better than they were before the 2011 season, but this isn’t the type of thing that winning teams worry too much about, in any event.

It’s difficult to really evaluate the defense going forward because the world of Cleveland Browns football after Pat Shurmur’s dismissal does not include Dick Jauron and rumor has it the plans might not necessarily call for the 4-3 scheme on defense either.  While the defense has definitely improved, mostly for reasons related to upgraded personnel, it’s difficult to say what difference it’s going to make if the defense, the one that no one ever associates with Pat Shurmur, is better or worse than the one he took over.

During Shurmur’s tenure, specifically once I turned on him (this season), I believed that the success was coming in spite of him, not because of him.  I give him credit for making sure this offensive line works the way that it’s supposed to, but I don’t think that the wasted seasons with him at the helm showed anyone anything valuable.  We suspect the worst-case scenario at quarterback, but not because the Head Coach got everything out of his rookie, but because worst-case is always the safe bet with the Browns.  We don’t know if our special running back is especially special or not because he was not permitted to actually heal on Shurmur’s watch.  We know that our Supplemental Pick can be explosive, but play-calling didn’t reveal that he’s actually an elite pass-catcher or a good route-runner.

My conclusion, with or without the defense being a factor, is that the Browns are much better off today than they were in the days we wondered who would replace Eric Mangini.  But, before we start baking cakes and honoring Shurmur or Holmgren, let’s face reality.  The Browns got better because it is a natural step to rise from the bottom of the barrel.  The Browns got better because they’ve added talent through the draft.  The Browns got better because they had to play exceptionally well so that Shurmur couldn’t impede their success.

So, to answer the question at hand, the Browns are actually better off than they were before, but are still nowhere near the desired level.  Pat Shurmur is leaving a smaller mess behind than the one he walked into two seasons ago.  No one truly knows how much that matters, but I’ll sleep easier at night knowing that two years weren’t completely wasted on Pat Shurmur.

You hear that folks?  They hired Shurmur, and now they’re better, even though they’re moving forward without him.