Awaiting further instruction

For years, the Browns have needed a First Monday in January Guy.

The first Monday in January is normally the start of the offseason for perennial dregs like the Browns. It's the day when the postmortem begins. It's the day when the front office takes stock of what went wrong and starts formulating the initial steps to try and fix it.

It's also the day when the coach often gets fired.

Mike Holmgren was brought to Cleveland and paid a lot of Randy Lerner's money to be the man making the calls on the first Monday in January. To be the organizational guru who can identify what is wrong with his team and how to correct it.

Monday, he made his first big call, firing Eric Mangini after a second straight 5-11 season. It's a move that is at the same time defensible and questionable.

In a business driven by wins and losses, Mangini didn't improve. In the division, he didn't improve, leading the Browns to a 1-5 record for the second straight year. His team appeared poised for bigger and better things after a pair of impressive wins over the Saints and Patriots, then fell apart in the second half of the campaign, sustaining embarrassing losses to the Bills and Bengals, and punctuating the season with a 41-9 humiliation at the hands of the Steelers.

But the Browns played competitive football for all but the final game. Mangini got the most out of a very limited roster for the season's first three months. Injuries to Colt McCoy and Scott Fujita slicked the Browns' second-half slide.

This truly was a judgment call for Holmgren, and by his own admission during his afternoon press conference, he hadn't totally made up his mind on Mangini's fate until Monday morning.

"I didn't sleep very well (Sunday) night," Holmgren said during his press conference, as quoted on Cleveland.com. "I was up a fair amount of the night thinking about this, thinking what I might have to do and trying to make the correct decision."

Mangini is a good coach. Not a great coach, but a good coach. Which is far more than we can say for any other Browns coach in the expansion era. The Browns might gain more from Mangini's replacement, or they might not. But they definitely lost something with his dismissal. They lost the coach who did the initial dirty work of taking the Browns from a circus of ineptitude to something resembling a competent, professional organization. And he took a lot of heat from the players and media to get there.

Mangini came in with the wrong idea about himself as a football guru in the mold of Bill Belichick. He botched the 2009 draft and alienated former GM George Kokinis. But when the time came to reform, Mangini swallowed his pride and became a team player with Holmgren.

He's a better coach than he was two years ago. His time in Cleveland made him a better coach. You could make a case that Mangini deserved a shot to see his vision for the Browns through to completion, maybe with a new offensive coordinator and a couple of new receivers.

That's what makes all of this more than your average bilge-water purging of NFL coaching flotsam. That's what makes this potentially a polarizing move by Holmgren.

Holmgren has placed himself on the hot seat by doing exactly what every one of us wanted him to do when he took the team president's job a year ago: put his stamp on the organization and make this a Holmgren team.

That's about to happen. Holmgren the football executive is about to build an entire franchise in his image. He plugged in his front office last year, and it yielded arguably the best free agent and draft class of the Browns' expansion era. Now we get to see if the former coach who has thrice tread a Super Bowl sideline has the right stuff to hire the best possible coach for this team.

But really, what is Holmgren's vision for the Browns' on-field product? It might still be murky, even to the man himself. Which, honestly, is a little disconcerting for those of us who want to see the most accomplished Browns executive since Ernie Accorsi move forward with a definitive plan for rescuing the franchise from the NFL's sewer.

It would be one thing if Holmgren were dead set on building the Browns around the West Coast offense and Bill Walsh football. That was never going to be Mangini. Sometimes, the pieces just don't fit. But according to Holmgren's comments on Monday, even that isn't an absolute. He says he wants the best candidates. He'll beat the shrubs looking for the best coaching candidates, no matter what corner of the football universe they come from.

"If I hire a coach, I'm going to hire a coach," he told reporters. "He's going to run what he runs, what he's comfortable with, what he knows. Will (the West Coast system) be a part of the consideration in the process? Absolutely, but I'm not going to interfere that way as the president"

Holmgren stated he won't return to the sidelines himself at this point, which eliminates the possibility that Holmgren was angling for the job all along. Apparently, he truly wants to build this team from the executive level.

So what does Holmgren want? The best possible people. That broad definition serves as Cleveland's guiding light for the time being. Maybe the coming weeks and months make the picture a little clearer. For now, we have a team president with respect-demanding credentials discarding a decent coach with room to improve for an undetermined better coach.

Holmgren has the hammer and chisel. He could sculpt a classical masterpiece to rival Michelangelo's "David," or he could scuplt a backyard garden gnome. Right now, this really could go either way.

Frankly, I was hoping for a little more from Holmgren. And I'm going to be hoping for a lot more in the coming months.

Value proposition

For the past year as fans, we've operated under one unwavering assumption when it comes to the Browns:

Mike Holmgren is the key to success, in the short term and long term. Therefore, the Browns must do whatever is necessary to keep Holmgren in the fold. If that means allowing Holmgren to scratch his still-existent coaching itch on the Browns' sideline, so be it. No matter how much improvement Eric Mangini shows, losing Holmgren to another organization would cancel it out a hundred times over.

So even if Mangini can demonstrate marked, steady on-field improvement as evidence of his staff's effectiveness, if Holmgren wants the headset, Mangini gets the boot. Is it fair? No. Is it worth it to keep the man who helped mold Brett Favre into a Hall of Famer? Yes.

Up until the Browns delivered the Saints a trick-play induced haymaker in New Orleans, that line of thinking wasn't even questioned. Over the bye week and heading toward the showdown with New England this past Sunday, there was some cause for debate, but most fans still couldn't stomach a Browns team with Mangini but no Holmgren.

But then at a press conference last week, Holmgren reiterated, in a roundabout way, his desire to return to the coaching ranks. Then Mangini took his old mentor Bill Belichick out behind the woodshed in a 34-14 roasting of the Patriots over the weekend. Mangini outclassed Belichick in the battle of coaching wits, which is kind of like out-thinking Stephen Hawking on the subject of theoretical physics.

Now, it's fair to open the floor to debate: if the time comes when Randy Lerner must decide whether to allow Holmgren to take over his team's coaching job, or risk losing him to another team's open coaching position, what decision should he make? If Mangini's team continues to trend upward, is it really in the best interest of the organization to pull the plug on his tenure just to make sure the more-accomplished Holmgren stays put?

What exactly do the Browns need from Holmgren, and is it possible that he has already put all the thumbprint he's ever going to put on the Browns?

When Holmgren agreed to take over as president of the Browns last December, he was taking over a team with no general manager and a severely-frayed coach who had been worn down by endless media criticism, the stress of turning over a roster that included human hand grenades like Kellen Winslow and Braylon Edwards, and the fracturing of his relationship with former GM George Kokinis.

The Browns of last year were in desperate need of a strong guiding hand, and Holmgren provided that almost immediately. He oversaw the hiring of Tom Heckert as GM. He dusted Mangini off and determined that the young coach was a fixer-upper, not recycle-bin wreckage.

As pointed out in a New York Times article from earlier this week, Mangini reached a moment of self-realization in January of this year. From that point forward, he became more committed to his coaching and more committed to his health, dropping weight, attempting to kick a chewing tobacco habit and -- above all -- listening to the three Super Bowls' worth of experience Holmgren was willing to impart on his quasi-pupil.

The result has been a renewed Mangini, fitter, happier, and finally past his Belichick-wannabe phase. The new Mangini is more open, self-effacing, even funny at times. Above all, he's a more confident coach who now has developing people skills to pair with a Belichick-bred football acumen.

If this really is a complete new beginning for Mangini, he's reaching a rebirth at the green age of 39. He could be the Browns' coach for a decade or longer, which would be a refreshing change from the organizational carousel we've had to endure, while the likes of Belichick and Bill Cowher stay nestled in their coaching jobs for 10 to 15 years or longer.

Holmgren, by contrast, is 62. Chances are, he wouldn't last more than five to seven years in any coaching job. That could certainly be enough time to win the Browns a Super Bowl, but once Holmgren leaves, the regime shifts again, and the Browns are right back in a state of upheaval.

At his advancing age and vast experience level, Holmgren's best possible impact on any organization is the impact felt after he leaves. Did he hire the right successors? Did he teach them the right things? Can the organization still move forward and win once Holmgren has moved to his retirement villa?

With that in mind, the best possible outcome for the Holmgren Era is one where Mangini turns into one of the most successful coaches in Browns history, Heckert reaches the Bill Polian class of roster architects, and ultimately, Holmgren becomes an unncessary layer of management.

Ultimately, the Browns don't want an organization where Holmgren has to stick around and ensure that everyone is doing their jobs right. The Browns want an organization where Heckert and Mangini are so good at their jobs, it would be an insult to keep Holmgren on the payroll as a babysitter.

Whether we realize it or not, Holmgren not only got the ball rolling in that direction, the ball might already be most of the way there. Not to a Super Bowl berth, but to an organization capable of building and sustaining that type of team.

There is still drafting to do, still coaching to be done, still decisions to be made at all levels of the Browns organization. But this franchise is already miles ahead of where they were 11 months ago. Holmgren could still stick around for another year or two and help some more -- and there is a good chance he will -- but if the Cowboys or Vikings come calling and it becomes apparent that Holmgren is going to be pacing the sideline somewhere in 2011, the Browns and Holmgren can still part ways with a clear conscience on both ends.

Holmgren still has some gas left in the coaching tank, and he might be the right coaching hire for a veteran team trying to make a Super Bowl push. But for the Browns, he's probably not the right coach. He's the right president. And in the U.S., presidents have term limits. It keeps the balance of power in check and ensures progress.

In leveland, progress needs to come in the form of Heckert and Mangini leading the Browns to better days ahead, and continuing it after Holmgren has hung up his whistle for good.

Code of honor

We're better in Cleveland. At least we think we are.

No, not the city itself. We're firmly second-rate in our own minds. But when it comes to rooting for our sports teams, nobody can tell us that we're anything but number one.

No fan base has had so little to show for so much loyalty and passion over the years. We stick with our teams like glue, we develop static-cling emotional attachment, we debate on message boards, we read volumes of fact, opinion and stats, we allow anyone who is willing and able-bodied to take a crack at being our Moses, whether it be LeBron James or Charlie Frye.

We defended Albert Belle when the rest of the country hated his thermostat-bashing, trick-or-treater chasing butt. Through voice and volume, we intimidated the NFL into making a replacement franchise for Cleveland a priority.

And despite it all, we've received no championships for our trouble. No lasting moment in the Sun. Just a lot of betrayal and cruel jokes at our expense. And if the outlook for this town's sports teams is as universally bleak as it appears to be, we aren't going to have that itch scratched anytime soon.

At this point, you kind of have to assume that the next legitimate contender in this town might be five years away or more. The Browns, because of the NFL's built-in parity rules, stand the greatest chance of reaching contention first, but regardless of who is running the show, that franchise always seems to make five bad moves for every good move.

The Indians are financially overmatched, with an alienated fan base that might not fill Progressive Field even if the team gets off to a hot start one of these years. Look to the case study of the 2007 season for proof.

The Cavs aren't winning anything until they find another LeBron. Enough said.

Three teams, and nothing but flat prarie (or scorched desert, depending on your outlook) as far as the eye can see. And absolutely no promise that what is over the horizon will be any better.

At some point, even the most steadfast Cleveland fans -- the ones who will proudly wear a 2003 Kelly Holcomb jersey through downtown Pittsburgh as an act of pure defiance -- might start to ask their inner selves if there is a point to it all.

You'd be excused if you did want to ask that question. Going to bed on Sunday with a rope of pain looping your scalp from temple to temple, the result of an evening of quiet seething over another Browns loss -- and the alcohol that probably accompanied it. The mind-numbing college lecture that every Indians season seems to become. The knowledge that LeBron almost certainly quit on the Cavs last spring, knowing full well that he was paving his way out of Cleveland.

And yet, we come back for more, year after year. We fall madly in love with any Cleveland team that shows even a glimmer of potential as a title winner. We're that desperate. We'll suffer to no end, hoping for that final championship-parade payoff.

Not only that, we wrap ourselves in a cloak of righteuosness as we suffer. We're dedicated. We're not like those fair-weather fans in Miami. We're not a city of transplants like Atlanta, Phoenix or Tampa. We were born and raised here. Our fandom was passed down from our fathers and grandfathers. We live and breathe the very essence of our teams. We sacrifice and bleed for them. We identify with them on a DNA-structural level. They are us. We are them.

To which Miami fans answer: "That's nice. You do that. We're going to go watch LeBron and the Heat win by 30, then we're going to the beach."

Those so-called fair weather fans in the Sun Belt? They pick sports up and put it down whenever it suits them. We look down our noses at a fan base that doesn't even think about the Marlins until they're in the NLCS. We're appalled that such lax fan support is rewarded with two World Series titles in the span of six years. Then, Miami was rewarded with an NBA title in 2006, and chances are very good they have more Heat parades coming.

All for a fan base that, save for the Dolphins and maybe the University of Miami football program, really doesn't cling to sports in any meaningful way.

But maybe Miami has it right. Maybe they do deserve the titles they've won because they approach sports in the right frame of mind. They put sports in its frivolous place. They don't look to local sports teams for regional or personal vindication, or to provide a metaphorical sword of justice to wield when assailed by fans of a rival team.

Yes, Miami has beaches, warm weather and points of civic pride that Cleveland quite obviously doesn't have. But it's a state of mind more than anything else.

The fans in Miami and across the Sun Belt know what we in Cleveland refuse to admit: there is no honor in suffering for a sports team. To emotionally martyr yourself, week after week, month after month, coming back for more time and time again, it's about as futile as trying to get anywhere by running on a hamster wheel.

Cleveland has, quite possibly, the most unhealthy fan/team relationship of any major U.S. city. It's a clingy, needy, desperate, one-sided relationship in which the fans keep giving and giving of themselves, in the hope that the love will be requited in the form of that long-sought championship parade that seemingly every U.S. city has experienced in the past half-century except for Cleveland. But the teams always let us down, without fail, and it creates even more emotional baggage.

I've seen the cycle of abuse play out since the days of The Drive and The Fumble, and those older than me have even earlier examples.

Instead of mocking Miami, Tampa and Atlanta, maybe we should strive to be more like them. We should care less about sports in Cleveland. That doesn't mean we stop supporting the local teams, but as a source of joy and misery, the grown men who play games for millions of dollars a year should be far down the list of what moves us.

If for no other reason, change your outlook to achieve this: when a Steelers fan tries to give you the business about the Browns' latest calamity, you can say something like, "Oh, really? I didn't see it. I was at the park with my family on a beautiful fall day."

That is a liberating feeling.

The past is history

As a football player, Jim Brown deserves all the respect in the world. Even today, 45 years after he abrputly walked away from football at age 29, he is still one of the defining players in the history of the NFL.

His career rushing record of 12,312 was an all time record that stood until Walter Payton surpassed it in 1984. Since then, seven other rushers have passed Brown's mark, set in the days of 12 and 14-game schedules, and yet Brown is still regarded by many knowledgeable students of football history as the greatest running back -- and perhaps the greatest player -- to ever set foot on an NFL field.

He is certainly the greatest player in Browns history. If anyone were to take that title from Brown, he would have to be a truly special player. Brown's combination of size, speed, coordination and power made him the perfect physical specimen for the gridiron. His intense competitive spirit made him a winner -- something that LeBron James, who was briefly considered the co-greatest athlete in Cleveland history with Brown, might have benefited from this past spring as the Celtics were mopping the floor with Cavs in the playoffs.

Brown deserves to be remembered and revered for his contributions to the Browns organization in his playing days. No other Browns player will ever wear No. 32, and when the Browns introduce their ring of honor next month, Brown's name should be the first revealed, even before Otto Graham, Paul Brown or Lou Groza, who all won more championships than Brown. It is because Brown was that great as a player, and he is that important to the history of the organization.

....To the history of the organization.

Brown has still hung around the Browns organization, on and off, since retiring. But football was never really a priority of his once he pulled off the shoulder pads for good. He sowed his wild oats as an actor in Hollywood, he threatened to return to action with the Raiders in 1983 when Franco Harris was within striking distance of his all-time rushing record. He became a community activist by founding the Amer-I-Can program, helping to steer inner-city youths in Los Angeles away from gangs and drugs.

But he was still Jim Brown. And when Randy Lerner assumed control of the Browns after his father's death in 2002, he needed an advisor. Someone with a football background who could give him an insider's perspective on what to look for in front office personnel, coaches and maybe even scouting players.

Brown had his hand up, and Lerner couldn't say no to an all-time great. Brown was hired on as an executive advisor to Lerner, reportedly making a six-figure salary in the role.

If Brown was a figurehead, a community ambassador in charge of making public appearances on behalf of the team, there would have been no harm in giving a revered alumnus a cushy front-office job. But, based on what has happened since Mike Holmgren took the reins of the team last December, it appears Brown held real sway within the organization.

Earlier this year, Holmgren told Brown that his services as an advisor were no longer needed, essentially firing Brown on the spot. According to media reports, the Browns have also curtailed their monetary contributions to the Amer-I-Can program.

Brown was understandably upset, and now a rift exists between the rushing great and the team with which he has been virtually synonymous for almost half a century. There is reportedly a significant chance that Brown will not show up to the team's ring of honor introduction ceremony during the Browns home opener on Sept. 19. Even if he does show up, it might be with a coating of ice.

Perhaps at some point in the future, the relationship can be repaired. But at this point, how Jim Brown feels about the Browns, and his dismissal from the organization, just isn't important.

Right now, keeping Brown happy should be pretty far down the list of priorities for a team that has been one of the league's laughing stocks since returning to action in 1999.

Jim Brown, at 74 and with little pro football experience over the past 45 years, would appear to not know very much about how to run a modern NFL team. If he has been the man advising Lerner on the Phil Savage and Romeo Crennel hires, on giving Eric Mangini total control of the football operations, the evidence would seem to bear that out. And if Lerner took Brown's advice to heart, it simply underscores how unqualified he was as the decision-making head of an NFL franchise, and how relieved we should all be that Holmgren agreed to take over the top decision maker's role.

Really, Lerner tabbing Brown as an advisor on football matters makes about as much sense as Larry Dolan hiring 91-year-old Bob Feller as an advisor on baseball matters. Feller has the same advisor qualifications as Brown. He was an all-time great on the field, and he's opinionated. That's about it.

If Brown did have Lerner's ear to the point that Holmgren felt he needed to dismiss him in order to achieve the rank and file he desired, then showing Brown the door was unquestionably the right move, no matter how hurt Brown might be. Knowing that Brown is fiercely proud and rather temperamental, chances are he wasn't going to take his dismissal laying down. There was going to be some kind of public backlash from Brown. It's just the way he is.

Holmgren should simply continue to remain positive about the matter, demand that everyone else in the organization do the same, and go about his business secure in knowing he made the right move.

Holmgren is in the business of this team's present and future. Of trying to rescue the wayward expansion Browns, give them an organizational rudder and pilot them back to contention. If any visitors from the team's past are trying to pass Holmgren notes, coaching from the sidelines like overzealous soccer dads, telling him what they think he should do, it's needless clutter at best and an outright insult to Holmgren at worst. Holmgren shouldn't, and won't, put up with the possibility of that.

The Browns owe a lot to Jim Brown: gratitude, respect, his name engraved on any team plaque or monument that is worth anything. But they don't owe him a job. And they certainly don't owe him the chance to put his rubber stamp on personnel moves.

Jim Brown is an integral part of the Cleveland Browns' past. But only the past. It took Randy Lerner about eight years to finally hire someone who could stand up and tell him that.

The Browns, boiled down

In this town, we love to analyze football. And we really love to analyze the Browns.

Sometimes I wonder if we, as a fan base, out-think ourselves. We're so thoroughly schooled in the nuances of the sport, in the theory of roster-building, from an early age that we sometimes forget to answer the simple questions first.

We look at the construction of the rebuilt linebacker corps, the lack of depth at wide receiver, the mostly-young secondary, the committee situation developing at running back, the Swiss Army knife that is Josh Cribbs, and we try to mash it all together into some kind of blackboard-filling calculus equation that will determine, beyond a reasonable doubt, the trajectory of the upcoming season.

But sometimes, the most basic questions are the most important. And in the case of this year's Browns, I keep coming back to two main questions that will likely determine the course of the season:

Can the roster stay mostly healthy? Can the Browns get good quarterback play?

Injuries and poor QB play have dogged the Browns since returning to the league 11 years ago. The two most successful seasons since the relaunch, 2002 and 2007, featured a relatively healthy squad and spikes in the performances of Tim Couch, Kelly Holcomb and Derek Anderson.

The seasons in which the team was on its fourth center by opening day? When Charlie Frye looked like he might not even make an Arena Football League roster? The Browns were a league doormat.

You don't need to be scientific about it. Quarterback is the most important position on the field. It's not left tackle. It's not tailback. The quarterback is the field general. Think beyond the passing game to the sum total of what is expected of a quarterback, and you'll realize that if he is bad, the offense is bad, the team doesn't score points and wins are hard to come by. End of story.

There is a great burden on Jake Delhomme and Seneca Wallace to be not just capable passers, but the veteran offensive backbone that the Browns have lacked for most of the past decade.

Injuries are a fact of life in sports, and football and particular. On the pro level, the sport features extremely large and fast men slamming into each other at high speeds. Knees buckle, ligaments rupture, bones break. Every team has a busy medical and training staff.

You simply hope that your team's best players don't suffer serious, season-ending and career-jeopardizing injuries. The Browns haven't had a lot of luck in dodging those types of injuries.

On both fronts, there are reasons to be encouraged, however.

Delhomme is under the microscope for a woeful stretch of football that began with a playoff game in January 2009 and continued throughout the following season, when he threw eight touchdowns and 18 interceptions, paving the way for his release by the Panthers. At the very least, 35-year-old Delhomme has a great deal of incentive to prove that he's not washed up.

Behind him, Wallace's combination of arm strength and leg speed make him useful as a change-of-pace option under center, and if necessary, step in as the starting QB.

During training camp, the Browns had some fairly typical injury problems to deal with. Dave Zastudil is done for the year with a recurring knee injury. D'Qwell Jackson has his second chest muscle injury in as many years. Rookie Montario Hardesty is having knee problems, much like he did for three years in college. But so far, it's nothing that most other NFL teams aren't going through.

The Browns roster is built up to the point that there shouldn't be large-scale questions about the talent level of the team. National scribes are quick to assess the Browns roster as thin on talent. They are thin on elite talent. They don't have a lot of star power. But they do have talent in the form of young prospects and role players. A roster like this could become a team that is greater than the sum of its parts.

To succeed, this Browns team has to assume the role that so many Cleveland teams have to play -- that of the gritty, overachieving underdog. Nobody expects Cleveland to make much of a splash this year. The AFC North is a beast, with three other teams that all, rightfully, have Super Bowl aspirations. The Browns could show a great deal of improvement this year and still end up in last place with little more than a one or two-game improvement over last year's 5-11 mark. The schedule, which also includes dates with the Saints, Patriots and Jets, could simply be that difficult.

But it's also not unrealistic -- fanciful, maybe, but not unrealistic -- to envision a scenario in which the Browns show the backbone and fortitude that they so often haven't exhibited in years past, snag a few surprise wins and end up at 10-6 or 9-7.

It does start with the tone set by Mike Holmgren in the president's chair. It has a lot to do with the personnel decisions made by Tom Heckert, and how Eric Mangini and his staff cultivate the roster handed to them by the front office. It all matters.

But if you can assume the experience of Holmgren and Heckert is bound to make the team better on a foundational level, if you can assume that Jerome Harrison will continue to be fast, Shaun Rogers will continue to be big and Josh Cribbs will continue to be a great playmaker, then there are only a few hinges upon which this season will pivot. There actually isn't a lot standing between 5-11 and typical Cleveland pessimism, and 10-6 with rampant optimism.

Can Delhomme have a bounce-back year in a new setting, and can the starters around him stay off the injured reserve list?

It could be that simple, or it could be that complicated.

Overtime overview

The NFC Championship Game sent the Saints to the Super Bowl for the first time in franchise history. It also had the type of ending that only the NFL can provide:

One team, one drive, one possession, one field goal. The Vikings offense never took the field. From the moment Minnesota lost the overtime coin toss, they were fighting a steep uphill battle. As soon as New Orleans' high powered offense crossed into Minnesota territory on the ensuing drive, a field goal attempt was well within sight. From that point on, the game essentially hinged on the accuracy of Garrett Hartley's kicking leg.

It is true that the Vikings -- and more specifically, Brett Favre -- created their own mess. Favre killed a shot at what could have been a game-winning field goal attempt by hip-shooting the ball straight to Saints defensive back Tracy Porter on an incredibly stupid throw with seven seconds left in regulation.

But that interception doesn't change the fact that the events of the game from that point forward still shine a much-needed light on the NFL's overtime rules.

The NFL's sudden death overtimes rules, which have been in place for the playoffs since the 1940s and in place for regular season games since 1974, essentially takes the overtime format the NHL used prior to 2005 and attempts to fit it to football.

There is a timed period -- a full 15 additional minutes in the case of the NFL and five minutes in the case of the NHL -- in which the game proceeds under regulation-time rules, except the NHL now permits one fewer skater on the ice. The first team to score, wins. If the timed period ends and neither team has scored, the game ends in a tie. In order to remove the anticlimactic tie-game outcome, the NHL instituted a shootout system in 2005 as a fail-safe means of determining a winner. If the overtime period ends in a tie, a series of penalty-style shots determines the game.

A tie is still a possible outcome in an NFL game, though it's rare. The last NFL tie occurred between the Eagles and Bengals in 2008, and before that, between the Falcons and Steelers in 2002. It's so rare, after the '08 tie Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb confessed that he didn't even know an NFL game was allowed to end in a tie.

The argument in favor of the current NFL overtime system says that it has rarely failed to decide games. That's true, but it's also true that football possessions are completely apples and oranges when compared to hockey possessions.

In a hockey overtime period, both teams are likely going to have multiple opportunities to take possession of the puck and create a scoring chance. In football, there is no face-off. There is a coin toss, kickoff, and the receiving team takes the ball and drives it down the field. If the offense is successful and the team's kicker has a strong leg, the team that loses the coin toss will never get a scoring chance. The probability of an win-loss outcome is high, but the system is inherently not fair. Both team battled through 60 grueling minutes to reach overtime, and the outcome can hinge on what side of the coin is facing upward.

In the interest of fairness, the sudden-death format isn't the best fit for a game like football. There are other ways to handle overtime games, methods that can produce definite outcomes while allowing each team to have a reasonable chance to win. Let's take a look at a few of them. Some are more practical, some are a little more creative.

Sudden death -- first team to six points

This method is the one I tend to favor. It takes the current overtime rules and eliminates the "win the coin toss, drive the ball and kick the field goal" scenario, which is the most damning argument against the current NFL overtime setup.

In a nutshell, if you win the coin toss and don't want to give the ball to the other team, you need to score a touchdown. If you kick a field goal, the other team still gets the ball back. If they score a touchdown, they win. If they kick a field goal or fail to score, you get the ball a second time. From there, if you can kick a second field goal, you win.

The setup doesn't completely eliminate the kicker from the game's outcome, but it makes the kicker a less pivotal player. It also encourages teams to drive for the end zone instead of field goal range.

Ultimately, this method ensures that if a team succeeds in preventing the other team from having an overtime possession, it's because they earned it by putting the ball in the end zone. If neither team can get the ball into the end zone, field goals can still determine the outcome, but it would be a more difficult task than under the current rules.

College rules

Sometimes called the "Kansas Plan," this is the method made famous after it was adopted by the NCAA. It's also used in various forms by the Canadian Football League and high schools in states around the U.S.

Essentially, it's a hockey shootout adopted to football. Offenses take possession of the ball at attempt to outscore each other in rounds of drives that usually start deep in the opponent's territory. In NCAA-sanctioned college football, the drives start at the defense's 25-yard line. If your offense is on the field in the top half of the first round and you score a touchdown, the other team has to match your touchdown in the bottom half of the round or you win the game.

If you kick a field goal in the top half of the round, you must keep the other team to a field goal or less in the bottom of the round. If the other team answers your field goal with a touchdown, you lose.

The NCAA alternates which team goes first in each round. After the second overtime round, if a winner has not yet emerged, extra points are ruled out and teams must go for two-point conversions after touchdowns. Interceptions and fumble recoveries can be returned for scores by the defense per NCAA rules, but in high school, turnovers usually result in a dead ball and the end of the possession.

This method of overtime makes for great TV. Every football fan in Ohio remembers Ohio State's thrilling, pressure-packed overtime win against Miami in the 2002 national title game. The only trouble is, if overtime goes four or five rounds, the final score and final statistics can really get thrown out of whack.

What was a tightly-contested 17-17 game in regulation can suddenly sprawl into a 45-38 final in which the second-rated defensive team in the league plummets to ninth based on giving up three or four short-field touchdowns in overtime. The NFL values its stats and rankings, and defensive coordinators around the league probably wouldn't be keen on the idea of an offense-biased overtime that has the potential to kill a defense's reputation.

It's a little different in college ball, where dominant defensive teams are few and far between. But in the NFL, where many teams pride themselves on their defense, this style of overtime has hand grenade potential in league meetings.

Move the kickoff spot up to the 40 yard line

This setup would move the kickoff spot up 10 yards from normal regulation kickoffs, which are booted from the 30 yard line. The idea is to increase touchbacks and regularly pin offenses deep in their own territory, which would presumably make it more difficult for a team to take the opening kickoff and immediately drive into field goal range. Putting the offense on a long field increases the probability of fourth-down punts, and therefore, changes in possession.

Here's the problem: If the team that fields the opening kickoff returns the ball to the 10-yard line and the ensuing drive nets little to no additional yardage, that team would then be forced to punt from deep in their own territory, or even their own end zone. Unless the punter uncorks an 80-yard cannon shot downfield, there is a good chance the other team will take over with favorable field position to -- guess what? -- take the ball, drive into field goal range and win the game.

In a roundabout way, it penalizes the team that wins the overtime coin flip. And in the event that the team receiving the opening kickoff is able to pick up a couple of first downs but the drive stalls, the other team is likely taking possession deep in their own territory, setting up a see-saw of drives beginning deep in the offense's territory, and reducing the chances of a scoring opportunity.

The object is to make overtime fair, not kill all scoring chances.

Five-minute periods, with rotating kickoffs

This is sort of a modified shootout format. The clock doesn't stop, so team that wins the opening kickoff doesn't have a lot of time to drive the ball into field goal range. They're basically forced into a hurry-up offense from the outset. If either team fails to score in five minutes, the clock expires and the team that received the first-overtime kickoff must then kick the ball off to the other team at the outset of the next overtime period.

It increases the chance of each team having at least one possession, but this is also a tiring way to run overtime. It's basically a series of five-minute sprints until someone scores. By the fourth or fifth overtime, offenses and defenses would begin to succumb to fatigue, increasing the possibility of injuries and, in hot weather, dehydration.

Full overtime period, followed by a field goal "shootout"

Want to put the game at the feet of the kickers? Make them an absolute last resort. Play a full 15-minute overtime period without sudden-death rules. If the game is still tied at the end of that period, do what the NHL does and decide the game with a shootout. Or in this case, a "kick-out."

Pick a field goal distance that is makeable for NFL kickers, but not a slam dunk. Say 45 yards. Each team lines up, 11-on-11, and attempts one field goal. If both kickers make or miss their attempts, the shootout goes to a second round with the order alternated. If both kickers make their attempts, the line of scrimmage is pushed back a couple of yards, requiring a 47 or 48 yard attempt. If the game still isn't decided, a couple additional yards of distance, and a 50-yard attempt. And so on, until a winner is determined.

If both kickers miss in a given round, the distance stays the same for the next round.

By the time the distance reaches 55 yards and beyond, a missed field goal is only a matter of time.

If you don't like putting kickers in such a powerful position, this isn't the overtime setup for you. But then again, how is it really different from the current overtime rules?

A delicate situation

It would be so easy for Josh Cribbs to look like the good guy in his contract dispute with the Browns.

He has been told to play the role of the good soldier on numerous occasions. The ongoing message from Browns management -- in all its changing forms -- to Cribbs has been "Do what is asked of you, and we'll take care of you when the time is right."

Cribbs has done all that and one heck of a lot more, last month virtually dragging the Browns to their first win over the Steelers in six years. With an NFL record eight career kickoff returns for touchdowns to go with punt return scores and a mastery of the kick coverage game, Cribbs has already cemented himself as quite possibly the greatest non-kicking special teams player the league has ever seen. His playmaking ability out of the "wildcat" formation on offense is an extension of the quick moves and superb field vision he displays on kick returns.

He is, quite simply, a unique talent. You can certainly make a case that within the past half-decade, Cribbs and left tackle Joe Thomas have already staked their claim as the best Browns players of the expansion era.

Now, Cribbs wants his salary to match his accomplishments and abilities. No harm there. Three years ago, he signed a six-year, $6.8 million deal that included a $2 million signing bonus. For a young player who was signed as an undrafted free agent from Kent State in 2005, that was big money and big-time security.

But this year, with Cribbs a certifiable NFL star, the $600,000 he made this year looks relatively paltry. He wants starting receiver money, like Chicago's Devin Hester -- one of the few return men in the league who is in Cribbs' class. Hester signed a four-year deal in 2008 worth up to $40 million. But Hester has been exactly that this year -- a starting receiver. Cribbs flopped as a starting receiver, and outside of kick returns and coverages, is relegated to taking direct snaps a few times a game.

Cribbs began to make waves over his contract in the second half of the season. He put a self-dictated end-of-season deadline on getting a new deal. That didn't happen. Then Mike Holmgren officially began his job as the new team president, and Cribbs knew the man he needed to talk to was in town.

One of the first acts of the Holmgren regime was indeed to offer Cribbs a new contract. But it wasn't anything close to what Cribbs and his agents had in mind. The Browns reportedly put an offer on the table worth about $1.4 million per year.

Better than $600,000? Certainly. The type of money that a game-changer like Cribbs should be making in the NFL? Probably not.

Which is why Cribbs could have very easily spun this situation 100 percent in his favor within the court of public opinion.

It was a lowball offer. It was insulting, as Cribbs' agents declared. It reeked of a new management regime hastily shoving an offer across the table to see if Cribbs would bite. If the Browns were going to make that kind of an offer to a guy who has been one of the team's very few consistent high performers for the last five years, they probably needed to just table discussions until Holmgren could hire his general manager and the club's big thinkers could come up with a better plan.

But the only person who might be handling this worse than any member of the Browns is Cribbs himself.

If he wants to threaten a holdout, fine. If he wants to threaten to demand a trade, fine. Even Hester did that prior to signing his new deal. Unfortunately, in the NFL's contract negotiating system, which is decidedly antiquated in a lot of ways, raising a fuss is the only way a player can generate any leverage.

But maybe the fuss should be saved primarily for team management. Instead, Cribbs is spewing histrionics via his Twitter account and any microphone that can pick up his voice. This past week, when he showed up at the team's Berea headquarters to clear out his locker for the season, he told the assembled media that he believe he had played his last game for the Browns. He told the media that he said his permanent good-byes to the team training and medical staff.

On Twitter, his comments have included "I don't believe I made the to do list for the team in 2010" and "I just hate being taken advantage of ... What else is new?"

There is a lot of water left to tread between where the Cribbs-Browns negotiations sit, and the irreconcilable differences that could lead to a trade. Chances are still very good that he and the Browns will be able to find a common ground and Cribbs will be in uniform, if not for organized team activities this spring, then for training camp in July. This isn't even close to over.

Which is why Cribbs declaring his relationship with the Browns over and done with, and doing it publicly time and again, seems a little less like hardball negotiating tactics and more like a petulant grade-schooler storming up to his room and slamming the door.

Cribbs is trying to get the fans and the media opinion columnists to come down hard on the Browns under the threat of having to watch him play for another team. But facts are facts. Cribbs is under contract, he has no legal way under NFL rules to force the Browns' hand into giving him a raise or trading him, and Holmgren hasn't yet hired a GM. The GM would logically be the executive who would handle contracts and salaries, not Holmgren.

Maybe there was no good way out of this for the Browns. Maybe if they tell Cribbs to sit tight a little while longer while Holmgren hires a GM and pieces together his management team, Cribbs gets impatient and we arrive at the same Tweets and media spout-offs that have occurred this past week.

But after watching the Browns disgracefully lowball Cribbs, and then watch Cribbs throw a multimedia temper tantrum, I'm beginning to think stall tactics are the approach Holmgren should have used.

The Browns' front office, under construction yet again, is apparently in no shape to carry forth high-pressure contract negotiations at the moment. So they shouldn't have tried.

And for Cribbs, a simple "no" followed by a simple, privately-delivered "I'm not coming back here without a new deal" would have sufficed. Act like the experienced veteran you want your salary to reflect. Not like a sniveling rookie being told to run laps for the first time.

Weighing the options

By the time you read this, you may already know Eric Mangini's fate as Browns coach. The situations is fluid, and changeable by the hour.

By as the hours have gone by this week, the one constant has been uncertainty. New team president Mike Holmgren appeared in front of the cameras at his first official Browns press conference on Tuesday, essentially saying that he'd like to have a decision on Mangini's future soon. But not too soon. It could be by the end of the week. Or maybe he extends his self-imposed deadline for more consultation, maybe a subsequent meeting with the team's first-year (and possibly last-year) coach.

As we slog through the murky swamp that has become Mangini's Browns future, we can't help but wonder whether even Holmgren himself was anticipating this touch-and-go decision process.

When Holmgren agreed to take the reins of the franchise a couple of weeks ago, he might have had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to proceed. Which is to say, his own coach and his own general manager. The type of organization Holmgren wanted to build here -- rooted in his Bill Walsh-based upbringing as a coach -- is in stark contrast to Mangini's background, heavily influenced by Bill Belichick, who is a branch on the Bill Parcells coaching tree.

On top of that, the results produced by Mangini offered no reference that favored keeping his job. When Holmgren took the job on Dec. 21, the Browns had just won back to back games against Pittsburgh and Kansas City, but they still stood at a bottom-feeding 3-11.

Heroic performances by Josh Cribbs and Jerome Harrison aside, the decision for Holmgren was as easy as a snap of the fingers. Season ends, Mangini gets his walking papers, and Holmgren sets about finding a coach and GM who have the same football philosophies that he does.

But we're talking about the Browns here. It can never be that simple. Something with tentacles always comes along and inks the water.

The ink cloud came in the form of the season's final two games, against Oakland and Jacksonville. The Browns won both games. You could even say they won both games convincingly. The Raiders definitely aided their own demise with serial personal fouls in a 23-9 Browns win, but it was still a game the Browns pretty much controlled start to finish.

In the season finale last Sunday, the Browns jumped out to an early 10-point lead over the Jaguars and seemed to control the flow and pace of the game for 60 minutes. The final score read 23-17, but it wasn't quite that close.

In short, taken purely within its own context, December 2009/January 2010 was the Browns' most successful month of the expansion era. Four wins, one loss, and that loss to San Diego way back on December 6 contained a furious fourth-quarter rally that fell short. The month contained their first four-game winning streak since 1994 and their first four-game streak of 160-plus rushing yards since 1968.

Production appeared from all directions. The accomplishments of Cribbs and Harrison are well-documented, but the Browns also received noteworthy contributions from lesser-known names on defense, like Matt Roth, Marcus Benard and Ahtyba Rubin. Joe Thomas and Alex Mack continues to grow as current and future stalwarts of the offensive line. Lawrence Vickers played a key role in helping Harrison roll up a series of 100-yard rushing efforts.

The Browns came together in the season's final month. You can say it was because of Mangini or in spite of Mangini, but the key fact is that Mangini was presiding, and it has forced Holmgren to soften his stance on how he wants to move forward.

Holmgren has to consider both the pluses and minuses of keeping Mangini on board, even for just next season, with no guarantee afterward. When laying everything out on the table, here are the factors Holmgren has to be looking at:

Why Mangini should stay:

1. Maybe Mangini was right all along

Maybe it is a process. Maybe it took almost a year for Mangini to instill his own brand of discipline on a resistant roster. Maybe it took that long to weed out some of the dissenters and negative influences like Braylon Edwards, Kellen Winslow and Jamal Lewis. Maybe going from Club Romeo to something resembling a real NFL team was actually this difficult.

If that is the case, it would be a setback to stomp the sprouts growing from the seeds Mangini has sowed in the past year.

2. Mangini grew as a coach this year

At times, it's easy to forget that Mangini is only 38 -- a tyke by NFL head coaching standards. He's still growing in his job as much as his players are. And he underwent a great deal of growth this season.

Mangini came to town like a tornado. Fresh off the ego rush of being given total control of the football operations by Randy Lerner, Mangini quickly became enthralled with the idea of himself as an authoritarian ruler. His disciplinary tactics were heavy-handed (who can forget the story from the preseason, when Mangini reportedly fined a player $1,700 for not paying for a bottle of hotel water?). He was aloof toward the media. He grated on players. Jamal Lewis criticized Mangini for allowing too much contact in practice. Rookie running back James Davis was lost for the season due to a shoulder injury on a post-practice contact drill that was reportedly approved by Mangini.

But Mangini's attitude seemed to soften considerably when GM George Kokinis parted ways with the team in November. Kokinis alleged that Mangini went over his head on personnel decisions, including the Edwards trade, effectively undermining Kokinis' decision-making power over the roster. Kokinis, a longtime associate of Mangini going back to their days as interns with the Belichick Browns, was escorted from headquarters in Berea, which tends to make you think he had some choice words for Mangini on his way out the door.

With his GM gone, the losses piling up and speculation rampant that he was doomed to be a one-and-done coach in Cleveland, Mangini seemed to shift from a dictator with a grand scheme to a coach just trying to win each Sunday and save his job.

Perhaps, over the course of the season, Mangini went from being the team, to being a team player. If that's the case, the idea of keeping him around for another year becomes a lot more palatable.

3. Rob Ryan

In the end, this probably won't be anything that Holmgren considers when deciding Mangini's fate, but hiring Ryan as defensive coordinator is easily the best personnel move Mangini has made. Ryan looks like a cross between Santa Claus and a drifter, but he's inherited the defensive smarts of his dad, Buddy Ryan. And he's a passionate leader, which players latch onto. Ryan has taken a defense of mostly no-names and gotten them to play over their heads on more than one occasion this season -- most notably in the win over the Steelers.

The stats might not bear it out, but Ryan is an excellent defensive coordinator. Unfortunately, if Mangini goes, Ryan probably goes, too.

Why Mangini should go:

1. Differences in team-building and coaching philosophies

Obviously, the most glaring reason why Holmgren and Mangini can't coexist. You don't hire a French instructor to teach a Spanish class. And that's the essential difference between Holmgren's football background and Mangini's. It's no one's fault. It's just a fact of life in this situation.

2. Should the last month really make up for the previous 11?

The ledger still says Mangini did a lot more wrong than right over the past year. The draft netted Alex Mack and Mohamed Massaquoi, who both look like keepers. But for a team that was slated to pick fifth overall, Mangini's trade-down draft strategy looks like an overall goof. David Veikune, a non-contributor taken in the second round, is the poster boy for Mangini's draft-day ineptitude.

You could make a case that Mangini bungled the quarterback competition in training camp, waiting way too long to name a starter. And there is no question that there was a major communication breakdown between he and Kokinis over personnel authority, which led to the breakdown of their relationship.

3. Star search

Mangini doesn't like to deal with the egos of star players. He'd rather build a team of role players that is greater than the sum of its parts. Holmgren's background includes the likes of Joe Montana, Steve Young and Brett Favre. He wants stars, particularly at quarterback.

Asking Mangini, who can come off as aloof at times and has well-documented shortcomings as a communicator, to oversee an egotistical starting quarterback who needs equal parts butt-kicking and shoulder-massaging, might not be the best idea. As we saw in '08, when Favre and Mangini attempted to coexist with the Jets. It was the last season for both QB and coach in that organization.

The new czar in town

Mike Holmgren is coming to town. Monday, after nearly a week of meetings and suspense, he accepted the role of Browns team president.

If you want a team czar with football chops, a guy who has won everywhere he's gone, a guy who was a leader -- not a support staffer -- on a Super Bowl winner, Holmgren is your man.

That's good news. But that's not the best news. The best news is who Holmgren is slated to replace as team president.

No, not Mike Keenan. He's the team's main business operations guy, and will transition to the role of chief financial officer.

I'm talking about Randy Lerner.

For way too long now, Lerner has been the Browns' football czar by default. As the team's owner, it has ultimately been up to him to staff the president's, general manager's and head coach's positions. In an organizational setup than began with the hiring of John Collins in 2004 and survived through inertia to this year, the team president was not technically part of the football chain of command, instead leaning more toward the business side of the operation. That removed another layer of authority between the owner and the general manager.

As a result, Lerner's inadequate administrative thumbprint has been all-too-visible on the Browns for the past seven years. From Collins to Phil Savage to Romeo Crennel to Eric Mangini, Lerner kept hiring decision-makers who were untested in, and ultimately proven to be ill-suited for, their job descriptions.

Every Lerner football hire has been a step-up hire. Savage from scouting director to GM. Crennel from coordinator to coach. Mangini was the coach who would be czar, but he turned out to be a very weak czar, so the job fell back to Lerner.

Holmgren is a step-up hire, too. He's never been a team president. But his history in spotlight positions -- and success in those spotlight positions -- suggests that this hire will be a little different.

As team president, Holmgren's job is going to primarily consist of looking at things from the business-cliche "30,000 foot level." His job will be one of vision, team-building and delegation. At first, he might be more involved in the relative minutiae of deciding who should occupy the 53rd spot on the roster, who makes the final cut in training camp and how to best utilize Josh Cribbs. But over time, he'll have his GM and coach making those judgment calls.

Ultimately, Holmgren is in place to eradicate a firmly-entrenched losing culture by installing a system of leadership based on structure, accountability, discipline, and a cultivating a winning attitude from the GM's chair down to the practice squad.

It's something the Browns haven't had in a long, long time: an umbrella-type leader who rules over the Berea facility with an authoritative air. Someone to build standards and a strategic plan for the future, and make sure everyone is living up to that plan. If someone isn't, there are consequences ready and waiting.

With Lerner splitting his time and attention among Cleveland, Long Island and Birmingham, England, and not really having a dominant personality to begin with, he is ill-suited for the role of organizational godfather. Savage survived a coup d'etat of sorts from Collins, leaving him as the organizational go-to guy, but it was evident over the ensuing years that A) his people skills were lacking and B) he was mostly at home in a rental car, jaunting between college towns to scout next year's draft class.

Mangini also has issues with his people skills, and at 38 and with just three previous years as a head coach under his belt, was not experienced enough for the task of singlehandedly running an NFL franchise.

The result was what you'd expect when no one is adequately steering the ship. The often-mentioned "rudderless suck" that has defined the Browns for the past 10 years.

That's the real value of Holmgren. It's not really in his ability to coach X's and O's -- unless he at some point names himself coach, in what would be a pretty blatant mistake on Holmgren's part.

It's not his ability to run a draft-day war room, his roster management, his ability to make trades and free agent signings, or his ability to groom Brady Quinn as an NFL passer.

Holmgren's real value to the Browns, the area in which he needs to succeed above all others, is in finding guys to do all of the above. And then finding guys to replace those guys when they are inevitably hired away by other teams, because you've become one of the league's model franchises and everyone is trying to emulate you.

That's how teams like the Patriots, Colts and Steelers leave the rest of us scratching our heads at their year-in, year-out success, with their ability to take seemingly no-name players and coaches and turn them into hot properties.

It's all in the organizing of the organization. And organization is what the Browns have lacked since returning to the league.

With Holmgren on board, we can now envision a world where Lerner can ping-pong from Long Island to Cleveland to England and back, make sporadic appearances in Berea and at games, hide from the media's microphones, enjoy an afternoon brandy, whatever he wants. And no Browns fan needs to care because Lerner's involvement in the football operations extends only to his writing hand, which he uses to sign the checks.

I don't know about you, but that's a world I can't wait to live in.

A win that's worth the price

At this point in the Browns' seasons, wins are the enemy.

Wins drop you in the draft order. Wins keep Eric Mangini employed, and might even convince Randy Lerner that it's OK to move forward with Mangini as the primary personnel decision-maker.

When you're 1-11 and four games away from euthanizing, burying and forgetting about this season, wins do nothing but provide false hope and impede long-term progress.

On Thursday, the Browns won. They likely did most or all of the above -- deprive themselves of the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 draft, secure Mangini as the coach at the outset of next season, possibly cause Lerner to hold off on hiring a general manager, and made the fans hope, however so slightly, that maybe some faint pulses of light are filtering through the fog that has entrapped this franchise for way too long.

Against 30 other teams, it would have been a meaningless win that did exactly what the evidence says it did -- more harm than good.

But this wasn't the other 30 teams. This was the Pittsburgh Steelers.

If you've lived on either side of this border rivalry between two cities separated by less than 150 miles of interstate, you know the history. Recently, it hasn't been much of a rivalry. The Browns had lost 12 straight to the Steelers, the last win coming at Heinz Field on Oct. 5, 2003.

How long ago was that? The following month, Michigan beat Ohio State 35-21 for their last victory over the Buckeyes to date. That's how long ago.

The Browns hadn't beaten the Steelers in Cleveland since Sept. 17, 2000. How long ago was that? A rookie from Penn State named Courtney Brown was the star of the game with three sacks.

There were excruciating near misses over that span. A 16-13 overtime loss in 2002, when the Steelers had a would-be game winning field goal blocked, but the ball stayed behind the line of scrimmage, allowing for a recovery and successful re-kick. A wild card playoff game at the end of that season in which the Browns held a 17-point second half lead, only to let it evaporate and lose, 36-33. A last-minute Willie Parker touchdown in 2006. A missed Phil Dawson 52-yard field goal attempt in 2007, which would have tied the game as time expired.

There were blowouts, too. Since returning to the NFL in 1999, the Browns have been blanked by the Steelers four times, by scores of 43-0, 22-0, 41-0 and 31-0. They held the Browns to seven points or less another five times.

But the biggest discrepancy of all: over that span, the Steelers have won two Super Bowls. The Browns have managed two winning seasons.

It's been a long, strange, crazy, heartbreaking, confusing, frustrating road for the Browns these past 10 years. The twice-yearly beatings at the hands of the Steelers, the declarations of the rivalry's death by members of the local and national media, all of it just served as the most pointed reminder that the Browns have fallen from glory, and hard. The one-time New York Yankees of professional football had become the Los Angeles Clippers -- a team with losing in its DNA.

Better talent, in the form of star players -- the kind a team is supposed to get when it drafts first overall -- is ultimately the only way the Browns are going to amass the bricks and mortar needed to turn their fortunes around. But that's not all of it. You need talent to win. But you also need to have your heart in it. You have to be invested physically, mentally and emotionally in wanting to win.

Thursday night, we saw for the first time in a long, long time a Browns team that cared. Really, truly cared. Thursday night, we saw a maligned coaching staff leading an offense and defense that was undermanned and undertalented, but still playing like this game meant something. Everyone from one-man wrecking crew Josh Cribbs to unheralded rookies like Marcus Benard started playing like they were sick and tired of losing to the Steelers and finally wanted to do something about it.

The Steelers, for their part, were fighting for their playoff lives. They had lost four straight and had fallen to 6-6 heading into the game. Ben Roethlisberger was a career 10-0 against the Browns. Maybe they viewed this game as a free throw, a chance to relax, get an easy win against a devastated team and right their ship. Or maybe the Steelers really can't bail water fast enough to prevent their ship from sinking.

Whatever happened, the Steelers looked completely frazzled by the different looks that defensive coordinator Rob Ryan threw at them. Roethlisberger was sacked eight times. Rashard Mendenhall was Pittsburgh's leading rusher, amassing a pedestrian 53 yards on 16 carries.

Still, through all of it, Pittsburgh hung tough and remained within a touchdown in the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter is when Roethlisberger, like all great quarterbacks, becomes an escape artist and pulls drive-saving completions out of his nether regions.

Thursday, it wasn't there. Roethlisberger moved the ball, but looked utterly mediocre in doing so. The deadly efficiency with which he normally marches his team on game-winning and game-tying drives was absent. Needing a touchdown to tie with time running thin, he didn't penetrate any further than the Cleveland 39 yard line before David Bowens knocked away a 4th-and-6 pass, essentially sealing the game.

When Bowens knocked the ball away and began celebrating, I knew for certain that it was right for the Browns to win this game. They needed it. They worked for it. They deserved it.

We, as a city of football fans, deserved it.

After the game, Phil Dawson -- the only Brown to experience every loss to the Steelers since 1999 -- was found with moist eyes in the locker room. He had pointed to the fans in the Dawg Pound after the game, the ones who were sticking around in the open lakefront freezer, steaming the wind-chilled sub-zero air with their trademark barking.

"This was for them," Dawson told The Plain Dealer. "I just wanted to let them know how much I appreciate them. It was a moment like this that you want to share with them. I hope the people in Cleveland enjoy this one because they really deserve it."

High emotion at the end of a miserably cold game near the end of a lost season. Tears of joy after finally breaking the shackles of submission. Dawg Pound fans returning the sound and fury of the late '80s to the shores of Lake Erie, for at least one night.

That's why this is still a rivalry. That's why Thursday night was worth a couple of spots in the draft. That's why this game means more.

Failing at failing

What the Browns did in losing to Detroit 38-37 on Sunday was pretty remarkable.

Yeah, they built a 24-3 lead after weeks and weeks of historic offensive ineptitude. Yeah, they entirely blew said lead. Yeah, they rallied to take a 37-31 lead into the final minutes. And, yeah, they had the game won until Hank Poteat's pass interference call turned a game-ending Brodney Pool interception into first-and-goal with no time on the clock.

And, I might add, the ensuing Browns timeout gave Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford a chance to recover from an injury suffered when he was leveled on the final timed play. Stafford dragged himself back into the game and threw the winning touchdown pass to Brandon Pettigrew with literally triple zeroes on the game clock.

But none of that is as amazing as the fact that I felt absolutely nothing afterward. Don't misinterpret that. I didn't feel numb. I felt nothing as in, I changed the channel and busied myself doing other things.

Leave it to the Browns: They don't even know how to frustrate me properly anymore.

Sunday's game had all the makings of a thriller. No lead was safe. Stafford and Brady Quinn were slinging the ball like Dan Marino and Johnny Unitas. Stafford finished with 422 yards passing and a 112.7 QB rating. Quinn finished with 304 yards and a 133.1 rating. Neither team relied much on their ground games. Jamal Lewis was the contest's leading rusher, with 75 yards on 24 carries.

Three touchdown passes in the game covered 40 yards or more: Quinn touchdowns to Mohamed Massaquoi (59 yards) and Chansi Stuckey (40 yards), and a Stafford hookup with Calvin Johnson (75 yards).

And that's before you even get to the screwball ending -- a Browns speciality since returning to the league in 1999.

This game was the direct descendent of the '90s run-and-shoot fad. Of Air Coryell and the American Football League. Observed through the lens of a single football game between two teams, this was everything that makes you want to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and watch football. You don't even have to be a fan of either of the teams playing to enjoy a high-scoring shootout. It's great TV, and probably even better in person.

But it was impossible to take Sunday's game without context. And the context is what made this game about as compelling as a marathon research session involving dusty encyclopedia volumes at the local library.

Both teams were 1-8 heading into play. They were bottom feeders at the season's outset, and have actually been worse than advertised. They were consigned to the trash heap a while back. The Lions, who play indoors at climate-controlled Ford Field, only drew a crowd of 43,000, microscopic by NFL standards. The lack of a sellout lowered a blackout on more than half of the state of Michigan, and most of northwest Ohio.

If anything, this game should have been shown outside of Michigan and Ohio, in markets that just wanted to see an entertaining football game. Instead, most of the country got a far-more-meaningful but lower-scoring wrestling match between Indianapolis and Baltimore, won by the still-unbeaten Colts 17-15.

In Ohio, and I can only guess in Michigan as well, this game was killed, gutted and cooked before it even arrived in the kitchen. From the standpoint of a Browns fan, it really didn't matter what Quinn did today against a terrible Lions pass defense. It didn't matter what receiver stepped up. It didn't matter if Lewis found the fountain of youth for one more game. It didn't matter if Kamerion Wimbley looked like an actual pass rusher for one game.

It just didn't matter because the Browns are toast this year, there is a strong possibility that they're headed for another rebuild, that the coaching staff is going to be replaced and the roster once again gutted by a different decision-maker with different philosophies on building a team.

Essentially, this was an exhibition game that occurred about three months too late. There is no way this game could serve as a building block. There is no way this game could serve as any pinpoint of light, foretelling of better days ahead. Not against the post-Matt Millen Lions, a team that is 2-8 and already two wins better than last season.

Actually, this wasn't an exhibition game. Exhibition games generally accomplish something, even if it's just paring down the roster. You find out something about your team -- or at least your players -- during the preseason.

This game was an old-timers reunion game played by 20- and 30-somethings. The Browns and Lions should have been wearing sneakers on the feet and flags on their belts. And what happens at the end of an old timers' game? You grab a beer and reminisce about the glory days. Really, as a Browns fan, what else is there right now?

The Browns didn't just fail on Sunday. They failed their fail. They took a game that should have had some meaning, a game with an ending that should have made me grumpy for the rest of Sunday and a good portion of Monday, and turned it into nothing with their performance in the previous nine games.

Here is the message the Browns' big thinkers need to hear: Want to get fans up for these kinds of games? Play them in September, when the season still has a pulse, before your radio broadcasts become background static for home winterization projects. Then use the momentum from those games -- some of which you'll hopefully win -- to carry the team into fan-drawing, late-season contests that have this foreign substance on them called "playoff implications."

As of now, I really don't care if Quinn outduels Dan Fouts circa 1981. It's way too little, way too late to make me care.

Sending a message

Next Monday, the eyes of the football-watching world will somehow find their way to Cleveland via ESPN. That's because, somehow, the Browns found their way onto the Monday Night Football schedule for 2009.

It's a divisional game versus the Ravens, an AFC Championship Game participant a year ago. Outside of Baltimore, Cleveland and the football junkie section of the U.S. population -- the kind that would watch the Rams play the Lions, even with no rooting interest, just because it's football -- there is no reason for anybody to build their evening around this game.

The Ravens, trendy Super Bowl picks at the outset of the season, are kind of sputtering along at 4-4. They'll be coming into town fresh off a 10-point loss to the suddenly-successful Bengals, stuck in the wild card chase pack behind Pittsburgh and San Diego.

The Browns are 1-7, and needed a botched kick return to even get the "1" on their record. They haven't even been competitive in six of their seven losses.

When these two teams met in Week 3, the game was so comically lopsided that Brady Quinn was benched for Derek Anderson halfway through. Anderson injected maybe half a quarter of life into a stone-dead Browns offense, but the Ravens still cruised to a 34-3 win.

It's a game ESPN would probably like to hand back to CBS for Sunday airing. The Browns would probably just as soon skip out on the national publicity right now, too. A 27-point pounding is bad enough on a regional Sunday broadcast. A 27-point pounding in front of the nation -- an apathetic nation, granted, but still all 50 states -- is exponentially worse.

It is against this backdrop of an underachieving football team playing a bottom feeder on the NFL's biggest weekly stage that an enterprising Browns fan would like those of you unlucky enough to have tickets to tell Randy Lerner, and the nation, how you really feel about the state of your team.

"Dawg Pound Mike" Randall, one of the more visible Browns fans (you can tell it's him by the giant dog bone he wears on his head), along with fellow Browns fan Tony Schafer, want everyone in attendance to refrain from entering the seating bowl prior to kickoff. Just long enough to let ESPN begin their broadcast and present their establishing stadium shots with no one in the stands.

It seems the primary objective of Randall and Schafer is to create more accountability on the part of Lerner and the front office. He wants Lerner to address the fans publicly and take his verbal lumps for the sorry state of the Browns organization.

Randall and Schafer received several thousand e-mails from other fans supporting their stance and demanding more accountability out of Lerner and the team's football decision-makers. They presented some of the e-mails to Lerner during a meeting last week, The Plain Dealer reported.

If Randall and Schafer want to lead a demonstration, fine. Public demonstrating has been an integral part of the American experience ever since a few guys threw crates of tea into Boston Harbor. But if Randall and his crew want real change and real accountability, a delayed mass sit-down in front of a disinterested nation isn't the way to do it.

Why? A few points:

1. You're not telling Lerner anything he doesn't already know.

The team is awful. The fans are upset. We demand answers. We want the responsible feet held to the fire for this mess. Lerner knows this.

It's not like he's going to see an semi-empty stadium, possibly receive an inbox full of hate-mail, and suddenly have a grand epiphany in which he finally realizes that the team is awful, the fans are angry and he'd better do something about it.

Lerner knows the state of the team. The trouble is, his attempts to change the team's fortunes have gone only slightly better than the Hindenburg's attempt to land at a windy airfield in Lakehurst, N.J. in 1937.

In other words, don't mistake incompetence for inattentiveness. Lerner isn't failing as an NFL owner because he's not listening to the fans' pleas for change. He's failing as an NFL owner because his administrative decisions have been terrible.

2. Fan protests, as a general rule, don't improve team performance.

Orioles fans staged a walkout from a game at Camden Yards in 2006. Pirates fans tried the same tactic with a planned walkout in 2007. Management of those teams obviously heard their fans loud and clear. The Orioles just finished a last-place 64-98 season. The Pirates just finished a last-place 62-99 campaign. Both protests have been long forgotten by the baseball-watching public.

Voice your frustration all you want. Just don't expect the management of your favorite, struggling team to suddenly turn over a new leaf. Or in the case of the Pirates, find the money to compete with the big-market bullies.

3. The nature of the protest seems flawed.

The primary problem I see with a delayed sit-down is Randall, Schafer and their backers are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. To enter the stadium and hang out on the concourse until kickoff is kind of like trying to send McDonald's a message by continuing to eat there, but only using the drive-through instead of walking through the restaurant door. In the end, you're still plunking your money down and shoveling their food into your esophagus.

The walk-in protest has drawn enough national attention that ESPN and the people around the nation who do tune in will know why the stands are next to empty at kickoff, if this protest indeed is a success. So in that sense, it will draw attention. But there will be other establishing shots over the course of the game, other blimp shots, other pans of the crowd. It seems like it wouldn't make a very strong statement if the opening shots show empty stands and the halftime shots show a raucous, supportive crowd.

You want to support the players, even if you're angry at management. You also paid a lot of money for those seats that get you on TV. I get that. But the net result might be a wishy-washy protest that generates little to none of the desired effect -- which is apparently to make a lasting statement about the fans' displeasure with the state of their team. You're going to have a heck of a time making that kind of impression if you're still in attendance and spending your money on concessions and merchandise.

4. With that in mind, there is one sure way to make your voice heard.

As a fan, what is the one variable you control in all of this? What is the one foolproof way you can let Browns management know you're unhappy with their job performance?

You might be sitting on it right now. It's called your wallet.

If you aren't happy with how Randy Lerner is running the Browns, answer with apathy. How do you do that? You don't buy tickets. You don't purchase or renew your season ticket plans. You don't buy the gear, you don't buy concessions, you don't go out of your way to watch the team on Sundays.

You let the team play in front of dwindling crowds with sagging TV ratings. You send NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell unmistakable signs that the bungling of Lerner and his minions is wilting what has historically been one of the NFL's strongest fan bases.

You, as a lone fan, can't put the screws to Lerner. But as a unified force of disposable income-spending football fans, you can send a message to the guy who can put the screws to Lerner. The one main guy who outranks Lerner in the NFL hierarchy. The one guy who can, if necessary, pressure Lerner into selling the team.

If you're among those who are going to join Dawg Pound Mike in playing to the cameras next Monday, have fun with it. Just don't expect it to make Lerner jump out of his chair or make Eric Mangini sweat bullets.

The real protest that fans can initiate is much quieter. It's the sound of cash registers not ringing and silent televisions on Sunday afternoons.