2013-14 Cavs: The wild cards

“What if?”

It’s the most Cleveland of questions. The Indians liked it so much they turned it into their advertising slogan for several years. But this year’s Cavaliers team might have every right to snatch that slogan for themselves.

Perhaps no team in the NBA presently has a bigger factor of variables than the Cavs. We know the Heat, barring a catastrophic injury to LeBron James, are going to be the league’s best team. We’re almost certain the 76ers are going to be the league’s worst team, fronting the Andrew Wiggins lottery derby in 2014.

But the Cavs? They could fall just about anywhere in between.

What if Kyrie Irving takes the next step to superstardom? What if injuries limit him to fewer than 65 games again?

What if Andrew Bynum recovers to his 2011-12 form, when he had the best statistical season of his career? What if his knees can’t keep him on the floor?

What if Andy Varejao once again flourishes in Mike Brown’s defense? What if he keeps adding lines to his rapidly-lengthening injury history?

What if Dion Waiters really is Joe Dumars to Kyrie’s Isiah Thomas? What if he’s a chronic shot-chucker who consistently sabotages offensive possessions, and he never gets any better?

What if Tristan Thompson’s right-handed shot doesn’t work? What if it does? What if Anthony Bennett’s recently-revealed sleep apnea and asthma caps his conditioning level, relegating him to a part-time role? What if Jarrett Jack starts to play like a 30-something? What if his veteran leadership is exactly what the doctor ordered? What if small forward is a black hole of non-productive suck all season long? What if Alonzo Gee really can become Cleveland’s version of Bruce Bowen?

And what if Brown’s offensive acumen hasn’t improved since he last patrolled the sideline for the Cavs in 2010?

If the majority of those questions have positive answers, the Cavs could win upwards of 50 games and find themselves in the battle for a middle playoff seed in April. If the majority of those answers are bad news, the Cavs could be a 30-win team in the lottery hunt for the fourth straight year.

With the Cavs season set to tip off Wednesday night against the Brooklyn Nets at The Q, this is a closer look at what we know about the 2013-14 Cavs:

Starters

PG Kyrie Irving: When the media starts talking about Kyrie needing to make the third-year leap, it’s the height of praise. LeBron made the third-year leap in 2006 and took the Cavs to a hard-fought, second round exit against the Pistons in his first playoff appearance. Kevin Durant made the third-year leap for Oklahoma City in 2010. Chris Paul is a member of the third-year leap club. Now Kyrie has to do the same.

Kyrie has the goods to put himself on the outskirts of the MVP conversation in his third year. He’s not unseating LeBron and Durant just yet, but he could make his presence felt. He has arguably the best handle in the league, a reliable outside shot and a knack for making incredible finishes in traffic. And if the preseason is any indication, he’s already paying more attention to defense.

The one caveat with Kyrie is his body. Brittle bones and joints have already cost him significant chunks of his lone college season at Duke, and his first two NBA seasons. The injuries have been of a freak nature – nothing chronic or degenerative – but missed games are missed games. He has to stay on the floor for at least 70 games this year if the Cavs are to make significant progress.

SG Dion Waiters: His offensive talent is undeniable. Despite being a controversial No. 4 pick in 2012, he finished second among rookies in scoring last year. The problem with Waiters is harnessing that talent.

Waiters doesn’t have the best basketball instincts. He tends to hoist up the kind of jump shots that wreck possessions. But he appears willing to learn, and Brown is willing to teach. If Waiters can master playing in the flow of an offense, he could blossom into an 18-19 PPG scorer with a significantly elevated field goal percentage. If not, he’s going to become nary more than a poor man’s Stephon Marbury.

SF Earl Clark/Alonzo Gee: The mere fact that there’s a slash in the name doesn’t bode well for the position. Clark and Gee are interchangeable parts at this point. Both have some length that can help with perimeter defense – not that either of them are going to earn a spot on the NBA All-Defensive Team. Neither brings much in the way of offense.

The popular theory, of course, is that whoever mans this position is merely a placeholder until the Cavs make a run at LeBron next summer. But regardless of whether LBJ returns or not, this position will need an upgrade after this season.

PF Tristan Thompson: Give TT credit – he’s worked his tail off the past two years. He came into the league as a raw athlete with little in the way of skill. Now, you could make a case that he’s the most fundamentally sound of the Cavs’ five starters.

He’ll never pour in 20 points a game. He doesn’t need to. TT needs to defend, rebound and make the few open shots he gets – in that order. If his new righty jump shot lets him do that, there are few, if any, real questions about him. And that’s a great place for a third-year player to be.

C Andrew Bynum: He’s the guy on this roster who really makes your stomach churn and your heart pitter-patter. You really, really don’t want to place a lot of hope in the idea that he’ll recover to be the interior force he was with the Lakers. But if he does, he could be the ingredient that turns this team into something truly special.

Bynum, with his knees and head on straight, is the best post-playing big man in the league. Yeah, you have Pau and Z-Bo and an aging Tim Duncan – I’ll still take a healthy, motivated Bynum on the block. He’s big, strong, nimble and adept at shooting with both hands. He’s virtually impossible to stop if he gets deep position on his defender. He has to be double-teamed in many cases, which opens up shots for the other four guys.

A healthy Bynum paired with a healthy Kyrie? You can see why the defense mechanisms go up if you dwell on it. It’s too heartbreaking to think about it not happening.

Bench

F/C Anderson Varejao: In lieu of Bynum, Andy is the starting center. And that’s far from ideal, both because the increased workload of the past few years likely contributed to his recent string of injuries, and because Andy is at his best in a super-sub role.

Andy needs to be allowed to roam the floor, harassing players on the wings, drawing charges and being an all-around nuisance to the other team. As the starting center, he needs to stay close to the basket and play a much more static role. That’s just not his game, and it showed over the past few years. Despite Andy’s prodigious rebounding totals, the Cavs interior defense was quite porous when Andy was out there.

G Jarrett Jack: He’s going to be expected to be a human glue stick for this young team. He can bring scoring off the bench, but even more than that, his presence needs to be felt in the locker room by Irving and Waiters, both of whom need a role model who is still in uniform.

The primary worry with Jack is that he’s 30, and that’s right about when players start to trend downward in terms of production. Jack needs to bring a reliable 9-12 PPG off the bench, and if called upon to start, he has to still be able to shoulder a starter’s workload.

G/F C.J. Miles: He’s a gun for hire. He never met a three-pointer he wasn’t willing to take. That probably makes him worth the minutes, because when he gets hot, he’s a candidate for a 20-point quarter. But he brings little else other than those brief spasms of white-hot production. He’s a horrid defender, and that might cost him a spot in Brown’s rotation, despite his standing as a veteran player.

F Anthony Bennett: There are a lot of expectations riding on the first-ever Canadian taken with the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, and he’s facing a steep learning curve. Offseason shoulder surgery robbed him of his conditioning, and the recent revelation that he suffers from sleep apnea and asthma has raised questions about his ability to recover his conditioning to the point that he can play 30 to 35 minutes a night.

As it is, nobody outside the Cavs organization is really looking for Bennett to win the Rookie of the Year Award, which seems to already be gravitating toward Orlando’s Victor Oladipo. Unlike Oladipo, playing for a strip-mined Magic team that can afford to give him all the minutes he needs, Bennett will be fitted to a much more narrowly-defined role on a deeper Cavs team that has playoff aspirations. He won’t get the minutes that other rookies might.

Despite the conditioning issues, Bennett is a talented scorer. He’s already demonstrated his shooting touch throughout the preseason, and his fourth-quarter outburst to beat Oladipo’s Magic early the preaseason offered a tantalizing glimpse of what Bennett could become.

His first NBA season could be a tough one, though.

C Tyler Zeller: Sometimes, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed in the morning. Zeller did everything that was asked of him this summer. He bulked up, adding a significant amount of muscle to his slender frame. He worked on his game, preparing to fight for a rotation spot on a roster that contains two veteran centers ahead of him.

His reward? Injuring his hip in the club’s first scrimmage, then having to undergo an appendectomy less than a week later. Zeller’s entire preseason was washed out.

Given the injury histories of Bynum and Varejao, Zeller still figures to be an important part of this team. But due to his preseason misfortune, his role is kind of undefined at the moment.

G/F Sergey Karasev: The Cavs’ other first-round pick from this past spring has a lot worth liking. He’s less than a week removed from his 20^th birthday, but has already played professionally in Russia. He’s a heady player with a rangy jumper and underrated passing skills. He comes from strong basketball pedigree. His dad is Vasily Karasev, who was one of the best players in Russia in the 1990s, and later became a coach who has had a major hand in his son’s development.

The junior Karasev has said he models his game on that of Spurs great Manu Ginobili. If he becomes a next-generation Ginobili for the Cavs, I think we’ll take that without a lot of argument. As for now, he’s extremely skinny and not used to the physical nature of the NBA game. Let’s see what happens over the next few years, once he has a chance to fill out his frame and refine his game.

The Canton shuffle: Carrick Felix, Matthew Dellavedova and Henry Sims round out the Cavs roster. All three figure to log some major minutes playing for the NBDL’s Canton Charge this season, but depending on how hard the injury bug bites the Cavs, we could see some or all of them in action at The Q.

Felix is a second-round pick this past spring from Arizona State. The swingman is Brown’s kind of guy – a nose-to-the-grindstone worker who values defense. If he shows any scoring potential, Brown will find a place for him with the big-league club.

Dellavedova is an Australian import who played for the Aussies in the 2012 Olympics. The point guard is an undrafted product of St. Mary’s College in California. He doesn’t possess much athleticism, but comes with the reputation of a high basketball IQ and providing great court leadership, with enough of a jump shot to get by. His lack of athleticism, however, figures to be a major hindrance at the defensive end, where he’s already shown that he has trouble staying in front of other NBA point guards. He’ll have to compensate somehow, if he wants to carve out an NBA career.

Sims was the last man standing in the battle for the 15^th roster spot. The center is an undrafted product of Georgetown who looked solid during the preaseason. The best thing you can probably say about Sims as a long-term NBA prospect is that he’s willing to do the dirty work of defense, rebounding and dishing out fouls.

Coaching: Mike Brown returns to the Cavs sideline for the first time since LeBron quit and/or choked his way out of the 2010 playoffs, and subsequently out of Cleveland. In the interim, Brown had a forgettable year and five games as coach of the Lakers, where he struggled to manage Kobe Bryant and the Lakers’ arsenal of mercurial talent.

Brown’s Lakers tenure wasn’t a success by any macro-level measurement, but he did have a positive impact on Bynum, pushing all the right buttons and enabling the often difficult-to-manage center to compile his best statistical season. Brown enthusiastically endorsed a Bynum signing to GM Chris Grant over the summer.

Bynum is the type of project Brown loves – a young player who tends to thrive when given a high degree of structure and discipline. The same can be said for the remainder of the Cavs roster.

Brown is, at his heart, a teacher. He’s at his best when molding wet clay. And the Cavs will provide him tons of wet clay this season.

Defense does win championships. The best teams in the league are almost always the best defensive teams in the league. For the past few years, the Cavs have been in desperate need of the type of structure and defensive fundamentals that Brown will provide.

But Brown also comes with the deserved rap of enabling poor offensive execution. He tends to let bad habits develop at that end of the floor, failing to eradicate them at the root the way he would at the defensive end.

The object of the game is still to put the ball in the hoop, and if Browns’ second Cavs tenure is to be longer and more successful than his first, he has to cultivate this team’s offense the way he does its defense.

To that end, he has compiled an intriguing coaching staff that includes NBA coaching stalwart Bernie Bickerstaff – Brown’s first mentor in the NBA – and Igor Kokoskov, a well-traveled assistant coach who will serve, in effect, as the team’s offensive coordinator.

Training: The Cavs underwent another sea change this summer by rebuilding their entire training staff. Gone is longtime trainer Max Benton, replaced by the newly-named “Cavs Performance Team.” The performance team will be led by Alex Moore, the former strength and conditioning coach for the U.S. Ski Team.

Results have yet to bear out the wisdom of the decision, but it’s an attempt by the Cavs to address the fact that they have a number of key players with long injury histories by building a training department much closer to what you might see in Europe or Australia. The Aussies are often credited as world leaders in sports training, rehabilitation and injury prevention.

The creation of the performance team is the result of months of research by the Cavs brain trust, comparing the common practices of American sports training with those in other countries. What Grant and his staff concluded from the research is that American sports training methods lag behind the rest of the developed world. Hence, the development of the new model.

If it keeps Irving, Bynum and Varejao on the floor and producing, it’s a great move. We’ll know a lot more by midseason.

Retiring Wahoo

Chief Wahoo has been the face of Cleveland baseball for more than 60 years. Originally designed in 1947 by 17-year-old draftsman Walter Goldbach, Wahoo was the brainchild of former Tribe owner Bill Veeck, one of the greatest marketers baseball has ever seen.

Veeck wanted a unique image for his team, something apart from the statuesque Indian heads in profile that had served as the team’s logos up to that point. Goldbach devised a grinning cartoon Indian with a large nose and yellow skin. That version of Wahoo was perched on the left sleeve of the Tribe’s uniforms when they won their last World Series in 1948.

In 1951, the logo was redesigned to its current form. Wahoo’s red face, white teeth and eyes, and blue hair correspond to the team colors. Since then, Wahoo has been somewhere on the Tribe’s uniforms at all times. He was perched on the cap, encased in a wishbone-C for much of the 1950s. He moved down to the left breast on the Tribe’s sleeveless uniforms of the 1960s. He was given a body in a 1970s logo revision that featured a leg-kicking Wahoo about to swing a bat.

In the early 80s, the head-only logo returned to the left sleeve, where it has stayed ever since. For the 1986 season, the logo returned to the cap, unadorned. Along with the Orioles and Blue Jays, the Indians were one of the few teams to place their logo on the team caps instead of a city-initial monogram.

The Indians wore Wahoo on their caps exclusively until the 2002 season, when a script-I version debuted. That cap was eventually retired in favor of a block-C cap, reminiscent of the early-‘80s caps. For the past several years, the Indians have alternated the Wahoo cap with blue-on-red and red-on-blue versions of the block-C cap.

But Wahoo has always been there. And it’s easy to see why.

In a sports landscape dominated by logos that feature balls and shields and ferocious-looking animals, Wahoo is something that stands out. Veeck and Goldbach set out to create something unique, and they did exactly that. Wahoo is instantly identifiable with the Cleveland Indians, and Wahoo-adorned merchandise still sells, both in Greater Cleveland, and among the large footprint of Cleveland expats who have fanned out across the country and globe.

But there is another side to Wahoo, and no matter how much we as a fan base want to dismiss it as a hot wind from politically-correct extremists, it’s something the Indians, their fans, the city of Cleveland and Major League Baseball will be forced to address at some point – and quite possibly sooner rather than later.

Wahoo is the product of a different era, with different social mores. At the time of Wahoo’s creation, it was still socially acceptable for cartoons to portray African-American, Asian, Hispanic and Indian characters with exaggerated features and mannerisms. Bugs Bunny in blackface? A Tom and Jerry cartoon featuring a slanted-eyed cat or mouse wearing a cymbal on his head like a rice paddy hat? Speedy Gonzalez stealing cheese for his lazy, shiftless, tequila-chugging Mexican mouse friends? No censor batted an eyelash.

But as America became more integrated over the ensuing half-century, the “we” and “they” of 1950 became the “us” of the 21^st Century, and the culture shifted.  A new imperative developed: start viewing people as individuals, and not members of a generic race that possess a common set of lampoon-worthy characteristics.

Wahoo belongs to the old line of thinking, with his red face, big nose and prominent feather sticking up behind his head. As the decades have passed, people around the country have started to find less and less favor with the Tribe’s longstanding logo. The movement against Wahoo is growing, and soon, the Wahoo supporters will comprise little more than a small island of defiance.

The opponents of Wahoo are no longer limited to Native American protesters demonstrating on Gateway Plaza. Powerful people in prominent positions are aligning to retire Wahoo – by force, if necessary. The full force of the hurricane hasn’t hit yet, but it will.

If the Indians are determined to hang onto Wahoo until the bitter end, they can hide until the powers that be are done wrestling with the Washington Redskins. Recently, President Obama spoke out against the Redskins nickname – viewed as a blatant racial slur by many Native Americans – and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is on record saying the NFL has to do “what’s right” regarding the club’s nickname.

The Redskins nickname will likely be the first domino to fall. After that, they’re coming for Wahoo. Once the Washington Redskins are no longer the Washington Redskins, the next-most-blatant example of racially-stereotypical Indian imagery in professional sports is Chief Wahoo.

That is, unless the Indians take the initiative and retire Wahoo of their own free will, before having to face the judge, jury and executioner in the court of public opinion.

There would be life after Wahoo. Plenty of teams change their logos and color schemes. Every year, it seems like some team in some sport is debuting a new look. Even stalwart franchises like the Lakers, Cowboys, Celtics and Red Sox have been known to tinker with their uniforms.

If you’re worried that giving up Wahoo might lead to a slippery slope that ends with the death of the Indians nickname, those fears are probably unfounded. It should be a reasonable condition to request the retention of the Indians nickname. Plenty of Native Americans refer to themselves as Indians, so the nickname can’t be retired on the grounds of racism, like the Redskins’ nickname can. If I were running the Chiefs, Braves or Blackhawks, I’d dig my heels in on the nicknames, too. If the name isn’t explicitly derogatory, it’s defensible.

But imagery is another topic, and mascot-imagery is the real hot button. Nobody has raised much of a fuss about the Braves’ tomahawk icon, which has adorned their jerseys for much of the past 65 years. But when the Braves reportedly made plans to resurrect their “Chief Noc-A-Homa” screaming Indian logo on their 2013 batting practice caps, the idea was quickly shelved amid public pressure.

Could the Indians get away with a logo that features a bow and arrow? A teepee? A head dress or feathers that don’t adorn a human head? There isn’t a solution that will satisfy every person with an opinion on the matter, but a human face is the definite line in the sand. Any logo that renders an Indian person as a mascot will draw enough fire that the idea probably won’t get past the drawing board.

These are difficult discussions to have. Native American tribes and nations have their heritage, but Wahoo is a part of our baseball heritage, and when we are forced to give up a part of that heritage, it doesn’t seem fair -- especially when there are so many other pressing matters in the world.

But these are necessary discussions. Society has permanently changed, and any time stereotypes are shattered, it’s a change for the better. The burden is on us as a community of Cleveland baseball fans to have a long and frank discussion about the future of the Tribe’s image. The longer we put it off, the harder we’re going to make it on ourselves. Because it’s only a matter of time before Wahoo rides off into the sunset.

The debate is no longer about whether the logo is racist. It is to what degree the Indians need to alter their image to remain marketable amid current societal norms.

Either the Indians brass is going to take the initiative and update their image on the club’s own terms, or it’s going to be a sloppy, embarrassing procedure that involves lots of unwanted attention and pressure from bigwigs in Washington and the Office of the Commissioner.

But it’s going to happen, one way or another. It’s inevitable.

The gravity of the situation

Every playoff race has its moments. Tuesday night, the Indians had their moment.

Jason Giambi’s walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth inning might have been the single most important hit for the Indians as a franchise since Tony Fernandez lofted an extra-inning solo shot over the right field wall at Camden Yards in Game 6 of the 1997 ALCS, providing the Tribe with the run that sent them to the World Series.

Yes, it was that important.

Sure, there have been other memorable hits in memorable games since 1997. In 2001, Omar Vizquel lined a three-run triple into the right-field corner, driving in the tying runs during the Indians’ epic 12-run rally against Seattle. In September 2007, Casey Blake all but sealed the division title with an 11^th-inning blast against Detroit. In the 2007 playoffs against the Yankees, Travis Hafner wrote the final verse of what has become known as the “Bug Game” with an extra-inning RBI single.

But none of those hits carried the gravity that came with the situation Giambi faced when he stepped into the batter’s box with a 4-3 deficit to the last-place White Sox, two outs, Michael Brantley on second and the smog wrought by a Chris Perez blown save still thick in the air.

It was a fork in the season road. The Indians were wedged in between Tampa and Texas in the wild card standings, one game’s worth of room on either side. Hundreds of miles away, those teams were winning their games. And the number of games left on the schedule was slipping away like fall’s evening daylight. The Indians had five more games after Tuesday.

A stumble, a slip-up, a several-day swoon, and the season could be over.

Everything about the 15 minutes leading up to Giambi’s at-bat had been migraine-inducing. Perez had coughed up two home runs in the top of the ninth, the first blowing the save, the second giving Chicago the lead.

The single that put Brantley on base was sandwiched between swinging strikeouts by Yan Gomes and Mike Aviles. On Aviles’ second strike, he swung wildly – as he often does -- then grimaced and shook his head, as if to say “Why did I swing at that?”

That was the story of the ninth inning to that point. The Indians were watching opportunity slip through their fingers. They were complicit in their own demise, but there was nothing they could do about it. It’s as if they had been taken over by some self-destructive compulsion.

If Giambi strikes out, if he lofts a lazy fly to the outfield, if he beats one into the ground to second, everyone – including the players in the clubhouse – goes home remembering the Perez flameout and the swinging hack-fest in the bottom of the ninth. The players leave the ballpark with their heads low and come to the park Wednesday with perhaps more tension than they would have otherwise. More pressure to right the ship, to make the perfect pitch, to get the hit, drive in the run.

Baseball is a sport that gives you a lot of time to think. And sometimes thinking can be your worst enemy.

If Giambi makes the final out, Tampa is two games up for the first wild card position. The Indians are tied with Texas and potentially a one-day swing from finding themselves back in the chase pack and no longer steering their destiny – not a good place to be with nary more than a weekend to play.

Giambi was the fulcrum upon which all 156 previous games teetered as he stepped into the batter’s box Wednesday night against Chicago closer Addison Reed. He waved at the first pitch, which caused our throats to tighten just a bit more. He took the second pitch, a ball.

When Reed left a slider high and dry on the third pitch, Giambi heaved his still-beefy 42-year-old shoulders into motion, lumberjack-chopping the night air and making solid, square contact. When the ball left his bat, it was instantly apparent he had sent it on a season-saving flight to the visitor’s bullpen beyond the right field wall.

And for a few moments, 21,000 in attendance on a cool late September night sounded like the crowds of 42,000 from years past.

Maybe Giambi didn’t put the Indians in the playoffs with his heroics, but he very well could have kept the window from slamming shut under the crushing weight of tension, pressure and lament.

After the celebration had died down, Giambi told reporters that he made Perez give him a hug. It was a pick-me-up for an embattled teammate who, largely due to his own actions, is finding it increasingly difficult to pitch well in front of the home fans. But it was symbolic of everything that was made right by Giambi’s home run.

The season could have started to spiral out of control on Tuesday. Perez could have all but punched his ticket out of town. We, as a city and fan base, could have taken a turn down the familiar path of blame and bitter resentment. It could have all been yet another dark, depressing chapter in Cleveland sports.

But it wasn’t. It was all salvaged, rebuilt and buffed to a mirror-shine by Jason Giambi and his timeliest of timely hits.

A carousel of insanity

You’re a Browns fan. You hate owner Jimmy Haslam, the slimy, crooked huckster who is trying to stave off a federal indictment by playing dumb about his company’s rebate fraud scandal.

You hate CEO Joe Banner, the squinty-eyed, lock-jawed little Napoleon who got run out of Philly and views the Browns gig as one big ego trip.

You hate GM Mike Lombardi, the sniveling, shadow-lurking weasel who has a vastly overinflated opinion of himself as a talent evaluator.

You hate them all. And if you have any interest in giving the Browns a fighting chance to chip away at one of the most firmly-entrenched losing cultures in professional sports, you’d better hope that you get to hate them for a long, long time.

For 15 years, the Browns have been on a nauseating, ever-spinning carousel of high-level turnover – really, a carousel of insanity – and it has to stop.

Wednesday’s trade of Trent Richardson to Indianapolis is symptomatic of everything that has been wrong with the Browns since 1999. You can agree or disagree with the move itself – for what it’s worth, I’ve seen enough of Richardson to agree with Jim Brown’s original assessment of  “ordinary.” Not bad, but certainly not the franchise-caliber game-changer you’d expect to get at the third overall pick. But what makes the trade so troubling is the underlying causes, which stab right at the heart of why the Browns have been so bad for so long.

In 14 seasons since the club’s 1999 relaunch, the Browns have been led by six distinct leadership regimes. Six different brain trusts, with six different leadership philosophies, in 14 years. Carmen Policy and Dwight Clark from 1999 to 2001, Butch Davis from 2001 to ’05, Phil Savage and Romeo Crennel from ’05 to ’08, Eric Mangini in ’09 (the only year he was in charge of the entire front office), Mike Holmgren and Tom Heckert from 2010 to ’12, and Joe Banner and Mike Lombardi for the past year.

The math whizzes can quickly figure out that 14 divided by six is 2.33. That’s right. The average tenure for a Browns leadership regime since 1999 is two years and four months. If you don’t include the just-launched Banner-Lombardi regime, the average balloons to a rocksteady two years and 10 months.

It’s a suicidal level of turnover. In any other industry, the Browns would have gone out of business quite a while ago.

It’s because when new leaders come in, they’re brought in because the old leaders, at least in the sample size they were given, didn’t perform at a high enough level. No brain trust comes into a situation like the Browns present thinking that the old regime did anything resembling a good job. Is it realistic to ask that of them?

New leaders will always arrive with their own ideas and philosophies, which are usually starkly different from what came before. That’s why they were hired. They think differently. They’re supposed to be a breath of fresh air. They’re supposed to strip away what hasn’t worked and replace it with a system, and talent, that does work.

Those factors are compounded in the ego-driven world of professional sports. No roster architect worth his seven-figure salary wants to win with the last guy’s players. Then, then previous guy gets all the credit as the “real” brains behind the success. In the world that Banner and Lombardi occupy, that doesn’t compute.

To peek inside their heads, Banner and Lombardi – and every president/GM who has come before them – haven’t come to Cleveland to win games. They’ve come to Cleveland to realize a vision. The wins will come as a byproduct of that vision being realized.

It likely makes you want to put your shoe through the screen to read that, but – welcome to the world of big business.

This is why it is painfully essential that Haslam not follow in the footsteps of former owner Randy Lerner, caving to fan and media pressure for change as the losses mount.

No matter what you think about Haslam, Banner or Lombardi, they need to stay here for the balance of a decade, or longer. They have to be given the space and time to see their vision through to fruition.

The majority of fans and media, and apparently Lerner, seemed to operate under the pretense that it’s better to cut bait with a leadership team that isn’t producing immediate wins than to continue on a treadmill to nowhere for years on end.

But all that does is produce an ongoing stream of executives making short-term moves to save their jobs, with no attention paid to the overarching problems that continually plague the franchise.

As the losing seasons continue to mount and the region-wide frustration with the Browns reaches a boiling point, the pressure to win now grows ever more urgent, leading to a snowball effect. If the latest brain trust can’t reverse the losing in Year One, we want them gone. Because it’s been long enough, and we, as a fan base, are simply fed up to the back teeth.

Again, this is the problem with perpetual reboots. Every few years, the Browns bring in new leaders who want to start from square one. They can only be held accountable for what happens on their watch. But beyond the gates to the Berea complex is an entire region enduring the sum total of 14 years of losing with no end in sight. We end up with the divergent goals of a leadership regime that wants to craft an organization in its own image, from the ground up, and a fan base that is beyond desperate for someone to end the losing as soon as possible.

This is bigger than the latest 4-12 season. This is bigger than an 11-game losing streak to the Ravens or going two-and-a-bazillion against the Steelers over the past decade. Turnover is the fatal, systemic flaw that is leading to all the other problems that are destroying this franchise, eroding the fan base and suffocating what was once one of the great football towns in America.

Do Banner and Lombardi have the answers? Do they comprise the brain trust that can finally turn the Browns around? Only time will tell. But that’s exactly it – time. More time than any previous regime since 1999 has received.

You might hate Haslam. You might detest Banner and loathe Lombardi. And maybe they aren’t the perfect football brain trust. They do come with a very prominent set of questions attached. But these are the guys who found the seats when the song stopped in this latest game of musical chairs. And we have to move forward with them for a good, long while – even if the wins don’t come this year, or next, or the year after.

The phrase “stability for stability’s sake” carries a negative connotation when it comes to the Browns and their various leadership regimes. But without stability and consistency, you have what the Browns have become.

The Browns very much need stability – and for stability’s sake.

It's still worth it

Is Cleveland a bad baseball town?

Apparently, we don’t like what we see in the mirror at the moment.

Heading into play Friday, the Indians were 78-68, 1.5 games out of the second wild card spot, 3.5 games out of the wild card lead, and in a deep but still-scalable six-game hole in the division.

They’re in the midst of a series in Chicago against the last-place White Sox. The remainder of the season includes three games against the third-place Royals, a four-game home series against the last-place Astros, two more games against the White Sox and four games to close out the season against fourth-place Minnesota.

This is exactly what we wanted in March, right? September finally matters for the Indians, and it’s one of the softest September schedules the team has ever faced.

We should be oozing confidence as a fan base. We should believe that the Indians not only could make the playoffs, they should make the playoffs. They should be able to tear through the remainder of the schedule at an .800 clip and, at the very least, end up on the doorstep of the top wild card spot.

But we don’t believe that. We’ve voted with our attendance at Progressive Field, where four-figure and low five-figure weeknight crowds are still the reality of the situation.

The first playoff-contending season in six years, and the Indians might as well be 20 games out to look at Progressive Field on most game nights. Much like the team stock that former owner Dick Jacobs issued in the latter part of the 1990s, people just aren’t buying it.

It’s not the economy. Not when the perennially-inept Browns also make a perennial killing at the season-ticket sales window. Not when nearly every decent restaurant in town has a 45-minute wait on a Saturday night. People still buy what they want to buy.

It’s not endemic hard feelings toward owner Larry Dolan. Maybe the fans really are cooler toward Dolan than they ever were toward Jacobs. It’s tough to follow an act like what the Indians put on the field from 1994 to 2001. But fans aren’t staying away in droves to spite Dolan.

The biggest culprits in the short-circuiting of the Tribe’s attendance are the numbers 6 and 27.

That would be the Indians’ combined record against the Tigers, Red Sox and Yankees. The three highest-profile teams on the schedule, and the Indians completely wet the bed against all of them.

In other words, this team might make the playoffs, but nobody believes they have chances of making much noise once they get there. In a city that hasn’t seen a championship trophy in 49 years, the prospect of making the playoffs just isn’t enough to excite the fan base, because all it means is more heartbreak and embarrassment if they do get there.

In baseball, the small-market war cry is “Just make the playoffs, and anything can happen.” That’s true, but when you are all but assured of seeing at least one of the teams that combined to beat you 27 out of 33 games this year, the dreams turn to nightmares in a hurry.

If the Indians were in or near first place, if they had battled the Tigers to a draw this year, if they had the look of a 95-win team that could do some damage in October, chances are the hometown stands wouldn’t be a field of green silence. But that didn’t happen. We have the situation we have. Far from hopeless, but with enough negative warning signs to scare off the region’s emotionally-battered fans.

So is it worth it for this team to even make the playoffs, with the odds so heavily stacked against them once they’re there?

It depends on your definition of “worth it.”

If you just want the ring, you’re fully within your right to feel that way. Forty-nine years – with three teams for most of those years -- is a long enough drought for any city. Nobody in this space is going to tell you to just be happy with making the playoffs.

But then you really take a look and see how bad it can get. And in baseball, the postseason droughts  can reach legendary status.

The Indians themselves went 41 years without a playoff game. The Pirates are working on ending a 20-year drought that included no winning seasons from 1993 until this year. The Royals haven’t made the playoffs since winning the World Series in 1985.

The Orioles broke a 15-year playoff drought last year, and the Nationals broke a drought that dated to 1981, when they were the Expos.

Bear in mind, we’re just talking playoffs. No mention of the Cubs’ 105-year World Series title drought, the Red Sox’s 86-year “Curse of the Bambino,” the White Sox’s 88-year drought that ended in 2005 or the Tribe’s drought, at 65 years and counting.

World Series title droughts have their own poetic verse. They almost always involve episodes of failure and foreboding under the bright lights. They become so well-known, they get reduced to names and phrases: Bill Buckner. Steve Bartman. The Black Sox. The black cat at Shea.

Curiously, in a town that loves to attach “the” to every sports misadventure, the Indians’ meltdown in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series never really received a widely-accepted nickname. Even the main antagonist of that fateful ninth inning, Jose Mesa, has become little more than a minor sports villain in local lore. It would take 100 Jose Mesas to equal the rage inspired by one Art Modell or LeBron James.

The lack of resentment toward Mesa is a curious anomaly – good for Mesa, and probably good for our collective blood pressure, but still curious -- because he scraped closer to a World Series title than Modell ever did to a Super Bowl title or LeBron to an NBA title during their time in Cleveland. If you’re going to get mad at someone, it’s probably going to be the likes of Mesa. Those are the rules of the game when a world championship is at stake.

But playoff droughts? Failing to even make the postseason for years and decades? Those are just pathetic. Playoff droughts don’t make villains or tragic characters. They simply produce an endless, numbing parade of forgettable players and forgettable teams. 

The Indians have been playing baseball in this town for 112 years. They have made the playoffs in 10 of those seasons. That means roughly 92 percent of the time, an Indians season has ended on the last day of the regular season.

Regardless of how much of a buzz they’re able to create around the region, regardless of their record against other contenders, regardless of whether they make the playoffs with room to spare or squeak in on the last day of the season, it’s better for the 2013 Indians to become the 11^th Tribe team to make the playoffs than the 103^rd Tribe team to miss the playoffs.

There have been enough dark Octobers in our past. There will be more dark Octobers in the future. This year – even if it’s for a moment – we can have October baseball again. Maybe it won’t possess the electricity of 1995. Maybe it won’t possess the magic of 1997. Maybe it won’t become a surprise ALCS gift dropped in our laps like 2007. But it beats the all-too-familiar alternative.

Et tu, Kyrie?

Where have we heard this before?

The Cavaliers’ franchise player is cornered on the subject of his future by a press corps eager to stoke the flames of intrigue by further-moistening the already-sweaty palms of a fan base that knows “fate” as the filthiest of four-letter words.

The player does nothing to allay the anxiety of the fans. He plays it coy, sidestepping the question with ambiguous generalities, such as: “I’m only focused on right now. I’ll worry about the future when it gets here.”

LeBron James tap-danced like that for seven years as a Cav. He now plays for the Miami Heat. Kyrie Irving tried on his tap shoes this past Saturday when reporters questioned him on his future plans at a basketball camp he was conducting in Independence.

Irving can sign a max extension next summer – five years and about $80 million – and the Cavs will almost certainly offer it to him. The only reason “almost” is even worth discussing is due to any unforeseen catastrophic injuries that could threaten his career, life-altering criminal charges or an irreconcilable falling-out with Cavs management. The statistical equivalent of being flattened by the remnants of a satellite falling to Earth, but you at least have to put it on the table.

In other words, he’s getting the offer. Now, whether he’ll accept that offer?

“Right now I’m a Cavalier,” he told the assembled reporters. “This is where I am. All that future stuff, I’m not really worried about. I’m living in the moment right now and I’m just trying to get better with the teammates I have now and make the playoffs for Cleveland. That’s the only thing I can do right now is give it my all as it stands right now and that future stuff, I’m not really worried about it.”

When you read it, the Cleveland parts of your mind start to squirm. You see all the negative space around the words – everything that wasn’t said.

Has he been taking advice from LeBron? Is he planning to hook up with LeBron? Is he planning to hook up with LeBron in a place other than Cleveland? Is Kyrie going to be another burgeoning superstar who ditches Cleveland right as he’s rounding into championship form?

Nobody can give you a cure for that bellyache. If Irving wants out of Cleveland at some point, he’s going to get out, one way or another. That’s how the game is played. When it comes to stars and superstars in the NBA, they get what they want. GMs can be strong-armed, coaches can be fired, rules can be manipulated.

Star power is the fuel that drives the NBA. The owners don’t run the league. Their best players do.

However, despite all of that, and despite the fact that New York-based radio gabber Brandon Tierney tweeted a few weeks ago that Irving is not long for Cleveland (which, to be fair, was rebuked by Irving himself), there are some concrete reasons to not panic just yet.

First of all, the Cavs hold Irving’s rights for three more years. That’s important not just due to the competitive window that Irving could allow, it’s also because it gives the Cavs a breathable window to make any decision that might be necessary.

If Irving were to turn down or table an extension offer next summer, or try to negotiate an early opt-out that would drastically shorten his commitment to the Cavs, the Cavs would have from the summer of 2014 to, at least in theory, the trade deadline in February 2016 to decide what to do. If they decided to trade him, they’d have ample time to shop around and find the best deal.

Yes, that approach could backfire if Irving keeps suffering nagging injuries, or is felled by the aforementioned career-threatening injury, but nowhere does it say that the only guarantees in life are death, taxes and NBA players staying healthy.

And that’s if he were to turn down an extension next summer. While Cleveland sports has a well-documented history of setting negative precedents, it is unheard of to this point for an NBA player to decline an extension coming off his rookie deal. The whole reason the media questioned Kyrie about his future is because the Wizards’ John Wall – one of Irving’s contemporaries in rising crop of young NBA point guards -- recently inked a five-year extension.

Even LeBron extended with the Cavs once, in 2006. When a player is only three years into his career, he still has to wade through so many checkpoints to get to unrestricted free agency – his base contract, teams options, qualifying offers – that it’s easier to take the money sitting right in front of him, even if the team isn’t positioned to make a Finals run at the moment.

It is possible for Irving to be planning an exit strategy from Cleveland as we speak. It is possible that he’s eyeing star-laden rosters and warmer climates, dreaming of rings and bling on South Beach, or Hollywood Boulevard. It’s also possible that Irving is quite happy in Cleveland – right now – and has no overt intention of leaving unless circumstances force his hand. To that end, there is a lot of pressure on Dion Waiters, Tristan Thompson, Anthony Bennett and Andrew Bynum to become the supporting cast LeBron never had here.

What we do know is seven years of LeBron made us, and the Cavs, smarter, more streetwise and a heck of a lot more clinical about the NBA, their superstars and their culture of entitlement. No more talk about family and loyalty. This is a business. Every party acts in its own best interest.

Dan Gilbert has said it, and Chris Grant has repeated it, in so many words: The Cavs are not going to let themselves be held hostage by one player again. If Irving turns down an extension or tries to negotiate an escape hatch after two or three years, he’s obviously not committed to the Cavs over the long haul, and as such, is not a reliable franchise cornerstone.

No more waiting around to see if his loyalty increases. No more letting your best player coast all the way to free agency while you have your fingers and toes crossed, hoping that he re-signs. That’s a recipe for disaster. That is the summer of 2010 all over again.

If Irving balks, Irving gets traded. That’s the bottom line. And, yes, it sucks. Because all we want in this town are great players that are motivated to stick it out and try to win us our first title since the height of Beatlemania.

But that emotional response gets in the way of good business. It’s better to punt away a good player for draft picks than to lose him for nothing. And when a Cleveland player turns down an extension, it’s not because he wants more money. He wants more money from a team in a bigger city.

As soon as they discover an ocean of oil under Cleveland and we can start building zillion-dollar skyscrapers like a Great Lakes version of Dubai, that will change. Until then, we have our reality.

Of course, this is all pre-emptive. There is a season of basketball to be played between now and next summer, and for the first time in three-plus years, the Cavs look like they might be worth watching, even for casual fans that tuned the team out as soon as LeBron skipped town.

Kyrie’s words are actually quite wise: Enjoy now. Let tomorrow brings what it brings. Most likely, it will bring a five-year contract extension, negotiated with little drama. But if it doesn’t, the Cavs have a backup plan.

That’s more than we could have said for them during the last superstar’s reign.

The mouthpiece

Since the Browns debuted their underwhelming sequel in 1999, Bernie Kosar has been the team’s most conspicuous extra.

He’s never been given even a supporting role in the organization, but despite his lack of any official football-governing capacity, he’s been active and involved. He frequently appears on local radio and TV stations from the start of training camp through the end of the season, offering his analysis and opinions. You can find him at the stadium on many a Sunday, chatting with players, coaches and executives, obliging media requests – doing anything to stay close to the game he lived and still loves.

The fans reciprocate Kosar’s devotion to the Browns and football. Despite never leading the Browns to the Super Bowl, despite the fact that his career prime lasted all of two years – he was never the same after his elbow was injured in the 1988 season opener – despite the fact that he is quite possibly the fourth-most-accomplished quarterback in Browns history behind Otto Graham, Frank Ryan and Brian Sipe, the fans have elevated Kosar to folk-hero status.

Part of it is his local ties, having grown up a Browns fan in Boardman, Ohio, just outside Youngstown. Part of it is the fact that he declared for the 1985 supplemental draft specifically so the Browns could select him. And part of it is grasping at the strands of what little we have had to cherish about the Browns over the past quarter-century.

Other than the Kosar years, it’s been quite ugly, which makes those gritty Browns teams that were thrice eliminated by Denver on the Super Bowl’s doorstep look all the more legendary.

That’s why Browns Nation is so quick to circle the wagons around Kosar, deflecting criticism and assailing detractors. And now it’s happening again.

Kosar has been the primary color commentator on Channel 3’s preseason telecasts since 2007. Despite the fact that his concussion-induced slurred speech and his appearance – often appearing something like haggard or sleep-deprived – drew criticism and jokes, Kosar’s intellect has remained unquestioned. He is extremely knowledgeable and perceptive about football, and can break plays down like a coach reviewing game film. You are a better fan for having listened to Kosar talk football.

But there is that other part to Kosar. The part that might explain why, despite his very obvious football acumen, he has never been given the opportunity, by any of the revolving-door Browns regimes, to take a more prominent role in the organization.

It’s the part that has dealt with post-concussion brain trauma, an embattled personal and business life, and the effects of alcohol abuse. It’s that aspect of Kosar that should have people stroking their chins after his behavior during last Thursday’s Browns-Rams telecast, wondering aloud if it might be in the best interest of Kosar and the team to keep their relationship strictly casual moving ahead.

In ripping the quality of the Rams receiving corps, he was stating the obvious. Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt are not walking through the door in St. Louis. Those salad days went limp and brown a long time ago.

And maybe Kosar was simply delivering a raw truth when he knocked the play of Rams third-string QB Kellen Clemens. His first name isn’t Roger. His last name isn’t Winslow. The only way he’ll get into any hall of fame is with a purchased ticket. That’s not breaking news.

Maybe he was just trying to be funny when he mocked an apocryphal story about Clemens autographing the mitre of Pope Benedict XVI, which was tied to a true story about Clemens' daughter receiving a blessing from the pope, relayed by Kosar's broadcast partner, Jim Donovan.

And maybe Rams coach Jeff Fisher was just being a big crybaby about all of it during his postgame remarks, when he said he "lost a lot of respect" for Kosar. Fisher's team did lose, after all.

Besides, what's the big deal? So many talking heads mindlessly gush superlatives and sing high hosannas to athletes, it's refreshing to have someone in the booth who gives you his blunt, unvarnished opinion.

But every facet of that argument sidesteps the fundamental truth that Kosar was working on behalf of the Browns. One would assume that, like every other team broadcaster in sports, he was on the payroll, therefore acting in the capacity of a team employee on a team-sanctioned broadcast.

When Kosar made his remarks on the air, he wasn't just speaking on behalf of Bernie Kosar. He was speaking on behalf of the Browns organization. That changes the rules a bit, and mandates a bit more respect be shown the opponent. It's not an afternoon talk show. It's a game telecast.

Joe Banner, as is often the case, gets cast as the bad guy for reprimanding Kosar. But that's Banner's job. If he thinks his organization's reputation has been sullied, he needs to take steps to make it right. He's the one who has to meet face-to-face with other team executives at league meetings, not Kosar.

Kosar wasn't removed from his perch. He'll remain the team's TV color guy for the remainder of the preseason. But after that, Banner will have another decision to make: Defining Kosar's role with the team moving forward. And that's a prickly topic.

Kosar would likely jump at the chance for a role that allows him real authority within the Browns organization. Plenty of people around Northeast Ohio think it's a travesty that the Browns have never given him that chance. But football head knowledge is only part of the equation.

Kosar has always been an opinionated person. But there is a time to express an opinion, a time to soften the blow and time to keep your mouth shut. Navigating that hair-trigger minefield can mean the difference between focusing your attention on your job, and lost man-hours cleaning up public relations blunders and attempting to repair your organization's reputation.

It's not outside the realm of possibility to question whether Kosar's personal and professional history, which have not been kind to his brain, have clouded his judgment to the point where you can't trust him to make the right call with regard to decorum.

Heck, it's hard enough for some people to hold their tongue when they haven't been subjected to repeated brain trauma. Remember the email that ultimately cost Phil Savage his job?

Banner has to decide whether he wants Kosar representing the Browns in any official capacity after the preseason ends. Knowing that Banner is generally unsentimental and extremely bottom-line driven,  Browns fans and Kosar loyalists might not like what they're going to hear.

But perhaps it's for the best. Kosar will still be free to appear on local TV and radio, talking football while speaking on behalf of himself, and only himself. The Browns will be able to protect an image that has already been dragged through the mud way more than necessary over the past decade-plus, and still isn't out of the woods, as Jimmy Haslam continues to deal with a large number of justifiably-angry trucking companies down in Tennessee.

If you can't say anything nice  … save it for afternoon drive time. 

The comfort zone

Brandon Weeden left a five-year baseball career behind and returned to football, ostensibly because football is his comfort zone.

Though Weeden was a second-round pick of the Yankees in the 2002 MLB Draft, his baseball career never took off. In a second round that included Joey Votto, Jon Lester and Brian McCann, Weeden was one of the comparative duds, never rising above Class A.

He bounced around several different baseball organizations, struggling to climb the minor-league ladder, attempting to master pitches other than a fastball – only to end up as a farmhand in his mid-20s, riding the bus for the A-ball High Desert Mavericks, then an affiliate of the Royals.

The High Desert Mavericks play their home games in Adelanto, Calif., located in San Bernardino County, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. It’s a place where ERAs go to die in the heat and thin air.

Weeden racked up more than 2,800 passing yards in a season – second in the state of Oklahoma – while in high school, so a college football career was always a reliable second option as he toiled away in the minors. By the time he quit baseball after the 2006 season, returning to the place where he had last achieved any real athletic success had to have sounded pretty appealing.

Dodging pass rushers and hitting receivers in stride 30 yards downfield? Piece of cake compared to keeping the ball in the yard at a place that has only slightly more atmospheric pressure than the Moon.

So Weeden enrolled at Oklahoma State in 2007 and made the football team as a walk-on. The adjustment wasn’t easy, but he progressed from redshirt to backup to starter to record-breaking NFL prospect.

He re-wrote the school’s record books as a senior in 2011, setting single-season records in total passing yards, completed passes and completion percentage. In the process, he was named a finalist for the Manning Award – the top quarterback-specific award in college football – and won the Fiesta Bowl in January 2012.

Weeden was most definitely back in his comfort zone. There were probably more than a few moments when he wondered to himself why he wasted half a decade playing minor-league baseball.

Then the Browns made him the 22^nd overall pick in the 2012 NFL Draft. And Weeden, who had gone from no-name baseball farmhand to the golden-armed big man on Oklahoma State’s campus, was about to get another serving of humble pie.

Maybe in a parallel universe, Weeden ends up in a more fortunate situation, like Ryan Mallett, another big-armed quarterback who was drafted by the Patriots, and is now being groomed as a possible successor to Tom Brady on one of the league’s most successful teams.

But Weeden ended up in Cleveland, with an organization that has turned losing, instability, turnover, and ruining careers into a way of life over the past 14 years. An organization constantly and desperately searching for saviors upon which to place the crushing burden of eradicating a losing culture, restoring the team to prominence, and ultimately winning the city’s first major pro sports championship in half a century.

Brian Sipe couldn’t do it. Bernie Kosar couldn’t do it. Kenny Lofton, Albert Belle, Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez couldn’t do it. LeBron James didn’t want to do it. And here was Weeden, in the next wave of Marines to storm the beach.

He wasn’t in Oklahoma anymore.

As a 28-going-on-29 rookie, Weeden quickly discovered that football wasn’t his comfort zone. Winning football was his comfort zone. What Weeden had here was a mutant product comprised of the remnants of several failed roster reboots, led by Pat Shurmur, who coached more like a programmed computer, as opposed to a carbon-based life form who could think, feel, react and adjust.

Weeden rebounded from an abysmal debut against the Eagles to have a halfway-decent rookie season. He threw for almost 3,400 yards while completing 57 percent of his passes. He threw 14 touchdowns, but they were outpaced by his interceptions (17). His QB rating was a modest-but-not-humiliating 72.6.

And he did it all while playing in an ultra-conservative offense ultimately aimed at shoehorning him into a Colt McCoy mold. In a setup designed to benefit undersized, scamper-happy QBs who can dodge, dink and dunk, Weeden was a bullwhip-armed, stone-footed, ship’s mast of a QB. He was coached to look underneath first, play the percentages, and take very few risks downfield.

You might as well try to teach a dog to meow. It went against everything in his DNA, both in a metaphorical football sense, and in a very real genetic sense. Big guy, big arm, tiny offense. The fact that Weeden even put up the numbers he did is a minor miracle.

We know what happened from that point. The Browns limped to their fifth straight season of five wins or fewer. New owner Jimmy Haslam bulldozed the front office and coaching staff. Out went Mike Holmgren, Tom Heckert and Shurmur, in came Joe Banner, Mike Lombardi and Rob Chudzinski.

Chudzinski and new offensive coordinator Norv Turner pledged to install an offense that will play more to Weeden’s strengths – a vertical passing attack that embraces the idea of home-run throw and treats the 20-yard out pattern as a staple instead of a seldom-seen change of pace.

But the playbook only matters if Weeden can make it happen on the gridiron. In the NFL, the quarterback is the player who most influences his team’s level of success. A great QB, or QB who gets hot at the right time, can lead his team to great things. Joe Flacco proved it this past winter, as the Ravens won the Super Bowl. An underperforming QB can short-circuit the best-laid plans of coaches, and undermine rock-solid performances by the line, backs and receivers.

Teams with good QBs put the ball in the end zone. Teams with bad QBs don’t. It’s really that simple.

That’s where Weeden is now, as he enters his second year. He appears to have better tools at his disposal, with a pass-friendly offensive scheme, an offensive line anchored by Pro Bowlers and better talent at the receiver position than perhaps at any time since the Browns rebirth.

But the pressure is still there. Weeden still has the expectations of a battered franchise and hopes of a desperate city on his shoulders. And now, he’s no longer a rookie. The kid gloves are off. It’s time for Weeden to render a verdict on himself.

Weeden came back to football because it was always his first love. It was always the place where he felt most capable of success. Or that’s the story. Now we get to really see how comfortable Weeden can be manning football’s most demanding position while attempting one of the most challenging tasks the NFL can offer to a player, coach or executive – turning the Cleveland Browns into a contender.

Hopefully he’s not wishing, at some point, that he was back in Adelanto, watching home runs sail over the fence.

The big letdown

Monday night’s Indians-Tigers game was one of those moments that often lead to other moments. One of those moments that you -- down the road however far – realize was the finger that flicked the first domino.

It’s only the first week of August. There is still a lot of baseball left to be played. The Indians were still only four games out as of Tuesday morning. They’re in the thick of the wild card chase. They still have another series left against the Tigers, at the end of the month in Detroit.

And yet….in those moments of postmortem lucidity, when you look back at what this season ultimately became, you can’t help but think you might finger Monday’s game as the point when the division slipped away. The point when the Indians went from a fight for homefield advantage in the division series to, at best, the wild card and a first-round date with the Red Sox, who won six of seven against the Indians this year.

The Indians came into this week absolutely needing no worse than a split with Detroit. Maintain your three-game deficit, and the division is still quite winnable. Let Detroit take three of four, and their lead swells to five games. Let them come into your house and sweep four games from you, and their seven-game cushion all but signals the end of the division race.

Jhonny Peralta’s 50-game doping suspension, Miguel Cabrera’s bum hip and the good fortune of sidestepping Max Scherzer, Detroit’s ace-du-jour, in the rotation would seem to work in favor of the Tribe chances of at least clawing out a split. But the concrete evidence of the season series to date (a 9-3 Tigers advantage), and the Tribe’s often-combustible bullpen, can rot wood faster than you can build a raft out of it.

Monday’s game was a winnable game. More than that, it was a game they should have won. It was a game they needed to win. It was an important confidence-boosting toehold to carve in the midst of the torrential, scalding lahar the Tigers had poured out upon the Tribe thus far this year.

When the Tigers took three of four from the Tribe in early July, you could make the case that Detroit had successfully gotten in Cleveland’s head. The Tigers’ beefy offense is enough to send shivers down the spine of just about any opponent. But the way the Indians melted like Velveeta in the microwave in losing eight of their last nine to Detroit would seem to indicate another level of intimidation.

But that was a month ago. Plenty of time for the Indians to clear their heads and reset themselves for a final push in the last two series against Detroit.  And through eight innings, it looks like the Indians had smacked the cobwebs out of their skulls. Corey Kluber looked masterful in holding the Tigers off the scoreboard through seven-plus. Joe Smith finished off the eighth, and the Indians entered the ninth inning with a 2-0 lead.

On came Chris Perez, the Tribe’s always-volatile, often-polarizing, never-a-dull-moment closer. Somehow, since returning from a DL stint in late June, he had managed to convert 11 straight save chances, all the while dealing with the fallout from drug charges, stemming from the reported undercover delivery of marijuana to his house in early June.

But toking up was among the least of Perez’s problems Monday night. The sporadic nature of save chances, combined with a thin setup corps, had forced Terry Francona to go to Perez perhaps a bit more than he would have liked.

Monday was Perez’s eighth appearance in 11 days. That included two sets of back-to-back-to-back games. He was credited with either the save or win in every game he had appeared in since July 27 against Texas.

Perez’s command tends to fade in and out from pitch to pitch, batter to batter. You could call him “effectively wild.” But as soon as he threw a few pitches to Prince Fielder, Detroit’s leadoff hitter in the ninth, you could tell that the recent workload had taken a toll.

Perez did manage to snap off a crisp slider to Fielder, but his fastball looked fat and flat, and prone to drifting. Fielder, with one of the best hitter’s eyes in the game, managed to stay with an outside fastball and deposited it just inside the foul line in deep left for a leadoff double.

Perez always makes your stomach dance to his beat, but there was something wrong beyond the protracted angst typically wrought by a Perez save.

One batter in, and you could easily see that didn’t have it tonight, and he wasn’t going to find it. Not with an exhausted arm, against this heavy Motown artillery.

Victor Martinez followed with a sharp single to left. Fielder looks and runs like an elephant, but he was able to rumble home with the run that broke the shutout.

Every brain wave you could possibly send in the direction of the third-base dugout at Progressive Field was imploring Francona:

“Get Perez out of there! Get him out NOW! You can’t squeeze this save out of him! Don’t try! This game is too important tonight – go against the book and take him out!”

But as the old saying goes, managers who listen to fans are doomed to sit in the stands with them, and Francona would have to be the one to look Perez in the face and tell him “I can’t trust you to finish this game off tonight.”

Perez has 124 career saves and an all-star appearance that say he can close the game out. What message does it send to the team if Francona pulls Perez with the save still intact? What message does it send if he inserts Cody Allen with the save still intact, and Allen blows it?

There are so many ways it could go wrong. But it was going wrong – horribly wrong – with Perez out there, flailing away at Detroit’s heavy lumber with his exhausted chicken wing.

Perez walked Andy Dirks. Still nobody out. Allen was warming up in the bullpen at a furious pace. But the save was still out if Perez could wriggle off the hook somehow.

But Perez didn’t have a deeper reservoir of energy or resolve to tap. Not on this night. When Alex Avila deposited a three-run homer in the stands to put the Tigers ahead by the final margin of 4-2, it was a realization of the inevitable.

If Monday’s game indeed flicks the domino line that ends the Tribe’s hopes of a division title, we might look back and realize it was Francona, in a rare instance of bad judgment, who cost the Indians their shot.

Francona likes to pride himself on managing with his head, not his heart. But perhaps Francona’s heart won out on Monday, and he couldn’t bring himself to quick-hook his all-star closer when the game was still in hand. Perhaps he was concerned about wearing the goat horns if he left the game in Allen’s hands, and Allen failed him.

There really was no sunshine-bathed route for Francona to take. Every path had thunderclouds. But the darkest path was to let an exhausted Perez continue to twist in the wind toward the inevitable outcome.

Francona tried to squeeze one inning too many out of Perez, and he got burned. Hopefully the scorch-marks aren’t still visible in late September, but as Yogi Berra was once purported to have said, “It gets late early around here.”

Meet the new Shaq

At the end of June 2009, the Cavs acquired a former Lakers center. He was, at one time, widely regarded as one of the best – if not the best – centers in the game. But at the time the Cavs acquired him, those days were long past.

When he arrived on the Cavs’ doorstep, there were questions about his durability. Even in a best-case scenario, the Cavs would have to remain extremely vigilant about capping his minutes, conserving the wear and tear on his ravaged joints, carefully milking whatever ability remained in his bones and muscles for maximum effect over the span of 82 games and playoffs.

And even if they did all that, he was a near lock to miss games, weeks, and perhaps months, due to the simple fact that his body was already permanently damaged.

But the price was right, because on a good night, he could still show flashes of brilliance, still remind you why he won those championship rings in L.A. And even if he couldn’t do it night to night anymore, the prospect of him at his best was still tantalizing enough to take the risk and bring him aboard.

And there was that little matter of LeBron James. He could become a free agent the following summer, and the Cavs had to pull out all the stops to try and show him that Cleveland is a place where he could win championships and continue to build his legacy.

It was the story of Shaquille O’Neal four years ago. It’s the story of Andrew Bynum now, after he agreed to a two-year, $24 million contract with the Cavs Wednesday evening. $6 million is guaranteed, and the second year is a team option.

Shaq’s caveat was based on age. He was 37 at the time the Cavs traded for him. Bynum comes to town at the green age of 25, but with the knees of an 80-year-old. Over the course of his eight-year career, both knees have been operated on multiple times. He has suffered ruptured ligaments, bone bruises, cartilage damage and one would assume significant scarring within both joints.

Despite the fact that Bynum was the starting center on two Lakers world championship teams in 2009 and ’10, despite the fact that he had his best statistical season in 2011-12, averaging more than 18 points and 11 rebounds per game, his knees paved his path out of L.A.

With two healthy knees, Bynum is a Laker for life. But last summer, with Bynum’s contract set to expire within the year, the Lakers decided they didn’t want to commit franchise-player money to a player with such damaged knees – a player who has played in barely more than 60 percent of possible regular season games over the course of his career. So after some complicated negotiations, they moved Bynum to Philadelphia as part of a four-team trade that brought Dwight Howard to L.A.

Bynum never played a dribble of basketball for the 76ers. He was diagnosed with bone bruises in both knees before the start of training camp, further injured his left knee during a now-infamous bowling game over the winter, and ultimately had arthroscopic surgery on both knees in March, ending any chance he would have had to suit up for the Sixers.

By the time Bynum declared for free agency after the season, the Sixers, and their fans, enthusiastically showed him the door. The Sixers had given up veteran cornerstone Andre Iguodala and promising young center Nikola Vucevic to get Bynum. Bynum gave them nothing in return.

Bynum’s attitude often further complicates matters. He has a long history of immature behavior. He swears during live interviews. He’s been known to jack up random three-pointers during games. He’s dished out a few violent fouls that can only be described as punk behavior – most notably in the 2011 playoffs, when the Lakers were on the verge of being swept by the eventual champion Dallas Mavericks.

With the Lakers trailing by a few touchdowns late in the game, Bynum blatantly threw his elbow into the rib cage of then-Dallas guard J.J. Barea, as Barea was driving to the basket. Barea crumpled to the ground and Bynum was swiftly ejected, throwing off his jersey as he was escorted to the locker room.

None of that is so bad that it’s unforgivable. Bynum committed a far greater infraction when he put off a knee surgery to attend the 2010 World Cup after the Lakers won their most recent championship. Bynum had already played through a torn meniscus in his knee for the duration of the playoffs. The delay in seeking medical treatment after the season (he didn’t have surgery until the tail end of July) caused him to miss the start of the following season.

Missing games due to knee injuries is one thing. Missing them due to irresponsibility is another.

This is the package that is Andrew Bynum. He’s immensely talented, and he’s accomplished a lot in his career thus far, but between knees that Sixers doctors reportedly referred to as “degenerative” and a history of sideshow-acting, most of the league views him as more trouble than he’s worth.

So why did the Cavs want this guy? Are the Cavs that desperate?

Desperate? No. Scavengers? Yes.

Seven-foot, 290-pound, 25-year-old centers with an all-star appearance and two NBA titles on their resume don’t hit the open market all that often. Seven-foot, 290-pound, 25-year old former all-stars and NBA champions willing to give the Cleveland Cavaliers the time of day? Virtually unheard of.

The only way a talent like Bynum ends up in a town like Cleveland of his own free will is if fate throws a monkey wrench into his career. For the Cavs, Bynum’s knee injuries, his waste of a season in Philly and his threadbare market value comprised a perfect storm of sorts. Bynum needs a chance to resuscitate his career. The Cavs were reportedly the only team willing to give him $6 million guaranteed to give him that chance.

What do the Cavs get out of it? The opportunity to just maybe give Kyrie Irving the one thing LeBron never had in seven seasons as a Cav: A legitimate second all-star for a teammate.

And if this all works out while the situation in Miami starts to decline, the Cavs can finagle the numbers enough to extend Kyrie, pick up the second-year option on Bynum and still have enough space left to offer LeBron a max deal next summer. That would be the most perfect of perfect storms: A “big three,” right here on the North Coast.

For $6 million and no guaranteed salary past this season, Bynum is worth the risk for a Cavs team that has to pull out all the stops in order to try and make the playoffs with room to spare this coming season. If Bynum can once again achieve the heights of his Lakers career, he is arguably the best low-post scorer in the game. He has an extremely rare combination of Brahman-bull strength, upper-body coordination and a feathery shooting touch that allows him to fight through defenders, spin around them and flick the ball over them.

It should be noted that Bynum’s career-best 2011-12 season came with Mike Brown at the helm. Bynum and Brown butted heads at the outset of Brown’s short Lakers tenure, but after Bynum bought into Brown’s defense-begets-offense philosophy, Bynum was a force. Brown has brought out the best in Bynum before; the Cavs are counting on him to do it again.

But in order for that to happen, Bynum’s knees have to let it happen.

The knees that drove him out of L.A. and out of Philly are the knees that made him desperate enough to sign with the one team willing to give him another chance. This is the fact of life in Cleveland. Unless they’re drafted, star players come here with warts, or they don’t come here at all.

Four years ago, the Cavs tried to squeeze one more year out of an aging Shaq in an effort to win a championship and keep LeBron. It didn’t work out in the end. But give the Cavs credit: They keep trying, they keep looking for creative ways to pad their talent, in a market where the means are limited.

Three years to the day after “The Decision,” the Cavs, with a franchise history much longer on heartbreak than triumph, were willing to sign Bynum, warts and all, and dream of a pathway, however uncertain, to better days ahead.