Learning to live with fumbles

Knowing how much Coach Mangini hates turnovers on offense, it must be damn hard for him to digest that it is not possible to coach emerging star fullback Peyton Hillis out of his fumbling. I've read that each week Hillis does special drills designed to get him to hang onto the ball and no matter the effort, every week Hillis coughs up a ball. I've often compared Colt McCoy to Brian Sipe, in the case of Hillis there is another reference point in Browns history that is very similar. Mike Pruitt ran like a linebacker but he also had smallish hands and often fumbled. Forrest Gregg hated Pruitt's fumbling so much that he sat him for the better part of two years. When Sam Rutigliano arrived, he decided to put this force of nature into motion and Mike Pruitt was a key part of the Browns resurgence.

It's the same story with Hillis. 250 pound players with speed and agility are rare. Keep giving him the ball, his one fumble per game is more than offset by the damage to opponents that he does on the ground on all the other plays in which he doesn't fumble.

Brown's history: Dino Hall

Working under Art Modell put enormous constraints on Brown's head coaches. The most imposing of those limits was that Browns coaches were almost certainly forced to cut players who had earned a position on the 45 man roster based on their play but whose salary was too high. The evidence of this is simply overwhelming.

Modell was cheap but he wasn't a fool. With the exception of Tom Skladany and Jack Gregory, Modell usually did not apply salary pressure to the most critical roster positions. Instead Modell likely forced coaches to make do with lesser talented players in those positions that were less visible but nontheless important. In particular backups were systematically diluted year after year to pad Modell's pockets. Modell's self imposed salary cap clearly contrasted with winning teams especially during the 1970's and it's the prime reason the Browns rarely made the playoffs in those years. One need only site the Steelers and recall that whenever an injury hit a key player, a very able backup was ready to stand in. I can recall the excellent Dirt Winston stepping up for Jack Lambert when Lambert was injured and the Steelers more than holding their own. Tony Dungy was a very good defensive backfield bench player and the Steelers defensive line was 6 deep with a great player like John Banaszak in reserve. This contrasts Modell's Browns and that lack of depth in 1978 and 1979 hurt the Browns as the season progressed and those inevitable injuries that every team suffers piled up. It's the only reason the Browns missed the playoffs those years.

As I study Brown's history, one coach who wears very well with time is Sam Rutigliano. The reason I admire Rutilgiano is that he was very creative in coming up with strategies to deal with the realities he confronted. One of those realities was Art Modell. Previous to Rutigliano in the 1970's, the coaches who toiled under Modell, when forced to cut superior players, stuck with conventional wisdom when selecting the players that Modell was in fact willing to pay for. Rutigliano on the other hand, bucked conventional wisdom in several cases. If you have to put a player on the roster at league minimum salary, why not pick a brilliant athlete who for some reason was not appreciated by others? Dino Hall was a perfect example. Hall was way too short and didn't weigh nearly enough, but he was a fantastic athlete and a great football player. Even at 5' 6", Hall made real contributions to the success of the Browns in that era.

I've often wondered what might have been the result had Rutigliano gone with this intuition a bit more often, especially on defense. In particular the 1979 Browns had an offense that was Super Bowl caliber but their defense was so full of holes that as the season wore on, they folded completely as did the Brown's playoff hopes. Perhaps a few undersized defenders who were great athletes might have patched enough holes to get the '79 Browns into the playoffs.

Vintage Browns: The 1980 Kardiac Kids

With the Super Bowl almost upon us, The Brown Log peers into the off season knowing that we'll need to dig deeper for material . Thanks to the incredible website youtube, I believe we have found a few ways to do that. So Brown Log fans, we introduce another regular feature of the Brown Log, "Vintage Browns"

There is a gentleman from Ohio who has placed countless years of videos of Brown's games he videotaped onto youtube. I discovered this youtube page a few months ago and endlessly have enjoyed viewing games that I haven't seen in 30 plus years. Using the videos from this gentleman's youtube page, we will dissect some of the greatest seasons in Browns history.

Anybody who has followed the Browns for longer than 30 years, will very fondly recall our 1980 Kardiac Kids. For those who enjoy reading, Jonathan Knight did a great job breaking the 1980 Browns down, week by week, in his book "Kardiac Kids". If you haven't read it, I highly recommend that book as a great bit of easy reading and escapism. We will try to give your eyes and ears a taste of that classic season and point out what made that team so special.

The first video presented is a Monday might game at Municipal Stadium against the Chicago Bears, in which Mike Pruitt breaks the game open late with a long touchdown run. The 80 Browns were one of the first teams to recognise that new rules that favored the passing game would forever change the face of the league. Credit has to go to Sam Rutigliano who clearly recognized that the NFL was evolving towards the pass, and he recognized that he already had some of the talent needed to take advantage of this. First of all, Rutigliano saw that Brian Sipe had what it took to lead a pass driven attack. Rutigliano also did something that was fairly unconventional in that era. He put Ozzie Newsome, a wide receiver in college, at Tight End, and he put running backs into pass patterns instead of keeping them in to block. This was an era before defenses adapted to five highly skilled receivers attacking the defensive secondary. As a result Sipe often found Greg Pruitt, Calvin Hill or Mike Pruitt matched against a slow, hapless and helpless linebacker. This in turn opened opportunities for Newsome, Rucker and Logan up top. And as you will see in this video, the fact that the 1980 Browns passed to set up the run, often created huge opportunities for Mike Pruitt.

This team can be studied in so many ways, I'm looking forward to that over the next few months.