Breaking News: Cleveland Browns fire Head Coach Mangini

News just out of Berea is that Mike Holmgren has fired Eric Mangini as Browns coach.

The Browns finished ugly losing their last four games including getting trounced by the Steelers in the season finale. Despite the awful finish I saw signs of improvement. In 2009 they hardly seemed competitive until the last month of the season. This season the only two blowouts were the two losses to Pittsburgh.

I thought there was a chance they could bring Mangini back with some changes to his coaching staff. No matter what the decision was going to be with Mangini it was clear that offensive coordinator Brian Daboll was not going to be retained. Some of the other coaches have a chance to stay.

Obviously, there is still a talent gap between the Browns and the top teams. Making things worse were the ankle injuries suffered by the quarterbacks. Starter Jake DelHomme and his backup Senaca Wallace both incurred ankle injuries forcing the team to play rookie Colt McCoy sooner than desired and then McCoy also went out for several games with an ankle injury of his own. Another injury that really hurt was a knee injury to LB Scott Fujita. Fujita was a leader on defense. This team is not that far away, but must have another good draft to close the talent gap. Good teams become great when they have the depth of talent to weather injuries.

Hope for the Browns?

Except for one playoff appearance, the Cleveland Browns have been awful since returning to the NFL in 1999. This year has been particularly painful for Browns fans. The team is 1 and 7 and has been incredibly inept on offense. By point of reference, the Saints defense has scored a couple more touchdowns than the Browns offense. Maybe I'm a hopelessly optimistic fan, but I get some minor measure of hope from this interview of Coach Mangini. A lot of the interview could be dismissed as coach talk. However, one item jumped out from the interview. Over the last few years Browns fans have bemoaned the lack of discipline and excessive penalties.

Mangini: It's been frustrating, and what's frustrating is the amount of self-inflicted wounds. Now where we've been great is penalties. We're number one in the NFL in penalties, but we hired Dick McKenzie, who once was the head of officials. He not only does our challenges at the games, but he coaches our officials every day. So we have a coach for our officials who officiate practice, and they've been great.

We track every penalty every day, and we went from 32nd in the NFL last year to first this year. And that's a sign of discipline. That's a sign of growth.

Football success is predicated on discipline. Yes, you need talent, but talented teams without discipline lose. This team started 1 and 7 and I'll go out on a limb and predict a 5 and 11 final record.

Browns Solve All Their Problems

The Cleveland Browns in the midst of an awful season (current record 1-7) solved all their problems yesterday by firing General Manager George Kokinis. Who? Exactly.

I'm not defending Kokinis or claiming he did a great job. I will say he was not the main reason this team has only won one game and looked worse than pathetic on offense. The job of a general manager is to hire the coaching staff, oversee the scouting department, and assemble the on field talent. How much of that has Kokinis been able to influence? Well, the head coach Eric Mangini was hired two weeks before Kokinis. So, we can't blame Kokinis for Mangini. The April draft was graded as above average. In hindsight, any draft can be nit-picked by pointing out players who were by-passed who did better than the player selected. Many have said they should have taken Rey Maulaluga in the second round instead of a receiver. Maualuga ended up going to divisional rival Cincinnati Bengals and is having a good rookie season. However, people forget why Maualuga fell to the second round - he was considered a character risk (never an issue for the Bengals) due to a couple of altercations in college and in pre-draft work he didn't impress scouts add that to a past knee injury and he was too big a risk for a first round investment.

Whatever Kokinis did or didn't do, his share of the blame pales in comparison to Mangini's. I'm not say Mangini should be fired just that it would have made a lot more sense than canning Kokinis. This move just makes ownership look foolish and reactionary. The only thing that could make this move seem reasonable is if Kokinis committed a firing offense that they are not disclosing or they already had a top level replacement lined up. There were no rumors of misbehavior on the part of Kokinis, which leaves the question who is the "great" GM they have line up as replacement? If they didn't have a replacement lined up then there was absolutely no reason to make this move now.

Bottom line: I currently have zero confidence in team owner Randy Lerner and his management team to run this team or even choose the right replacement for Kokinis