Quarterbacks Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes are examples that there is no tried-and-true patch to the Super Bowl. (Getty Images)
What the Browns can learn from the Chiefs and Eagles
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Editor's note: Tony Grossi is a Cleveland Browns analyst for TheLandOnDemand.com and 850 ESPN Cleveland. He has covered the Browns since 1984.
PHOENIX, AZ
This is my 36th Super Bowl, not my XXXVIth.
Over the years, I like to think I innovated Super Bowl coverage in two ways.
A long time ago, I stopped using Roman numerals to distinguish Super Bowls because Roman numerals confused me.
The Plain Dealer kept editing my copy to comply with its outdated style book. But trust me, I was referring to Super Bowl 27 rather than Super Bowl XXVII, or whatever, before anybody. Nowadays, I see more media organizations dropping the arcane Roman numerals. It’s about time.
Another innovation I take credit for is leaving for home before the game is played on Sunday.
VIP guests and non-competing team personnel have been doing this for decades. But NFL writers always were obligated to stay and report on the game. Understandable, right? That was our job.
Fans, readers and editors never realized -- or cared about -- the difficulty in reporting on the season’s biggest game when squeezed like sardines into jam-packed press boxes. As credentialed media soared into the thousands, space limitations also made interviewing players after the game an exercise in futility.
It also struck me early on how much closer the TV audience got to the action than us jamokes in the press box ever could. Often, I couldn’t see replays adequately because TVs were limited. It was impossible to hear discussions of controversial plays. Reporters at games actually came to having family or friends back home relay information to them as reported on the TV broadcast.
The tipping point for me was the Super Bowl held in Jerry Jones’ shiny, new monolith in Arlington, TX, in 2011. That one, No. 45, was the one at which the NFL oversold tickets to 15,000 hastily-built temporary seats in order to break the Super Bowl attendance record.
The seats, however, were not cleared by the fire marshal in time and were deemed unsafe. The league scrambled to displace thousands of ticket-holders and eventually was sued by those who were left without seats for which they had paid thousands of dollars. I remember thinking a disaster was about to happen – the bleachers collapsing -- right up until kickoff. Further, an ice storm that paralyzed the Dallas-Fort Worth area earlier in the week had made for more logistical headaches.
After that one, I convinced my bosses at The PD it would be cheaper and better to return home before the game and write a recap off TV. They liked the idea of saving money and approved. My peers in the newspaper world were envious. Two years later, I felt even more vindicated when I watched a power outage in the Superdome suspend play of Super Bowl 47 for 34 minutes.
Now, there are two other things I’ve learned covering Super Bowls.
1. Organizations unabashedly copy the Super Bowl teams. They think they hold some kind of copyright on how to get to the championship. Even the Browns added a “Philly Special” play in 2018 after watching Doug Pederson pull that off against Bill Belichick in Super Bowl 52.
2. There are no absolutes. There are always other ways to get to the championship destination, depending on the evolution of your organization.
So with these latter points in mind, we offer a few nuggets about Philadelphia and Kansas City and how they relate to current Browns issues.
CEO coach v. offensive play-caller
Kevin Stefanski has a problem with game management, and I do think it would help him to hand off play-calling and remove his eyes from his Denny’s menu-sized play sheet to get a clearer view of things during crucial moments. It would also free him up to rally his troops on offense or defense or special teams when needed.
The argument against is that calling plays is what Stefanski does best, and that’s what he was hired to do. Well, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni was hired for his offensive expertise, too, and he called plays in his first year on the job. But guess what? He delegated play-calling this year to offensive coordinator Shane Steichen.
“I felt like I needed to make a change in the sense of how to free me up to be a better head coach, and I had a good assistant to call the plays, and so that's what I went with,” Sirianni said in June.
“What I noticed was, well, I wasn't communicating enough with [defensive coordinator Jonathan] Gannon about something, or I wasn't communicating enough about the defense about something that they needed to be pumped up or the special teams,” Sirianni continued. “I love doing that, to go over into the kickoff return and say, ‘Let's go, let's get a play going.’ There are a lot of things that have to happen on the offense before a drive starts.”
Another accomplished play-caller, Brian Daboll, also gave up play-calling to his offensive coordinator in his first season as head coach of the New York Giants. The results were equally impressive.
And yet …
Kansas City’s Andy Reid has been his own play-caller for the vast majority of his coaching career with the Eagles and Chiefs. In fact, he’s the one that popularized the laminated over-sized play sheet. And he’s been uber-successful; the fifth winningest coach in NFL history.
One time Reid gave up play-calling was to pull his former Eagles team out of an offensive slump. He let his coordinator, Doug Pederson, call plays. And when Pederson succeeded Reid as Eagles head coach, he called plays himself. And the Eagles won the Super Bowl. So there’s that.
Beefing up the defensive line
The Browns’ defensive collapse last season was due to communication breakdowns in the secondary and deficiencies on the defensive line.
Myles Garrett led the team with 16 sacks. Next-best was Taven Bryan with three. As a whole, the undersized defensive front also failed to aid an undersized set of linebackers, inviting teams with no business running the ball (Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans et al.) to gash the Browns into submission.
Meanwhile, the Eagles poured tons of money into their defensive line. It’s the biggest reason they’re in Super Bowl 57.
They led the NFL with 70 sacks in the regular season and added eight more in playoff victories over the Giants and 49ers. They have four linemen with 11 or more sacks – end Haason Reddick with 16, and 11 apiece from ends Josh Sweat and Brandon Graham. and tackle Javon Hargrave. Another tackle, Fletcher Cox, added seven. In all, 57.5 of Philadelphia’s 70 sacks in the regular season were registered by linemen.
And when the Eagles suffered some injuries in the middle of the year, they added veteran tackles Ndamukong Suh and Linval Joseph to their arsenal. They are so deep that Jordan Davis, their rookie first-pick from Georgia, the top tackle of last year’s draft, is sixth on their tackle depth chart.
This is the position group sure to be the Browns’ No. 1 priority in the offseason, starting with the addition of defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz.
How much is your quarterback worth?
The Browns' eternal search for a franchise quarterback led them to mortgaging their future in March by trading six draft picks, including three No. 1s, to the Houston Texans for Deshaun Watson. They added to that investment by signing Watson to an unprecedented five-year deal for a fully guaranteed $230 million.
Did they overpay?
The Chiefs traded three draft picks to the Buffalo Bills to move up 17 spots in the first round and select Patrick Mahomes in the 2017 draft. After Mahomes won a Super Bowl in his third season of 2019, the Chiefs awarded him with a new contract for $450 million over 10 years. Now Mahomes is appearing in his third Super Bowl in four years.
On the other hand, the Eagles have made it to the Super Bowl twice in seven years with one costly quarterback and one from the bargain basement.
In 2016, the Eagles traded five picks to the Browns, including a future No. 1, to select Wentz No. 2 overall. He helped them to the Super Bowl in his second season, though he gave way to Nick Foles because of a knee injury late in the year.
This year, the Eagles have made it to the Super Bowl in the third season of Jalen Hurts, who was a second-round pick in 2020.
