Kevin Love out 4-6 Months After Successful Shoulder Surgery
April 30, 2015Cavalier Film Room: Offense, Party of Two
April 30, 2015If you’ll be among those watching coverage of the 2015 NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting, you’ll have plenty of company. Last year’s draft coverage drew a record 45.7 million viewers during the three days of programming. The 2015 Super Bowl attracted over 114 million viewers. It was the most watched TV program of all time.
OK, that’s the Super Bowl. But the draft? Over forty-five million?
Two thousand fourteen was the third consecutive year in which an NFL game was the most watched TV show all 17 weeks of the NFL season. NFL games accounted for the top twenty most-watched TV shows last fall and 45 out of the top 50. At the top of that list was the Thanksgiving Day game between the Cowboys and Eagles with 32 million viewers. Also included on that list was the seventh game of the World Series. That came in at No.21 with 23.5 million viewers. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade at 25, drew 22.6 million and an episode of 60 Minutes was at No.49 with 18.4 million.
NCIS was the only non-NFL program which held two spots among the top fifty, at 44 and 50. Of course Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) was the starting quarterback for the UCLA Bruins in 1972-73, so I suppose football gets some of the credit for that as well.
But the draft? Over forty-five million?
But why this growing fascination with the NFL draft? After all not a single yard will be gained or lost over these three days. It wasn’t that long ago when it seemed “Monday morning quarterbacking” was as much of an indulgence as football fans would allow themselves. But a whole lot changed on Sept 7, 1979, the date of the first telecast of ESPN’s Sports Center. The following year, ESPN covered its first NFL draft and thirty-six years later we’re still wondering if there are any limits to America’s obsession with NFL Football.
Today, with the vast universe of information and means of instant communication at our disposal, not only are fans not satisfied with Monday morning quarterbacking, they’re also not content with second-guessing the coach. In fact, we’re at the point now, it seems, where fans are under the impression that the job of the General Manager has been democratized. What next? Concerning the NFL and the quality of the entertainment it provides, one of my offspring told me recently, “The only owners I trust implicitly are the ones who own the Green Bay Packers.”
But anyone who has been a General Manager can attest to the truth behind the warning, be careful what you wish for. Note the word “nightmares” in Tom Callahan’s 2007 book, “The GM: The inside story of a dream job and the nightmares that go with it.” Callahan is the fly-on-the-wall storyteller of the 2006 final season of New York Giants’ General Manager, Ernie Accorsi. Accorsi, of course, was the General Manager and Executive Vice President of Football Operations for the Cleveland Browns for seven seasons, from 1985 to 1992. He was the GM who contrived (not too strong a term) to acquire Bernie Kosar through the 1985 Supplemental Draft. Prior to his seven seasons with the Browns, he was Assistant GM (1976-1981) and GM (1982-1983) for Robert Irsay’s Baltimore Colts. After Cleveland, he was Assistant GM (1994-1997) and GM (1994-2007) for the Giants.
♦♦♦
Not only did Accorsi have the misfortune of working for two franchises who were plotting to abandon their home towns, he was also involved in the two major cases of quarterbacks who refused to sign with the teams who drafted them. While with Baltimore, Accorsi drafted John Elway with the first pick of the 1983 draft, only to have Elway refuse to play for the Colts. After his boss, Robert Irsay, traded Elway to Denver without his GM’s knowledge, Accorsi resigned.
Then during the 2004 draft, Accorsi found himself on the other side of that same fence, when Eli Manning refused to sign with the San Diego Chargers who drafted him. Accorsi engineered a trade for Manning by giving up Philip Rivers and three draft picks for Manning.
By all accounts Accorsi had a long and distinguished career for three different organizations. Under his General Managership, two of his teams, the Browns and Giants, had a respectable degree of success. But if you take a brief, sideways look at Cleveland’s draft picks from 1985 to 1992 it’s hard to be impressed. The Browns selected Kosar in the Supplemental Draft and Reggie Langhorne in the 7th round. There was Webster Slaughter in the 2nd round in 1986 and not much else. In 1987, Mike Junkin was the first round pick. (Please don’t remind us what Marty said about him.) Clifford Charlton and Michael Dean Perry were No.1 and No.2 in 1988. Eric Metcalf was No.1 in 1989 and, again, not much else. In 1990, once again without a first round pick, Leroy Hoard and Anthony Pleasant were at two and three. Free Safety, Eric Turner was chosen with the first pick of the 1991 draft and Tommy Vardell with the first pick of 1992.
You can be forgiven if most of these names are unrecognizable to you but the picks not mentioned are even less memorable.
This is not, for at least two reasons, to disparage the personal record or qualifications of Ernie Accorsi. He was, after all, just one person and it obviously takes a great deal more than that for an NFL organization to get consistently good at drafting and roster building. For another thing, the process itself is top heavy with failures. On the other hand, after seven years, you would think that Accorsi would have put in place the staff and systems to get the Browns on the right path. But the 1993-1995 drafts were pretty dismal as well.
The General Manager job? Well, there’s always that risk of working for an owner like Art Modell, who didn’t really want a GM, so much as a co-pilot for the job. When Accorsi came to Cleveland in 1985, Sam Rutigliano was the head coach and left-hander Paul McDonald was the quarterback. Accorsi remembers McDonald being a great guy but having a “big windup,” saying, “That’s okay if you’re Warren Spahn, but NFL defensive backs are way too fast for that.” So when Accorsi told Modell that the Browns have no chance for long term success with McDonald at QB, Modell yelled at him, “Don’t tell me that.” He was upset because Rutigliano had just that offseason talked Modell into letting Brian Sipe go to the USFL in favor of Paul McDonald. That slo-mo release of McDonald’s could have been spotted by satellite, but neither Modell nor Rutigliano noticed.
After a one and seven start, Modell fired Rutigliano “on an impulse,” as Accorsi phrased it, and then Accorsi had to talk Modell down from what would have been a fruitless and embarrassing attempt to pry Joe Paterno away from Penn State. Eventually they hired Marty Schottenheimer. But a short time later, after the two big playoff losses to Denver in 1987 and 1988, Modell fired Schottenheimer as well.
Eventually, after a brief interlude with Bud Carson and Jim Shofner, Accorsi hired Bill Belichick. Accorsi had interviewed him two years prior, just as the Browns were signing Bud Carson. But of that interview Accorsi said, Belichick was so good, “it was like listening to John F. Kennedy when he was running for president. You said to yourself, ‘This guy has been preparing to be president since he was ten years old.’ That’s the feeling I got with Belichick.” However, prior to finalizing Belichick’s hire, Modell called Accorsi to tell him he had hired Mike White. Again, Accorsi had to talk Modell out of an impulse decision and then go and un-hire Mike White.
Over his thirty-five years in the business, Accorsi obviously invested a great deal of his professional life in the NFL draft but there are precious few specifics in Callahan’s book about the art of drafting and roster-building. In fact, perhaps the most revealing story Accorsi told was one he’d heard from Mike Brown, the son of Paul Brown. The Browns had gone to ten straight championship games with Otto Graham at quarterback but in 1956, the first year without Graham, the Browns had a losing season. At the next draft, Paul Brown was desperate for a quarterback and he had his sights set on Len Dawson. Mike Brown described his dad as so nervous he could hardly breathe as the selections were being made. And then it happened, the Pittsburgh Steelers selected Len Dawson ahead of the Browns. Paul Brown dropped his head on the table in despair. Mike pleaded with his dad to do something because they were on the clock. With his head still on the table he muttered, “I guess we’re stuck with Jim Brown.”
Another note of interest is Ernie Accorsi talking about the logistics in the room where the Giants organization gathered on draft day. He pointed out the absolute necessity of making sure that everyone gets their say. After Tom Brady started winning Super Bowls for New England, Accorsi went back and read the various Giants’ reports on Brady. Everyone ripped Brady, except for one guy, Whitey Walsh, who predicted precisely what happened with Brady’s career. Accorsi said, “He was the only guy who saw it. Sometimes you have to listen to the one guy.”
Accorsi also described how he got into the habit of leaving the room when taking calls from teams for a last minute deal, “because everybody is trying to screw you … I say ‘no’ to almost everything. I’m not going to sell my scouts down the river.”
♦♦♦
If there is a unique perspective on what kind of players he wanted to draft, it’s in this quote: “When we select players, we are selecting people. In the final analysis it’s not the biggest and fastest player that prevails. It’s the best competitor. The best man … [An old Marine] once told me, ‘I learned two things from the Marine Corps. Officers eat last, and the troops fight for each other.’ They don’t fight for their commanders. They don’t fight for their division. They fight for their buddies. When I select a football player for the Giants, I can’t help thinking that. Will this guy be a good teammate? Will this be the kind of man that my players will fight for? Because that’s how you win …”
Less than a year ago, July 2014, Bryce Petty made this kind of impression on Trent Dilfer’s Elite 11 staff: Petty “… wowed everyone — including the Army Rangers and Navy SEALS who Dilfer brought in to administer his first big challenge to his young QBs — with his grit and resolve up in Oregon. In fact, Petty so impressed Command Sgt. Maj. Todd Burnett, the leader of a six-and-a-half-hour training session, that Burnett approached the 6-foot-3-inch, 235-pound Texan and said, ‘I don’t get easily impressed, but I’d go to war with you,’ before handing the quarterback his own hat as a sign of respect.” (The QB, by Bruce Feldman)
So if you’re still intent on pursuing a career as a Freelance General Manager, here is that part of the story where Browns fans are encouraged to enjoy this year’s draft proceedings in a kind of safe space, in a way that will ward off the heartburn and the heartache or, at the very least, postpone it.
- We might think we know a lot about draft prospects and maybe we do. But we don’t know the answer to the big question, whether they’ll succeed in the NFL. Not even the best of the best among the highly-paid professionals knows that answer for sure. That’s a good thing to tell ourselves. It will help us relax.
- The Browns might select some player we don’t much care for, and maybe, just as we thought, he’ll be a flop. That might happen, but if it does, it won’t happen this weekend. That would occur much later. So maybe we’ll want to complain then, but there’s not much point in doing so now. That would be like complaining on Thursday about a Browns defeat at the hands of the Steelers in 2018.
- No matter who the Browns select, we won’t really know whether it’s a good pick, bad pick or something in between. And no matter what Ray Farmer or anyone else in the Browns’ organization says, they don’t know either, not until later. We also don’t know how long it will take for history’s final judgment. Six months, a year, two years? We can celebrate before anything good actually happens or we can complain before anything bad actually happens. So maybe at this point it would be a good idea to tell ourselves, “Well, we gave it our best shot … we’ll see.”
- No matter what happens during this draft, there’s a very real possibility that someone we haven’t thought of, or know about, will surface and end up doing something extraordinary for Cleveland football. It could be someone like that 13th-round pick of the Browns in 1972 who ended up becoming an NFL MVP. It could be someone like that backup college quarterback, drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1958, a complete unknown, going nowhere in the NFL until he demanded a trade and came to the Browns on his 26th birthday in July 1962. A year and a half later he led the Browns’ offense to the championship. Who knows, such a person might be on the Browns’ roster already. How can we really know?
- We can hope. We can hope all we want. Hoping is OK. Venting, on the other hand, is not so good. Psychologists used to think venting was a good thing, like relieving some kind of built-up pressure, like your boiler’s pressure relief valve. Now, they say, they got that wrong. Turns out that was a bad analogy and a bad idea. Turns out rants just produce more rants that make even less sense.
- If we fans are ambushed by the stress of events, gratitude is always a great antidote. There’s plenty to be grateful for during such moments. We can be grateful we have an NFL team to follow. That’s never a given, as we know. We can be grateful for the past efforts of Browns players who have provided some terrific entertainment over the years. We can be grateful (if we’re old enough) that we witnessed one of the greatest athletes in human history, playing fullback for the Cleveland Browns. We can be grateful to have learned humility from the mistakes of others (and our own) and to avoid over-the-top platitudes for unproven commodities (Marty Schottenheimer regarding Mike Junkin) and the groupthink psychology of disparagement (the entire braintrust of the NY Giants, save one, regarding Tom Brady). We can also be grateful for all this electronic wizardry that allows us to watch the proceedings in real time and in crisp, clear color, and to instantly communicate our reactions (snarky and otherwise) to each other. And, let’s face it men, no matter what kind of hair we have, or how much of it we have, we can be grateful this week for the fashion standard set by Mel Kiper.
- The one element in sports that has the biggest impact on our peace of mind is our ability to handle losing. We tend not to face this very often or very honestly. But on a fairly regular basis we get reminders of the inherent risks to ourselves and each other, and to the sport itself, and of how badly things can go if we don’t confront it. The Boston Celtics last week gave us the most recent example. This business of selecting college players for potential careers in the NFL is, after all, about improving the chances of winning.
The deeper questions about sports as entertainment and the gazillions who watch can be addressed another day, but, this weekend, the Browns will not lose. Guaranteed. The Browns are undefeated in 2015 thus far and when the NFL draft draws to a conclusion they’ll still be undefeated. As a matter of fact, it’s a virtual certainty that no one will suffer a concussion or a pulled hamstring during the entire process. In many ways, the real news won’t occur until actual games are played.
On the other hand, if Mel Kiper shows up with a buzzcut, stop the presses. We have a new headline.
11 Comments
There’s a guy who believed in his system. I love this quote: “I’m not going to sell my scouts down the river.”
you have to build the foundation you believe in, and then TRUST it to inform you. I feel like this is a lost art, not just with the Cleveland Browns but in many a milieu.
Accorsi used picks to get USFL guys, which was a big part of the Browns rebuild in the Kosar era. Their output was significantly better than most of what they woulda got from the selections.
“Or just try to scout every player on your own and be so confident that you wont botch it!”
– Phil Savagge
Thanks to Mr. P. for that vast and gracious pre-draft repast. I feel as full as I do after a 7-course Thanksgiving dinner……..and I compare that to much of the other draft news which I would characterize as a room full of parrots all squawking,”Marcus Mariota, Marcus Mariota…..r-r-r-a-a-a-c-k!…….Marcus Mariota.” It’s nice to leave that cacophony and enter this nice oak-paneled dining room and see all the polished silverware. Had a few laughs and learned some stuff too! Now bring on the draft (and bring me three offensive players with the first three picks).
So many great tidbits in here, like PB being depressed at missing on Dawson for J Brown.
The dichotomy of not selling your scouts down the river vs. sometimes, you need to listen to the one.
I’m ready for the draft. Picking up fixins for nachos after work. Same plan as recent years: NFL network, and ESPN only during commercials. The least amount of Berman exposure as possible.
Shout out to Mike Johnson.
Thanks Richard. Keeps things in perspective. I think the draft is fun because it gives us hope. Hope that a pro-bowl player or future HOF player is selected. Hope that our team will be improved.
No matter how much I (we) think we know about the players being drafted, or how to build a team, or what the team’s biggest needs are; the GM’s, coaches, and scouts know way more. So I (we) have no business questioning their picks at this time.
I just hope Jimmy Haslem keeps his thoughts to himself and lets the GM and coaches make the decisions – LOL.
great article Richard …
By the way, with Bradford’s injury history, why in the world wouldn’t he jump at signing an extension?
Please forget this guys name.
Excellent point.