Johnny Manziel: Swan Won't Return His Calls

[jlj3184]

technically he sucked more dick than a 5 dollar whore on the vegas strip. anyone that watched yesterdays game and thought "man i know manziel sucked, but i would rather have them than hoyer" needs to be put in a fucking mental institution, and never again express their opinion about the sport of football.

manziel, by any fucking metric known to man was not only bad, he was historically bad.

i am absolutely convinced you run that site.

Bob, take a Xanax. No need to get so worked up.

 

[Soda]

Has anyone read this Kosar piece? He wants to say more than he's saying, I just can't pin about whom he's talking... Either way, terrible look for what's otherwise been a positive year... Is this something about Jimmy calling the shots regarding which QB plays?

http://www.cleveland.com/browns/index.ssf/2014/12/bernie_kosar_says_johnny_manzi.html#incart_m-rpt-1

BEREA, Ohio -- Bernie Kosar ripped the Browns' top brass Monday, saying Johnny Manziel and any other quarterback is destined to fail here because of the lack of a winning culture.

In an interview on The Mike Trivisonno show on WTAM 1100, Kosar said he's been talking all year about "how we're limited with our weapons offensively and it is somewhat of a tough spot for Johnny given this team and given this organization. It's just a complete recipe for a disaster.''

He said the quarterbacks keep changing, but the results are the same because of the way the team is run. He never specifically mentions owner Jimmy Haslam or general manager Ray Farmer by name, blaming the problems on the front office in general.

Haslam, in his second full year of ownership, is committed to turning the franchise around and is working hard to do that. Coach Mike Pettine has talked about changing the culture from the moment he walked in the door. The Browns were all alone in first place in the AFC North this year before losing four of their last five games.

"You can't put these kids (the quarterbacks) in these spots,'' Kosar said. "It's almost abuse. If you're going to keep running it the way we're running it, we may as well do nothing (to fix the quarterback situation), because you'll kill two more kids coming in here. It'll fail. It does not matter right now.''

Kosar, who was taken off the Browns preseason broadcasts on WKYC this year and has long wanted to help run the Browns, said, "We've had a headache. I've had a headache for 15 years with this and it's not stopping. It's getting worse."

Kosar said it doesn't matter if it's Brian Hoyer, Manziel or anyone else they can put behind center.

"You can take out Brian, you can take out Johnny Manziel's name and you can plug in (Tim) Couch.....(Derek) Anderson, Brady Quinn, Colt McCoy...the names change, but the way we do things as a culture above them is still the same and yeah he wasn't ready, but the team's not ready. December is when teams have to play good.''

Kosar said the Browns set the bar too high for Manziel by the way they praised him all week.

"They've been talking so positively like 'this is the savior' and that's what bad organizations do,'' he said. "They set these quarterback controversies up and it kind of takes the heat off of them and it gives everybody a little glimmer of hope. ...The organization and the players and coaches actually thought he was going to do good. I know they believed he was going to do good.''

Kosar said he's been hearing the same refrain since 1999 about the 21 quarterbacks who have started a game since then.

"I'm 51,'' he said. "At this pace, I'm going to die by 60 and for the last 25 years of my life, all I'm going to talk about is, 'Who do you think the quarterback should be?' That's all we talk about. And you can't fix it until you fix it above it.''

Kosar stressed that he's not pinning any of this on coach Mike Pettine.

"For all the reporters that listen to our show that want to say I'm dogging him, absolutely not,'' said Kosar. "He was hired under this set of rules where everybody gets to giggle and laugh and talk about things and everybody is involved in everything. He was hired in a tough, tough spot in a culture above him that is not a football culture. It's not a winning football culture. It goes above that.''

He also absolved the players.

"I ain't coming down on the players now,'' he said. "These are 25-year-olds. Yeah, they're men and yeah they're professionals, but, heck, at 25, did you know everything in life? You need leadership, and leadership just doesn't mean a player. There's a culture that's established within the building of intensity and focus and conviction and love for the game. You have to have a single-mindedness, a focus, in order to win."

Asked if the Browns should bench Josh Gordon, he said, "I wonder what culture they stand for and what their rules are systematically as to what they're supposed to do and how they're taught. The issue is systemically from a culture in Berea, they've got to get it together because I know of anyone who can be consistently successful within this culture, within this organization right now. You can't play football like this.''

Kosar, who was once a paid consultant for the Browns, said the front office doesn't have the right mindset to win. The Browns had no comment.

"When you have a front office that's really uneducated, and I'm not talking about just the coach, there's way above him that deserves this, they don't know how to lead and organize and set a culture to play winning football, to win in the NFL consistently,'' he said.

Throughout the interview he cites Patriots coach Bill Belichick as the model for success.

"This is an obsessive game of high stakes, high competition, and the feeling of winning is good, but the distaste that those guys have, Belichick, have for losing fuels them to obsessively focus on their job and what's going to take to win games,'' he said. "You can't expect a 23-, a 25-year-old kid to know that. if they're allowed to go out and talk about everything and laugh it up and yuk it up, then they're not told and then if they don't see the examples from the people above them, then how are they supposed to know?"

He said teams like the Patriots and Packers know how to win at this time of year, citing a television shot of Hoyer and Manziel chuckling on the sidelines of the fourth quarter of Sunday's 30-0 loss to the Bengals.

"You didn't see any chuckling or smiling (out of the Patriots or Packers) like we saw on the sidelines yesterday,'' he said.

He ripped quarterbacks coach Dowell Loggains for texting owner Jimmy Haslam on draft day and imploring him to draft Manziel. Loggains also said he texted coach Mike Pettine.

"That's not acceptable,'' said Kosar. "It can't happen. (Even) the defensive people are talking about how Johnny is going to do. They were like us fans. Even the head coach said, 'Hey we're kind of looking forward to watching him play.' Everybody wanted to watch him play instead of do their job.

"When you start worrying about everybody else's and you don't focus on your job that's what happens.''

 

[The Human Q-Tip]

He played like shit. Hoyer played like shit for four weeks.

Do we really need to parse advanced stats to tell us how poorly our players performed?

The difference is that Hoyer played like shit, and was regressing rather than progressing, after having had more than 5 years and a dozen starts in the league. Hoyer's performance didn't tell us that Manziel was the answer, but it damn sure told us that Hoyer himself was not.

Manziel shit the bed in his first start as a rookie QB. If he doesn't show anything more the last two games, then it might qualify as sufficiently disastrous as to warrant drafting some competition. But, he's got two games to show something more than he just showed.

 

[Binkster]

Historically there's been worse.

Nice way to justify it.

Sure, Kim Jong Un is a despicable leader... But Hitler killed more.

 

[Shakalu M.D.]

Yes he sucked, but at the end of the day it's one game and it counts the same as if he would have played amazing and lost. If Hoyer gets 4 games of absolute shit play, then we might as well give Manziel the next two.



Historically there's been worse.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk at your local pub.

Actually according to QBR, no there hasn't

 

[Spectre]

this doesnt sound like the qb everyone keeps talking about. not alot fo guys would own up to a lack of confidence.

Johnny talks like a seasoned pro but he needs to back that up. It's not just a confidence issue... He admitted in pre-game that he's no Brady/Manning in the film room and that this is the first week he's given top notch effort. I'm glad that he's willing to own the reasons why he was garbage on Sunday but how does he respond?

What will make Johnny a good pro is if he takes those things he's admitting and works his ass off to eliminate them. He needs to take the embarrassment he felt on Sunday and realize that there is no "Johnny Football" if he sucks, just Johnny Manziel the bust.

Obviously I'm not willing to write off a guy after one game but it's one thing to admit to his faults, it's another thing to put his celebrity aside and bust his ass to eliminate them.

 

[MoFlo]

Oh, ESPN

 

[The Oi]

So, I don't watch ESPN under any circumstances with the exception of actual Cleveland games.

What are they saying on Manziel?

 

[Phills14]

View: https://twitter.com/KeithBritton86/status/544910058518499328


Classic Browns if true.

 

[AZ_]

View: https://twitter.com/KeithBritton86/status/544910058518499328

Anyone who drafted him was doing just that, to some extent.

But as I said during the draft, it's more justifiable as the 22nd overall pick as opposed to earlier in the draft where some people thought he should go.

If they really fall out of love with him this quickly, I've got no problem trading him this off-season and moving forward with a new plan at quarterback.

 

[Phills14]

http://beta.espn.go.com/nfl/insider...g-johnny-manziel-cleveland-browns-nfl/insider

Johnny Manziel was about as bad as the Cleveland Browns could have imagined Sunday in his first regular-season NFL start. Two first-half interceptions and another pick wiped out by a penalty illustrated why the Browns turned to their rookie quarterback only as a last resort, well after it had become clear Brian Hoyer wasn't playing well enough to win consistently.

The Browns were looking for a spark from Manziel, but instead they got an implosion in his debut. Manziel finished Cleveland's 30-0 home loss to Cincinnati with 80 yards passing on 18 attempts. His 1.0 Total QBR score was the lowest for an NFL starter this season.

Odd as it sounds, this was just the type of disaster Manziel needed to shorten the long odds against him becoming a consistently productive quarterback in the NFL. A couple of more rough outings to close the 2014 season would help even more. It's unconventional thinking, but the conventional kind does not apply to Manziel -- for reasons we'll explore in the first of my 10 takeaways from Week 15.

1. Manziel must fail early before he can succeed.

David Carr and Alex Smith lived the classic cautionary tales early in their careers, suffering through enough hardship to imperil their football futures. No one is suggesting a five-year run of futility would help Manziel become a good player. But three rough games to end the season might do the trick. A former general manager felt strongly about this when I asked him about Manziel back in August.

"I personally think [Manziel] will be good, but he will fail first," the former GM said at the time. "If Manziel has success early, look out. He will not mature. If Manziel falls on his face and realizes how hard he has to work, it will help. He is too competitive. When he realizes how tough it is, he will have to go about it a different way."

Before the draft, a current GM said he thought Manziel would be "a turnover machine" in his first couple of seasons, and that would not change unless Manziel could discipline himself the way Russell Wilson has done with Seattle. Wilson, unlike Manziel, was a long-term college starter with experience in a pro-style system. He also was mature. Wilson was the anti-Manziel in so many ways, except that he likewise was shorter than the typical NFL starter, had big hands and could run well.

"Manziel is such a wild card -- his whole game has to change," this GM said in early May. "He has to reinvent his game at this level. A lot of things he [did in college], he will not get away with in the NFL. ... I could be dead wrong, but I'd think his first year or two, he'll be a turnover machine. Mike Evans bailed him out on so many jump balls [at Texas A&M] where he threw it up on his back foot."

Manziel, barely a week past his 22nd birthday, was indeed a turnover machine in his debut. When he threw off his back foot, there was no one there to bail him out. The speed advantages Manziel enjoyed in college appeared to be gone against Cincinnati. Any quarterback fitting Manziel's profile will succeed in the long term to the extent that he can become a polished pocket passer. This season in the NFL has shown how difficult that process can be for Robert Griffin III especially, but also for Colin Kaepernick and Cam Newton to some extent.

"You have to make the refined play at a certain point," a defensive coach said. "Kaepernick never makes the refined play. Will Manziel? He might have some success running around, but then the pro teams adjust. It is like clockwork. You have to start making the refined play."

No team likes suffering through a loss as brutal as the one the Browns did Sunday, especially not a team that was right in the playoff hunt just a few weeks ago. But in terms of Manziel eventually finding success as Cleveland's starting QB, it could wind up being a good thing in the long run.

 

[Soda]

It's sad how quick this is all going to wind down.. Not that I'm a big Johnny fan, I'm not. I can just see everything has been set into motion, like it does just about every year.

The young guy is put in to improve the team, he's struggling, front office gets chastised by anyone who can see, fans get super upset that it's happening again, ownership reacts and gets the next great thing, time for the guy you just put in to be labeled a failure. It's the life-cycle of just about every drafted QB since '99. I just don't understand why the same problem can't be avoided....

 

[spydy13]

It's sad how quick this is all going to wind down.. Not that I'm a big Johnny fan, I'm not. I can just see everything has been set into motion, like it does just about every year.

The young guy is put in to improve the team, he's struggling, front office gets chastised by anyone who can see, fans get super upset that it's happening again, ownership reacts and gets the next great thing, time for the guy you just put in to be labeled a failure. It's the life-cycle of just about every drafted QB since '99. I just don't understand why the same problem can't be avoided....

It's pretty simple. Everyone needs to stop being so reactionary in this city. So many people are acting like we know for a fact that Johnny won't develop because of the horrible game he played on Sunday.

The organization also needs to make sure, as Keys has said earlier, that they are 100% invested in the QB they draft. That completely unwavering support is the only way to get through the bad times when fans are calling for heads to roll.

I still believe that unless they get blown away with an offer in the offseason they should let Johnny play the majority of next season. It took us that long to find out that Hoyer wasn't the guy, but that was still a worthwhile endeavor.

 

[Soda]

It's pretty simple. Everyone needs to stop being so reactionary in this city. So many people are acting like we know for a fact that Johnny won't develop because of the horrible game he played on Sunday.

It's a very simple resolution that will take about 10 years to change.

Culture doesn't change overnight. That applies to both the fans and the organization. The Browns have the advantage of being able to be sold away from a big issue; that still doesn't mean the change will be implemented overnight..

 

[AZ_]

I'm honestly more worried about the culture of drafting terrible quarterbacks as opposed to "not letting them develop."

Perhaps that's just me, but no amount of development was ever going to turn their last three first round QBs into a good player.

They were wholly flawed prospects who rose up draft boards for one reason or another while those flaws were pushed aside.