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Some good quotes in the article...
On the Browns D
“That was our point all along, let’s build the best team first, let’s not take the quarterback,” Pettine says. “There was so much pressure internally to take a quarterback with the fourth pick [but] we weren’t going to do it because the grade didn’t justify it; we weren’t going to draft for need.
If you don’t have that guy, then you need to build it like Seattle did, like San Francisco did. Get a guy with some unique traits, but first and foremost, he’s not going to lose the game for you. Building a great defense and offensive line so we can run the ball—the quarterback’s going to look good because you’re not going to be in third-and-8, you’re going to be in third-and-4. Percentage-wise you’re going to convert more. Then ask the guy to make a couple plays with his feet, complete a fourth-quarter comeback half the time. Next thing you know, you look up and you’re pretty damn good.”
Even Pettine’s own evaluation of Manziel as a prospect stated, “He has a tendency to keep both teams in the game.” He could be a polished game-manager in the future (Brett Favre was similarly reckless early in his career), but Manziel is very much a work in progress in that area. That’s why there are no plans to rush Manziel, especially with the season-opener at Pittsburgh against coordinator Dick LeBeau’s zone blitz defense. They don’t have those in the SEC.
“We felt this entire draft class, every single one of [the quarterbacks] needed a redshirt year, with Johnny really being the only one that had a chance given the right circumstances to be an opening-day starter,” Pettine says. “It could happen, but in my ideal world, it’s not opening day.”
On the Browns D
“I think it’s happened quicker here because I think it’s a smart group,” Pettine says, comparing the install to last season’s with the Bills. “I’m not saying we were dumb in Buffalo—far from it—but this is a group that I think processes, as a whole, very quickly.”
The initial playbook itself is actually quite thin, and that’s by design. “I don’t put a lot of graduate-level information in it,” Pettine says. “We know in places like New England, it’s only a matter of time that they somehow mysteriously end up with our playbook.”
But there’s some coaches that each year, teach, This what we run and that’s it. They don’t ask more of their guys. To me that’s coaching. If your guys can do more and you’re not doing more, that’s on you. Or if this is your norm and you have a pretty good team and they’re just not mentally there, then (expletive) pare it back a little bit.”
Love it- coach players differently given their skill set and mental aptitude.when we got Kris Jenkins in New York for a limited amount of time—when we had him, we didn’t want him thinking. We would build it like, ‘Hey, line up here and go, and we’ll make it right around you.’ We’ll give the thinking to the guys around you. We’ve put some of the heavy-lifting thinking on a fewer number of players.”
The Browns will feature a lot of fast motion offensively, and will be multiple with an improved running game because they’ll need to run it in Cleveland in December.
“I don’t want to be ground-and-pound,” says Pettine, distancing himself a bit from Ryan’s mantra with the Jets. “People have already attributed that to us. But I don’t. I want to score points. But I think you have to have the ability, especially here in Cleveland.”
“It’s tough when you have a certain tempo and then all of a sudden it goes 800 mph for a series. The whole rest of the game as a playcaller, I’m sitting there with one eye on the field, one eye on the call sheet thinking, Are they going to do it again? Then you end up rushing a few calls later in the game because there’s the implied threat of up-tempo. I think that’s something that smart teams do, something we’re going to do here. We’ll mix our tempos between going absolutely as fast as we can, code word, one-word calls everything (again, like New England), and we go. And then we’ll practice all those tempos, and go as slow as possible as well.”
Offensively, the Browns will also devote much time in practice to two-minute situations, third down and red zone. “That’s where you win and lose games,” Pettine says.