Browns fire their alleged GM

[COB]

Randy Lerner has no f**king idea what he's doing. He's taking his crappy expansion franchise and actually making it worse.

Below is the latest from one of the sports columnists at the Dispatch. You may recall that earlier in the year, one of the other columnists wrote a column that said his 12 year old son was abandoning the Browns and becoming a fan of the Bengals.

If you are a central Ohio Bengals fan, you know that for years we've been in the minority. The Browns just had more fans. I think that will change over the next few years as the Browns continue to slide into hell.

/>http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/sports/stories/2009/11/04/hunter_11-4.ART_ART_11-04-09_C1_2BFIJT8.html?sid=101

Could the Cleveland Browns have fired anyone more blameless for that horrendous football mess on the lakefront than the general manager who really wasn't a general manager?

How about a secretary, maintenance guy or parking lot attendant? Or maybe the guy who walks team owner Randy Lerner's dog?

There is only one way this ridiculous fire-the-GM-who-was-hired-by-the-coach move works: That's if Lerner, who is quickly establishing his credentials as the dumbest owner in NFL history, hires the smartest, toughest, doesn't-give-a-damn-about-Eric-Mangini guy he can find and gives him carte blanche to do whatever is necessary to make this dysfunctional operation work.

If that means firing Mangini, the coach who would be king, do it. If that means turning offensive coordinator Brian Daboll into a glorified ball boy, do that, too. If it means trading quarterback Derek Anderson for a bag of footballs, go for it. It's the only way any of this makes sense.

Story continues belowAdvertisement Everybody in football gasped when Lerner, after firing his previous coach and general manager, hired the new coach first -- a guy who had just been fired by the New York Jets -- and then let Mangini name his pal George Kokinis as general manager.

That might work in a third-world dictatorship -- really, the guy with all of those strings attached to him only looks like a puppet -- but it doesn't work with a pro football team, especially one where the owner seems clueless and the coach is determined to always get his way.

To see coach Mangini standing in front of reporters yesterday explaining that " We felt organizationally this was the best decision in terms of moving forward" and then refusing to say much of anything else about Kokinis' firing was bizarre. Did the coach fire the GM, or did the owner? Or was it some mysterious man behind the curtain?

And if the coach can't say anything about it -- "I hope you can also respect I've added all I can add right now" was Mangini's repeated response -- why is he serving as the spokesman? Lerner said earlier that he wanted to add "a strong, credible, serious leader within the building to guide decisions in a far more conspicuous, open, transparent way," so why wasn't he at least standing before an angry public taking all the questions that Mangini refused to answer?

Lerner's predicament is easy to understand: If he dumps Mangini at this point, he's on the hook for his contract (Mangini is in the first year of a four-year, $12 million deal) while still paying the salaries of former GM Phil Savage through 2012 and ex-coach Romeo Crennel through 2011. And he also faces the public ridicule of admitting that he totally blew it when he handed Mangini the reins of the franchise. But while it might be easier for an owner to fire everybody around an unsuccessful coach, who is owed a lot of money, that rarely works.

If Lerner isn't going to fire the guy who loaded the roster with former Jets, has alienated half of his players, has totally mishandled the quarterback situation and has his team off to a 1-7 start, then he at least needs to hire a competent football man and let him run the franchise. Unfortunately, Lerner has done nothing to indicate he's capable of finding and hiring a competent guy of any kind, so the chances of that happening at this point seem pretty remote.

Barring that kind of miracle, the next-best solution is to find the person who is responsible for this nuclear waste dump of an organization and at least get him out of there before he has a chance to add to the chaos.

I'm guessing the dog walker could be next.

Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.

[HoosierCat]

He needs to hire this year's hot GM, that Mike Brown guy in Cincinnati...

[ArmyBengal]

He needs to hire this year's hot GM, that Mike Brown guy in Cincinnati...

Yeah, I understand it shouldn't take much in trade to make that move. Maybe a small box of rusty nails, and a Twix bar...