If the Browns do indeed “blow this thing up” at the end of the season, as owner Jimmy Haslam calls it – and it appears for all the world that that will be the case – then they will once again, for seemingly the umpteenth time in the expansion era, be charged with finding the right general manager and the right head coach.
 
For the purpose of this piece, Let’s focus on the head coach.
 
And in doing that, we submit for your consideration the man who will bring his Arizona Cardinals to FirstEnergy Stadium on Sunday to face the Browns, Bruce Arians.
 
At any time during the last four or five years when they’ve been going through head coaches such as Eric Mangini, Pat Shurmur, Rob Chudzinski and now Mike Pettine, the Browns could have hired Arians, who is no stranger to the club after having served as its offensive coordinator from 2001-03 under Butch Davis. And when he left Cleveland, he didn’t go far, becoming an assistant coach with the Pittsburgh Steelers for eight years. So the Browns wouldn’t have had to strain to find him.
 
It likely would have been a great idea had they brought in Arians. History tells us so.
 
In 2012, when Indianapolis head coach Chuck Pagano, with whom he coached at Cleveland, got seriously ill and had to take a leave of absence, Arians, then the Colts’ offensive coordinator, was bumped up to take over the team on an interim basis for a good portion of the season. He did quite well, posting a 9-3 record, which included a 17-13 win over the Browns almost exactly three years ago.
 
The Colts finished first in the AFC South, an incredible turnaround since they had won just two games the previous year, but by the playoffs, Pagano had returned and assumed the head coaching duties.
 
Based on that good showing – he was named the AP Coach of the Year, making him the first interim coach to receive the honor — Arians was hired to coach the Cardinals shortly after the season was over. He replaced Ken Whisenhunt, a Browns assistant in 1999 with whom he had coached in Pittsburgh.
 
The Browns were looking for a head coach at the same time and ended up hiring Chudzinski, who lasted all of a year.
 
Arians’ first team in Arizona in 2013 finished 10-6 but, while competing in the tough NFC West with the eventual Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers, could manage only a third-place finish and missed the playoffs.
 
No matter. He had turned the Cardinals around and it showed in 2014 when he guided the club to an 11-5 record, good for second place in the division behind the NFC champion Seahawks and a wild-card playoff berth. The Cardinals were eliminated in the first round by the Carolina Panthers, but they might have – actually, probably would have – gone further had their catalyst, former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer, not been lost with an injury late in the season. Before Palmer got shelved, there were some who through the Cardinals might be the first team to make it to a Super Bowl played in their home stadium.
 
This year, the Cards are 5-2 and in first place in the West, 1½ games ahead of the St. Louis Rams (3-3), who defeated the Browns 24-6 last Sunday.
 
So, in the four-year period from 2012 to the present, Arians’ coaching record is an impressive 35-16 (.686). During that same span, the Browns are 18-37 (.327).
 
We’ve said it in this space many times in the short time this website has been up and running – and we’re certainly not the only ones, as everybody else is fully on board – that the key to success in football at all levels, especially in the NFL, is to have a great head coach and a great quarterback who are in a professional marriage, joined at the hip and on the same page.
 
See Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, Paul Brown and Otto Graham, and so on and so forth.
 
Arians and Palmer will oppose Pettine and Josh McCown in Cleveland on Sunday.
 
Guess which team is favored, and will probably win? It’s not a hard question to answer.
 
Given his first full-time chance as an NFL head coach, Arians, who really understands quarterbacks and offense (the Browns offenses he coordinated for three years scored a lot of points), has reinvigorated the career of Palmer, who, as Browns fans will recall, was a holy terror when he played in Cincinnati a decade ago.
 
Pettine, whose complete experience is as a defensive coach and thus has virtually no knowledge of quarterbacks and offense, the most important parts of today’s game, went after in free agency the last offseason the 36-year-old McCown, who has never been a consistent winner in his long and unproductive pro career, and continues to insist on starting him – if he’s healthy – instead of going to young Johnny Manziel, who may not be the answer, either, but, based on what he did in college, where he was drafted and his age (he won’t turn 23 for five weeks), he at least has the chance to be so. McCown does not. That ship has sailed.
 
And did we mention that the New York Jets, who ripped the Browns 31-10 in the opener, have a first-year head coach in Todd Bowles, who played safety for Arians 30 years ago when he was head coach at Temple and then coached with him in Cleveland?
 
OK, so the Browns missed out on Arians, but they could have hired Bowles, whose 4-2 Jets have already equaled their wins total of last year when they were 4-12, and are squarely in the AFC playoff race, especially after a close loss to the New England Patriots last Sunday.  
 
But they did not hire Arians here, which is why the Jets, along with the Cardinals, are where they’re at right now, and the Browns are where they’re at right now, getting set to blow this thing up yet again after the season.