There is talk elsewhere on the web stating – emphatically – that the Browns’ total rebuild isn’t working.

 

I’m here to state emphatically – again, for perhaps the 20th time, maybe even the 30th or more – that the total rebuild is the way to go. It’s definitely the way to go. It’s the only way to go, in fact.

 

And it isn’t even close.

 

For years in this expansion era, the Browns tried to do it the conventional way, with conventional people in conventional roles doing conventional football things.

 

And where did it get them?

 

Nowhere!

 

Absolutlely, positively nowhere!

 

How many different times do you have to screw up doing the same thing before you realize that the method is wrong?

 

Think of it this way: you buy a fixer-upper of a house and set out to … well, fix it up. You add a little TLC here and a little there. You save bits and pieces of what’s already there and add to it.

 

It just doesn’t look right. What was in place doesn’t match at all – doesn’t fit –with what you are placing next to it, around it.

 

As weird and hideous as it was before, it looks even worse – much, much worse – now. You throw your hands up and start over, doing – again – the same crazy thing.

 

I’ve got a notion how that one will end up for ya.

 

Instead, the Browns finally got smart and did what they should have done a long time ago, and that was to tear it up down to the bare walls and put it back together with all new material.

 

Even if it doesn’t work for three, four years, you’re still ahead of the game. After all, how long ago was 1999?

 

Doing it this way – the right way – was never supposed to be quick or easy, or an exact science.

 

It was, instead, supposed to be as hard as heck, because it is as hard as heck to do this – to do anything – the way it’s supposed to be done, the way it needed to be done.

 

Patience is a virtue. As such, then, Browns fans can only hope that owner Jimmy Haslam is virtuous – that he sticks with this and doesn’t bend to pressure exerted by people stuck in the past and stuck in the mud, just like he Browns have been for all this time.

 

Why is that so doggone difficult to understand?