The Browns don’t have to look far to see the keys to success in the NFL.
They are there in plain view in the other three teams in the AFC North, including the Baltimore Ravens, who visit FirstEnergy Stadium at 1 p.m. Sunday in the Browns’ home opener.
A team needs to:
*Get good talent evaluators.
The Ravens have that with a group led by Ozzie Newsome, who is probably the best general manager in the league after having putting together two Super Bowl champions following the 2000 and ’12 seasons. He is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for what he did as a Browns tight end for 13 seasons (1978-90). So, is he a better GM than he was as a player? That’s a great question.
*Get a good head coach. The Ravens have that with John Harbaugh, a Toledo native who, in his ninth season, has a 78-51 (.605) regular-season record, a 10-5 mark in the playoffs, five postseason appearances and one of those Super Bowl titles. His brother, Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh, seems to get all the media attention, but it’s John who is the most accomplished of the two – by far.
*Get a good quarterback. The Ravens have that in Joe Flacco, who arrived in Baltimore the same year as Harbaugh, 2008, and led the Ravens to the Super Bowl championship four years later. The only year that Harbaugh has had a losing record in Baltimore was 2015, when Flacco was limited to 10 games after tearing his ACL and MCL. That tells you all you need to know about the importance of the head coach-quarterback relationship. They are joined at the hip. When one falters, so does the other.
*And then you just leave them alone, knowing that stability in the three most important positions on any team – GM, head coach and quarterback – is essential.
The Browns have changed GMs, head coaches and, especially quarterbacks, in the expansion era more times than anyone can count. Meanwhile, Baltimore and the division’s two other teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals, just keep trotting out the same people, weathering each storm in stride and never going into a panic. It’s why those organizations have been extremely successful.
Think about all that as you watch Sunday’s game and how efficiently the Ravens operate. They are one of the models of what the Browns want to become.
If the Browns believe they have the right talent evaluators in Sashi Brown and Andrew Berry, and I think they do, and if they believe they have the right head coach in Hue Jackson, and I think they do, then they just have to grit their teeth and fight their way through difficult times like this when, in one fell swoop last Sunday, they lost a game and their quarterback.
Granted, the Browns still have no idea who their quarterback is, but they’re making big strides in those two other important areas.
Now they have to have patience. Although everybody would like for things to change overnight, they won’t. They can’t. It doesn’t happen that way.
It takes time, which is not what anyone wants to hear.
But time is the key ingredient with which the good teams fuel themselves.
