Listening...and Why the Browns stink

I just finished my reviewing the arts class. We got our theater reviews back, I didn't do as well as I thought, but I will be able to work on it to go for a better grade, not that anyone really cares, I just thought I'd actually tell you, dear readers, what happened.

We did an exercise where we just sat and listened to the sounds that surrounded us. We all did this individually during our lunchbreak. I hadn't really listened like this in a while, especially the last few months, I've been busy and too self-absorbed to really stop and listen to the sounds of the city. It was really interesting to hear the way the cars cut through the air, the way the brakes squealed, that sort of thing.

As most people who know me well realize, my NFL fanness (I know I just made that word up) is divided between the Lions and the Browns. John already gave his take on the Packers getting Couch, so here's my feelings from the other side. The Browns, when they were originally constructed were in a difficultposition. Obviously, the city of Cleveland had been hungering for football ever since Modell moved the team, and in the intervening non-football years, both Carolina and Jacksonville's expansion teams had done extremely well very quickly. The Browns brought in Carmen Policy and Dwight Clark, who had experience building the 49er's dynasty, and so we thought everything would be ok. However, after that every move they made has just seemed to be a mistake. They hired Chris Palmer, who had been a coordiantor with the Jaguars as their first head coach. Frankly, for everyone who watched and commented on how lousy Marty Morninwheg was with the Lions, Palmer was basically just as bad. They had no line and when the front office put together the team, they failed to take advantage of the natural advantages they had, as far as free agency, the Browns didn't get one player in either FA or the expansion draft that made people say "wow". Still, the biggest mistake was the decision to take Tim Couch with the #1 pick in the 1999 draft. Compounding this mistake was that the debate in the Browns front office was vbetween Couch and Akili Smith, who had one good season at Oregon before becoming one of the worst busts ever as a pro. Couch had a lot of the things that make you wary of taking a quarterback high, but the Browns did anyway. He was a "system" quarterback, Kentucky threw all the time and threw short passes that relied on recievers to make long runs to gain yardage, this is a system that doesn't usually translate into producing NFL QB's (see Ware, Andre, Klingler, David, and Kingsbury, Kliff). The second quarterback chosen that year was not Smith, instead it was the one out of Syracuse, Donovan F. McNabb, who has appeared in three NFC title games and made some of the more amazing plays of the last few years made by quarterbacks.

Then came the hiring of Butch Davis...but I'll get to that monday

Have a good weekend everyone