Bill Belichick, sleazeball

One day, SS, I'm going to figure out what early Dylan and William Frawley have in common.

 

The problem with the Kosar move - in my opinion as an ardent Browns fan - wasn't so much the fact he cut Bernie, which nobody was happy with, but he did it with nobody available to step in immediately for the next game in Seattle. Vinny, as was stated earlier in the thread, was hurt at the time. If he would have at least waited until Testaverde was back - not that it would have necessarily cushioned the blow - I guess I could see it as being anything more than a petty personal move by him.

Also, Belichick's Cleveland teams were NOTORIOUS for starting fast and fading in the end. Even the team which made the playoffs in 1994 started 6-1 and finished 5-4 down the stretch. His 1993 team was 5-2 and was in first place after beating the Steelers in Cleveland (thanks to two Metcalf punt returns), yet finished 7-9 and missed out on the playoffs. Almost the same with the 1992 team, which was 5-4 and won just two games the rest of the way.

Finally, the genius also was the master of losing a game or two he had no business losing - see the loss in 1992 to Indianapolis, the 1993 "Metcalf-up-the-middle" defeat to the Falcons.

 

The Colts, coming off a 1-15 season, had 12 or 13 sacks in that game. Mark Herrmann started that opener for Indy and didn't even finish the month on the team.

Nobody wants to remember how monumental a failure he was in Cleveland. There will be none of that. The man is a genius. Stuart Scott said so.

 

No one has forgotten his failure in Cleveland, trust me.

 

Mangini would kick his old ass around Foxboro.

 

Is it possible he learned a thing or two from his first stint as a head coach? Was he a huge success in Cleveland? By no means whatsoever. He also was not a total failure. He did successfully rebuild a floundering team.

As for the timing of the Kosar cut, there is no defending that. While the change eventually worked out, you are right in saying that it should not have happened when it did.

 

Damn fine post, hondo, both paragraphs. I'd really like to see some journalistic follow-up to the questions you pose in the first paragraph. 5 calls a day? That's an enormous time-sink, you'd think.

 

I'm going to name my next band "The Pigskin Poohbah."

 

Dylan gave us words to live by; Fred Mertz taught us how to live.

 

Johnny's in the basement/mixin' up the medicine
I'm on the pavement/thinkin' 'bout Vivian Vance...

 

Lots of colorful insider stories about the utter contempt Frawley and Ms. Vance had for each other. He used to refer to her as a "dried-up old (real bad word)."

Frawley had a clause in his contract that guaranteed he was off the week of the World Series so he could attend the games.

He was so disinterested in the show that when he got his script, he would throw away all the pages where he didn't have a part. He was in a panic one week because he saw some of the other scenes being filmed and they didn't make any sense to him. He thought he had memorized lines from the wrong script.

Joe Falls used to tell a story about one of the first times he was in LA. He wound up seated near Frawley in a restaurant one morning and was impressed. He overheard Frawley ordering, "seeded roll and half a Crenshaw melon," so he ordered the same thing.