A masked Andrew Berry seemed the perfect illustration to accompany a response to his midseason State of the Team address. While his initialed mask helps to protect Berry from those with whom he comes into contact, as well as those people from him, during these Coronavirus Days, it also serves as something of a self-muzzle.

Berry needs neither mask nor muzzle to prevent anything remotely informative from escaping his mouth during inherently distanced Zoom sessions with the media. He wouldn’t spit out his true feelings if he had a mindful or mouthful.

He is an intelligent, self-controlled “rock star”—Tony Grossi’s term—of general managers. He also makes me pine for the Art Modell days, when the owner of the Old Browns would hold court and make pronouncements that could actually contain real news. This occurred not only on midseason bye weeks but also on a near daily basis. If you covered the Browns and could not find Art Modell, he would come find you.

Those were the days.

While the Uncle Artie Show and Tell could be self-serving. If it was incumbent on media members to sort the wheat from the chaff, it almost always proved grist for the mill. Intrepid snoops—Ed Meyer, my old Akron Beacon Journal running mate was the best—could follow up with more authoritative Browns sources leads from Modell’s crumbs. It wasn’t always easy, what with smokescreens and other diversions, but at least hardworking members of the Browns print and electronic media had an inside chance.

This feels wiped away in the age of COVID-19 and distancing that is anything but social. In fact, it strikes me as anti-social, part of the perfect fog machine the New Browns have created. Owner sightings are rare. They speak even more rarely. And, when they do, they say little of value. Transparent, they are not.

The locker room, not always a warm, fuzzy welcome wagon for media, has been closed to protect players, coaches, and other team personnel. My fear is it will not reopen when the virus has been conquered with vaccine and/or treatment. This is the perfect pretext to extend a policy that does not serve fans of the teams, because the media, whether fans hate them or not, serve as their representatives and information conduits.

With personal contact snuffed out, the media have fewer opportunities to establish relationships—most of a limited nature—with players and others who, when it served their purposes, would provide an unauthorized and real transparency. Now news is more likely to come from national media whom the team has chosen to nurture rather than from the Browns writers and columnists who used to haunt the locker room.

Recently, in a “Hey, Tony” post in which Grossi answers questions to The Land on Demand website, a writer inquired about changes the pandemic has wrought on the media. “How have you had to adapt to continue to get inside information and build stories of substance?” the writer asked. “The biggest change is the pandemic has built a wall between media and team (players, coaches, executives),” Grossi responded. “The days of ‘working a locker room’—visiting players for individual interviews, on and off the record—have ended.” That leaves a Zoom news conference with the Masked Man.

Berry addressed, for instance, the status of injured wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. who is signed through 2023 and will have surgery next week to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. Berry also shared his impression of quarterback Baker Mayfield at the 5-3 midpoint of a season crucial to his future. The team must decide by next May whether to add a fifth year to Mayfield’s four-year rookie contract, a step toward a longer extension, if the Browns believe Mayfield is its answer at QB.

Though Berry said some nice things about his quarterback, his inconsistent play put a damper on a more full-throated endorsement (even if this were not strategically the time for it). How Berry’s team, as a whole, made him feel—“encouraged but incomplete”—could also be applied to Mayfield. The quarterback, he said, was “putting the team in a position to win.” What he did not say is that Mayfield must do more in the second half of the season if he is to find his pot of gold and recognition at the end of the NFL rainbow.

There is no equivocation about first-year Coach Kevin Stefanski and his staff to whom Berry attached the golden adjective “fantastic.” For Mayfield to earn such superlatives, he will need more fourth-quarter victories and five-touchdown-pass games like he had against Cincinnati and, preferably, against a team better than the Bengals.

Mayfield has a certain degree of control over his future. Berry has given him new improved personnel to work with, and a Stefanski offense—Mayfield’s fourth in three years—that is supposed to be perfect for him. So far it has not seemed to be or has been applied imperfectly. He and Stefanski must adjust the offense to be closer to ideal for him. Grossi and other media members have been forced to do the same.

As Grossi explained, he relies on his “experience and contacts to take stories and analyses to the next level” and to put into “proper perspective” the quotes that joint Zoom interviews force everyone to share. Even when they come from the smartest Masked Man in a Browns headquarters overflowing with Ivy Leaguers, Grossi is not going to get the great lines once part and parcel of The Uncle Artie Show and Tell.

These are the days of a deadly virus and deadly dull media events. There is neither show nor tell, especially not tell. Uncle Artie, turning over in his grave, is a better quote.