For the past couple of weeks, folks have been jumping on the Kevin Stefanski bandwagon as if he were the Pied Piper. (Please excuse the mixed musical-sounding metaphors that lack the substance of truth and actually have some negative connotations.) The only wagon I know much about is the Sooner Schooner, and until a recent reconstruction improved its aerodynamics, it could be a dangerous ride.
Stefanski, the Cleveland Browns first-year head coach with Ivy League and NFL educations, would seem much too smart to take the leap and hop aboard. Also, he’s not nearly full enough of himself to follow the leaders of the admiring band who have declared him the greatest Browns coach since founder Paul and Bill What’s-His-Name. Stefanski recognizes a 4-1 record, rare as it is in Cleveland, is not a Super Bowl ticket.
But just as rats leave a sinking ship so too, it seems, they are willing to jump on the wagon of a winner or, as legend has it, follow the Pied Piper’s music out of the German city of Hamelin. The Sooner Schooner is closer to the real thing, a memory of the people who rode covered Conestoga wagons and raced on horseback to stake out land in 1889. The pioneers settled into what was then Indian Territory, and, frankly, still is. The United States Supreme Court recently affirmed that clear fact.
The Sooner Schooner is a smaller version of the Conestoga wagons, for which the ponies, Boomer and Sooner, no doubt are grateful. They come racing out of the tunnel at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium each time the Sooners score. Last season, against West Virginia the trip went awry. The wagon crashed into the Owen Field turf, breaking apart, and bucking off its occupants. The Schooner required rebuilding. In the process, Don Werner of Werner Wagon Wheel in Horton, Kansas, gave it a wider wheelbase, lowered the driver’s seat, put on heavier running gear to add stability, and added hydraulic brakes, improvements that made it safer and better.
Consider Stefanski and front-office cohorts, led by General Manager Andrew Berry, the equivalent of Don Werner. They have the Browns running better, literally, and with a (partly) new and improved offensive line made it safer for quarterback Baker Mayfield to operate the offense that Stefanski brought from Minnesota and which fits Mayfield.
Even in this pandemic-affected season the project is such a clear improvement over recent renditions of the Browns that it has prompted outright giddiness, tempered only by the usual complaints about what the quarterback doesn’t do rather than what he does do. Those contretemps have not slowed the bandwagon. Every Akron Beacon Journal and Plain Dealer Browns writer picked Cleveland over Indianapolis despite the fact both teams were 3-1 and the Colts sport the best defense in the NFL. In contrast, ESPN’s Sunday Countdown panel—national “experts”—favored Indy 3 to 2.
It seems a good idea that rather than gloat, Browns scholars might want to consider lining up behind Stefanski in his cautionary stance. He may not know the intricacies of New Browns history but he is a quick study and would appreciate the fact his team is the first since Bill Belichick’s 1994 to get off to a 4-1 start (the rest was not so pretty) and could become only the second (1999) New Browns coach to take a team to the playoffs. The first, Butch Davis, gave the reconstructed franchise hope in his second season (2002), the New Browns fourth, with Kelly Holcomb throwing out of his mind.
The glory proved short-lived. Not only did the Steelers blot the stars from the Browns’ eyes but perhaps from Davis’s. The 36-33 loss was the beginning of the end of Davis’s NFL coaching career. He lacked Stefanski’s long apprenticeship (14 years, all at Minnesota) but did coordinate Jimmy Johnson’s 1993 defense when Dallas won the Super Bowl and Barry Switzer’s 1994 Cowboys during six NFL seasons. Those successes set up Davis for a mostly shiny six-year run as University of Miami head coach, the last of which (11-1) led the Browns to turn over the keys to its kingdom.
It pains me to conclude this about a fellow good ol’ boy from Oklahoma—he was born in the Tulsa suburb of Bixby and won his early coaching spurs in Oklahoma high schools—but Davis, by all accounts, liked running the show but lacked the talent for it in the NFL. His personnel decisions—including talent judgment and an eye that favored those he recruited to the “U” such as Kellen Winslow Jr. or played in Florida or the East—put him ever more at risk. When Browns President Carman Policy announced he would be leaving for his California vineyards and his part-time consultant Ron Wolf, former GM at Green Bay, followed him out the door, it left Davis to run amok and he did.
Davis quit on his team late in 1994 before it fired him and left Randy Lerner, who had inherited the New Browns from his father, to wonder why the guy he had awarded a two-year contract extension on the heels of a losing season would cave in upon himself. (He said it was because of “intense pressure and scrutiny” and the bitterness and ill will affecting his family. Whether these things prompted Lerner to pull further and further away from the team, it is what happened until he sold to Jimmy and Dee Haslam in 2012, and they had to learn their own hard lessons about in whom to put their faith.
Davis went toe-to-toe with his final, handpicked quarterback, Jeff Garcia, whereas Stefanski and his inherited first, Mayfield, share a willingness to step forward, look their shortcomings and mistakes in the eye, and try to correct them.
It may not be time for the Stefanski bandwagon to roll like Sooner Schooner, but neither is it likely Stefanski will cut-run-and-drop into the fetal position, as his “star” predecessor Davis once did because the NFL can be a tough, mean world.
