A two year Cleveland project for former North Penn Knight Mike Pettine came to a dismal end yesterday, after their final loss of 2015 at the hands of the playoff bound Pittsburgh Steelers. A year filled with a quarterback carousel involving the enigma in Johnny Manziel and a defense that digressed from being the 9th best scoring defense to 29th this season, has cost Pettine his job as an NFL head coach. When teams don’t win games consistently from year to year, the blame, more often than not, falls on the head coach. Sometimes the blame is warranted, other times it is not. In this case, the blame should fall on the shoulders of the front office of the Cleveland Brown organization.

General manager Ray Farmer, who also got fired along with Pettine, did not provide his coach with the necessary resources to be successful as the coach for the team. The Browns, when Pettine took over in 2014, still did not solve their quarterback mystery since the days of Bernie Kosar, didn’t have a solid running game, and had a young defense that could not stop any team from scoring. Farmer tried to fix the quarterback situation by drafting “Johnny Football”, but that decision has done more harm than good with Manziel’s immaturity and inability to lead a football team, causing four more other quarterbacks to start for the team since 2014.

Even if Johnny Manziel was the answer at quarterback, or any other quarterback for that matter, the offense had no weapons, especially after the multiple suspensions of promising, yet troubled receiver Josh Gordon. The draft picks of the Browns the past two years have not panned out with the exception of Justin Gilbert, and in turn, Pettine had to bring a team together with no identity, and virtually no experience, and was expected to win right away. That expectation might have been realistic for a coach who had a resume of winning and turning around rock bottom franchises, but not for a coach who only has two years of NFL head coaching experience.

Some of the Browns players have claimed that the team’s performance, or rather lack thereof, was not Mike Pettine’s fault. Veteran all-pro offensive tackle Joe Thomas said of Pettine to NFL Media’s Aditi Kinkhabwala, “I think he’s a good coach. I think he’s one of the better ones we’ve had.” In his two years with the team, Mike Pettine went 10-21 while at the helm. The Browns expected too much of Pettine right away and did not give him a fair chance to really build a team and try and turn it around. Either way, his inability to muster up a winning solution in Cleveland was his Achilles heel and led to his dismissal from the team. Pettine was the Browns’ fifth head coach since 2007. They will now move on to their sixth.