“When [Brady Quinn] talks about the draft, he focuses not on draft position but on his excitement to simply know where he's headed,” said SI.com's Adam Hofstetter in an article I pulled from a Brady Quinn “support” website listed below. [It should be noted that due to insufficient information on the site, I cannot determine who actually runs the website and, therefore, its credibility.]
Despite this, one thing is clear: the Brady Quinn fans in Cleveland came to love on draft day is not the same man seen donning the #10 orange and brown during team activities in late May and early June. The fans aren’t the only ones who have to reassess Quinn’s status with the team because even his Browns teammates (well, not yet, technically) are counting him out for an extended period of time, no matter how they try to skip around it.
“You have to be on top of your game and know your plays and not have any doubt so when you get up there you're prepared,” offensive lineman Lennie Friedman said in a story from clevelandbrowns.com staff writer Jeff Walcoff titled, “Tempo new priority in practice” (posted 08-03-07).
Remember back when Braylon Edwards held out beginning his time in Cleveland. “It could very well take him a full year because he has missed this much camp,” head coach Romeo Crennel said in a 2005 ESPN.com article stating Edwards had just signed with Cleveland. While the wide receiver did miss TWO weeks, Quinn is headed there, with his holdout already at nine days. What needs to be remembered, however, is that Brady Quinn is a quarterback, the mental and vocal leader of the offensive unit on the football field.
I’ll bet Lennie Friedman doesn’t know what Quinn’s voice sounds like in the huddle. I can almost guarantee Friedman knows what Ken Dorsey sounds like more than Quinn and Dorsey has had his bags packed and ready to roll to a new team’s number three quarterback position ever since the draft took place.
Braylon Edwards finished his rookie campaign with just 32 receptions. How much Brady Quinn needs to catch up with is dependent on his holdout length, though he has assured reporters that he is studying his playbook.
Walcoff’s story from the team website describes the Browns’ use of a play clock on the sidelines at the practice field in Berea, Ohio, as well as using headsets to relay plays from offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski to quarterback coach Rip Scherer. Scherer then uses his headset to send the play into the quarterback’s helmet in the huddle. Apparently it’s being done to make practice more like a game situation and though I’m not sure how many teams do this kind of thing, ALL of them should.
Coaches set the play clock to 14 seconds during practice, hoping that will allow the quarterbacks to almost over-adjust during regular season games. It’s also set up that way so the quarterbacks and linemen have to make their defensive reads quicker because, as the article states, there is a “large amount of pre-snap reads and movement made in Chudzinski's offense.” I know Photoshop does wonders, but I’m pretty sure Brady Quinn’s playbook doesn’t have X’s literally moving around on the other side of the O’s.
NFL players do not just play a game anymore. There’s no doubt that they operate as pieces of a multi billion dollar machine and should get as much money as they want and think they deserve. After all, it wasn’t the fans that had to constantly hit the weight room. Fans didn’t have to miss every big party of the year because alcohol violations would sit them for a game or two. Fans don’t get told how to do THEIR job.
When it all boils down, however, it’s those butts-in-the-seats that keep the players employed. This is especially true for the blue-collar fans who get paid 10 times less to do a job that can be widely considered as 10 times worse than any other. It’s easy to hate when you’re in that position because, well, no one really hates them for having the job that they do.
Think of the dedicated garbage man who bleeds orange and brown. He does a job that not many people would like to do and, to my knowledge, doesn't build a mansion on his annual income. Brady Quinn pays a few bucks a month to have his trash removed, while the garbage man pays upwards of $70 or $80 a game to support that same player.
One word blends these two separate worlds - respect. A lot of people see it as disrespect (to them) that Brady Quinn (and all other holdouts, for that matter) is off the field trying to make an extra million dollars or more because it comes on top of tens of millions already – it weakens the importance of their jobs. Many blue-collar workers do not get to negotiate their contract terms, if they sign a contract at all.
Maybe this is a huge mistake diagnosing a socio-economic problem. Perhaps I’m just blowing this whole thing up. I just like to think that in an ideal society it wouldn’t really matter what job you do, as long as you respect everyone else. I understand that people have every right to try and earn as much as they think they’re worth. But Brady Quinn’s holdout is hurting him doubly. The obvious way is that he’s not practicing with his teammates getting ready for the regular season. The longer lasting effect is that he’s doing that to try and earn more money for himself when it is pretty obvious that this Browns team is nowhere near complete for a Super Bowl run.
Think of Brady’s holdout in five years when he’s begging for more help on the offensive side of the ball. And after this holdout is said and done, I don’t see him as being the kind of guy to restructure his contract. Fans can only hope that becoming a veteran in the league will change his mind in that sense.
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