After weeks of (yawn) competition, the Browns have announced that Kelly Holcomb will be their starting quarterback for the 2003 season.
As much as I like Tim Couch personally, this is probably a good thing. It's pretty obvious to an unbiased observer (me?) that the team responds well to Holcomb, and he is much better at looking and throwing the ball vertically down the field, as opposed to Couch who seems to look first to "dink" the ball to backs and to shorter routes in the flats. Holcomb throws a very catchable ball, with great touch, and just has the intangibles that you can only sense in your gut when you watch the team play.
(There now, have I used up most every sports cliché ever created in that paragraph? No? Let's see, somebody needs to step up, so that we'll all know he came to play, because it's all about winning football games. That should do it.)
I listened to Couch at the press conference, and he was understandably down, but says he will be a success in the NFL, the obvious inference being that he suspects that it will happen with another team. But such are the twists and turns of a professional sports season that Joaquin Andujar of the St. Louis Cardinals once said that he could sum it up in just one word..."You never know".
In more words, that means that something like this could happen to Holcomb, and we'd be right back where we started. Couch had the misfortune to play in a very unsophisticated college program at Kentucky, where the coach literally drew up plays in the dirt, and then came to a brand new, and very bad expansion team in Cleveland, where he proceeded to get his brains beat in for three years. That he survived is a testament to his toughness and that he has never bad-mouthed anyone is a testament to his character.
I wish him well, but I agree that we are starting the best quarterback now.
Posted by dan at August 17, 2003 07:37 PM