Controversy continues

Browns' Davis still considering his quarterback quandary

This is the seventh in a series of postcards Peter King will e-mail from his annual NFL training camp tour.

Friday, Aug. 1

Team: Cleveland Browns

In Berea, Ohio, site of the Cleveland Browns’ training complex, for the joint practice session of the Bills and Browns. Every time I come here, there’s something new. This time it’s a new lobby and a new media auditorium -- which has to be the best place in the entire league for us vermin to practice our marvelous craft. Maybe a 25-foot-square room, tan striped wallpaper, large framed photos of great Browns of the past ringing the room (Marion Motley, Paul Brown, Otto Graham, etc., which makes me very happy that they kept the Browns name here), two mounted TVs on either side of the room, five long tables with swivel chairs for us vermin to work. Great place. Hardly feels like training camp, especially when yesterday I was working in the press box of Georgetown (Ky.) College.

1. The Browns, coached by Butch Davis, employ an Andra Davis and an Andre’ Davis.

2. A tight end named Chad Mustard, who might look better in Steeler gold, is vying for a spot on the roster.

3. Another John-less team. Incredible. Frisman Jackson’s here, but not John Jackson.

The Browns have a college area scout named Robert Morris, who, I can only assume, has scouted players from Robert Morris.

Second-year middle linebacker Andra Davis, a 6-1, 255-pound hitter from the aptly named town of Live Oak, Fla., who is part of the three-new-linebacker scheme of Butch Davis. Davis is competing with former Eagle Barry Gardner for the starting MLB job, and he didn’t hurt himself this morning with four or five terrific standup hits of Bill backs in contact-but-not-tackling drills. Nice guy, too. Polite. "Nice meeting you, Mr. King," he said after we’d spoken.

1. I think this is finally the team Butch Davis wants. He talked this afternoon about finally making the purge of the slower, bigger linebackers and moving to the quicker guys, a la Dallas days, and he thinks it’ll be more in line with the Browns need to do to compete in their division. I guess so, but I do know this: Earl Holmes was one heck of a load in the middle of the field, and Andra Davis or Barry Gardner, the heirs apparent, better eat their spinach if they want to stop the run the way Holmes could.

2. I think Drew Bledsoe looked sharp in his work against the Browns secondary. He told me he thinks the offense will click fine without Peerless Price because of the impact Josh Reed will make in the passing game, and because Travis Henry has been doing a much better job hanging onto the ball than he did last year, when fumbling became his Achilles.

3. I think it was interesting to see Bubba Baker, the former Browns defensive end, looking pretty good in the food line. He’s a local entrepreneur now and a proud Browns alum. He told me he’s lost 37 pounds on the Atkins diet. "Why’d you go on it?" I asked. Simple, he said. "Barry White, Luther Vandross. I’m too young to have health problems like that."

4. I think William Green is 100 percent improved as a runner and a player over last year. He looked it in whamming up against the Buffalo defensive front this morning and, talking to him afterward, I found a confident and happy player, the polar opposite of what this guy was in his rookie season.

5. I think Davis is sold on a couple of nobodies’ abilities to contribute to his team right now: tight end Steve Heiden, a South Dakota State product who could become a 60-catch guy in this offense, and cornerback Lewis Sanders, who will push Anthony Henry for a starting job.

Finally, a meal of the gods. This is the gold standard, the Anna Kournikova of training camp chow, the culinary equal to the left-field seats at Fenway Park. Soup: Homemade minestrone. Never had better. Tomato-based, with elbow pasta and full of fresh vegetables. Chunky and delicious, but I don’t want to get filled up on this. Grade: A Entree: Chicken vegetable stirfry. Brown rice, chunks of chicken breast, zucchini (I picked over the dreaded peppers) in a semi-spicy sesame sauce. Couldn’t be better. Grade: A. Salad: Bibb and iceberg lettuces, shredded carrots, cucumbers, with a tomato-and-onion salad tossed in. Perfect capper to a fine meal. Grade: A. Drink: Fresh-squeezed/pressed orange/pineapple/banana juice, quite possibly the greatest drink in the history of mankind, other than the casked Heineken beer at the neighborhood Amsterdam pub I had on a college internship for lunch every day. (Almost.) Grade: A-plus. Dessert: A smoothie. Nonfat frozen yogurt, fresh strawberries and a whole banana in a blender. I would have this for dessert every day for the rest of my life and be quite content. Grade: A Overall grade: A. Annually, I die and go to training-table heaven when I get fed by the Cleveland Browns.

Tired of the Couch/Holcomb quarterback duel yet? So are they.

The Browns are trying to be accommodating folks, making Tim Couch and Kelly Holcomb available to the assembled masses every couple of days to answer the same questions over and over again. It’s really getting to Holcomb, who was pleasantly surly (if you know what I mean) in his 10-minute joust with us today. Couch is annoyed by it too, but he’s been famous for a long time, and as many famous people do, he can just turn on the tape recorder of boring quotes in his head, rewind to the boring answer he gave on a topic the other day, and spew it out again. Very nice about it, but saying absolutely nothing.

The only tidbits I can give you today, Browns’ salivators, are these: Butch Davis told three of us -- me, Len Pasquarelli from ESPN.com and Pete Prisco from CBSSportsline.com -- that his deadline of picking one over the other by the Aug. 23 third preseason game is strictly a "drop-dead date" and he could decide much earlier. And Couch, in his own vanilla, patient way, is getting a little impatient about the whole thing.

"I just want to get this whole thing over. I want to know who’s gonna be the guy," he said. "Let’s get it on, and let’s move on. Me and Kelly both say we can’t wait till it’s over."

Interesting, too, to hear Couch hem and haw a bit when someone asked him how he might adjust if Davis picks The Other Guy. "It’d be tough for me to get used to," he said. "I’d try to be supportive and be the best backup I can be."

Davis said he likes the fact that this is probably the first time that Couch has had to compete seriously for a job at the high school, college or pro levels. "It’s been good for him," Davis said. "He’s had to withstand a challenge."

My read? As I wrote in SI this week, I think the edge will go to Couch if the competition is fairly close. Davis has said too many times he remembers how Troy Aikman was vilified in some Dallas quarters in his first two seasons, implying that he’d hate to see Couch, finally with a competent offensive team around him, get yanked before he finally had a chance to justify his status as first player picked in the 1999 draft. Even this afternoon, he told us that he felt Holcomb was "John Smoltz, who can come in and bail you out and save you."

Not that I think this is the best idea. I bet if you secret-balloted the Cleveland locker room you’d find a majority of players -- perhaps a vast one -- favoring Holcomb. I would too. At the end of last year, while Couch played well, Holcomb played superbly. Not many bench guys could come in and put 429 yards and three touchdowns on the board in the biggest game of their life, which Holcomb did in the playoff game against Pittsburgh. I think Holcomb demonstrated that, if you ignore draft position and salary size, he’s the guy at the end of last year who deserved the ball at the beginning of this year.

But that’s not the way I think it’ll go, for this simple reason: I think Davis thinks it’ll be easier to start Couch and go to Holcomb in relief than the reverse.

Check back soon for more of Peter King's Postcards from Camp.

 

Related information

Multimedia

Visit Video Plus for the latest audio and video