Jim Ingraham: Browns are giving Pat Shurmur a chance to stay

Handoff practice began with 3 minutes, 7 seconds left in the game and the arrival in the huddle of cobwebbed Colt McCoy.

With 48 seconds left in the game, Browns coach Pat Shurmur relinquished his beloved play card to an assistant.

With 38 seconds left, Shurmur discarded his headset.

One by one, all the boxes were systematically checked in the official NFL blowout protocol checklist necessary for putting a rout to bed -- even a Browns blowout victory, which is about as uncharted waters as waters can be.

The Browns on Sunday lost the first 12 seconds of the game, 7-0. They won the last 59 minutes and 48 seconds of the game, 30-0.

They have now won three games in a row and five of their last eight. They are -- yee gads! -- on a roll. The Browns! They have scored 20 or more points in four of the five victories and in seven of their last nine games overall.

If you didn't know better, you'd swear it was honest-to-goodness NFL football. Right here in river city.

In fact, it's starting to look like a full-blown Shurmurthon -- keep those phone calls and pledges coming, folks! -- with the players trying their hardest to save the job of their coaching-for-his-job head coach.

Looking as relaxed and, dare we say, borderline playful after Sunday's smashing Browns rave-up as he has following any game this season, Shurmur quipped -- that's right, quipped -- "We did some fun stuff, and it worked out."

Fun stuff.

Imagine that.

The Browns.

OK, now for the caveat.

The Fun Bunch rolled to a 23-point victory over the hapless Kansas City Chiefs, who are about as far from being a legitimate NFL team as any NFL team in the NFL.

There's no nice way to put it.

The Chiefs are awful at everything. Offense. Defense. Special teams. Awful. All of it.

Ignore Shurmur's preposterous postgame comment that the Chiefs are "a very talented team."

They are not.

They are a terrible team. The worst in the NFL.

They have played 13 games and lost 11 of them. So you can take everything that happened Sunday on the landfill by the lake with a huge "yeah, but."

On the other hand, it's also true you can only beat the team you are playing. On Sunday, the Browns beat a team they should beat, and they beat them bad.

So that counts for something.

What counts for more is what it means to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and team president Joe Banner. The evaluation of Shurmur, General Manager Tom Heckert and quarterback Brandon Weeden, among others, continues.


Everything and everyone is under review. The team's rare rout on Sunday adds more data to that decision-making process, but, again, it's Kansas City.

Is any of it useful?

For example, the Browns used a lot of trick plays. Is that a sign of coaching creativity or overcoaching? The Browns spent a lot of time trying to trick the worst team in the league, instead of just lining up and beating a talent-destitute team straight up.

At halftime, the Browns had scored no offensive touchdowns against the worst team in the league and had been outgained, 237-148.

Early in the third quarter with the game still up in the air -- the Browns led, 10-7 -- Shurmur chose to challenge the call on the field that Josh Cribbs did not break the plane of the goal line for a touchdown. It was a questionable decision at best, idiotic at worst, because it wasted a timeout. Replays showed Cribbs had failed to break the plane, but beyond that, why bother? Why risk losing a timeout through a failed challenge when the result of not challenging would have been the Browns getting the ball first-and-goal from the Kansas City 1-yard line?

The challenge failed, so the Browns, minus one timeout, scored a touchdown on the next play.

Weeden was barely average, completing 17 of 30 passes for 217 yards, no touchdowns, three sacks and two should-have-been interceptions.

So there were some nits to pick even in a rare Browns blowout. But a win is a win, and this was a blowout and a win.

Could they run the table? Win three more in a row and finish the season 6-0? Unlikely. Their last three opponents are all superior teams battling for playoff seedings.

But Shurmur's Job Quest 2013 is ongoing, and that, more than anything, is what's going on here.

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