In Praise of Phil Dawson

The Browns outlasted the Buffalo Bills Monday night, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about Phil Dawson.

Had he kicked for the Browns in just about any other era, he’d be thought of among the team’s all-time greats.

For one, he’d have scored a lot more points. The poor guy had only 53 in the offensively challenged season of 1999, the year the Browns returned to the NFL. He kicked just eight field goals the entire year, and only 23 extra points. Not a lot of opportunities, there.

There would be another season of offensive woe in 2000 before Dawson and the team began to climb out of the abyss, culminating in last year’s 10-6 turnaround (or tease, depending on how you look at it), during which Dawson tallied 120 points -- a respectable total in anybody’s book.

Could you imagine if he’d been kicking for those Browns juggernaut teams of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s?

As it is, Dawson has totaled 852 points in his 9-plus seasons, and one has to believe he’d be well over 1,000 by now had he teed it up for the Browns of eras past.

But it’s a look inside the numbers that is startling.

Dawson has connected on 83 percent of his career field goal attempts. Eighty-three percent! Hall of Famer Lou Groza (left), known as “The Toe,” connected on just 58 percent of his attempts in 17 glory-filled seasons. Don Cockroft, Groza’s successor who spent 13 years with the team, connected on 66 percent.

Breakdowns by yardage aren’t available for Groza’s era, but a comparison of Cockroft and Dawson is even more telling. Including last night’s game winning 56-yard field goal -- a career best -- Dawson has made 10 of 14 career attempts beyond the 50 yard line, a 77 percent success rate. Cockroft? Try 3-of-19, for 16 percent.

This is not to take anything away from Cockroft (left), who doubled as the team’s punter for most of his career. But that’s a stunning disparity. It’s just as significant in the 40-49 yard category, where Dawson has connected 68 percent of the time, to Cockroft’s 52 percent.

Last night’s win over Buffalo illustrated perhaps as much as any game in recent memory why Dawson is so valuable to this team. He was 5-for-5 on field goal attempts. Add in the two extra points and he had 17 of the Browns’ 29 points. Without his steady foot, the game would have been lost.

Dawson is the only remaining player from the 1999 roster and has quietly defined excellence for a decade of seasons wearing the orange and brown. His field goal success rate is the fifth-best in NFL history.

Dawson has gotten stronger, and better, as he’s gotten older. He’s a seasoned veteran with ice in his veins, and quietly gets the job done week in and week out. In fact, there's hardly a time when Dawson comes out on the field when you don't think he's able to make the kick.

In my book, he’s already one of the all-time Cleveland greats. We should enjoy his work and appreciate him while we can.

Score Knew the Score - The Fans Came First

For a generation of Cleveland Indians fans, Herb Score is the voice they will always remember.

It wasn't a particularly mellow voice. He had a peculiar accent, one unlike any I've heard before or since. And he wasn't a polished announcer by any stretch of the imagination.

Instead, Herb came across as one of us, a fan, someone who was enjoying the games he was broadcasting, and who wanted us to enjoy them, too.

That was a pretty tall order during most of the three decades he sat in the Tribe's broadcast booth, first on television from 1964 to 1967, and then on the radio from 1968 to 1997. As Joe Tait, a former broadcast partner of Score's, once said, "Herb Score has seen more bad baseball than anybody."

Score died early Tuesday morning at his home in Rocky River, a suburb of Cleveland. He was 75. I remember when he was on TV, calling the games with Harry Jones; and his earliest days in the radio booth, with Bob Neal. He teamed with Tait in the mid-1970s, and they were the tandem calling the games when I left Ohio for the West Coast in '76.

So it was remarkable, to me, that Herb was still broadcasting the games more than 20 years later, when I moved back to Northeast Ohio in 1997. By then, the Indians were actually good. They had been to the World Series in 1995, losing to the Atlanta Braves. And they returned to the fall classic in that summer of '97, coming oh-so-close to winning it all before losing to the Florida Marlins (it still pains me to say that -- the Marlins?) in seven games.

The tributes began as soon as the news of Score's passing broke -- understandably so. Score was once a budding major league star, with the Indians in the late 1950s. It's been said that he was Sandy Koufax before Sandy Koufax came along -- meaning, of course, that he was the fireballing lefthander who was expected to take the baseball world by storm. But fate wasn't so kind. He was struck in the eye by a line drive off the bat of New York's Gil McDougal in May of 1957 (just a month before I was born), and his once promising career was derailed after that. Score never blamed the incident -- he insisted he encountered arm problems and was simply never the same.

Known for his humility, and his faith, Score jumped at the chance to give broadcasting a try in 1964, and it started a 34-year broadcasting career that became the stuff of legend in Cleveland lore.

Any of us who grew up as Indians fans in the 1960s. '70s, '80s and even '90s cut our teeth on Herb's descriptions of the games. They were simple, direct and free of fluff and bluster. He described what he was watching, to the best of his ability. If that ability was sometimes lacking, he more than made up for it with his knowledge of, love of, and respect for, the game.

Those descriptions of Indians games meant so much to us as fans because we couldn't just turn on the TV and see every game, every night. In those days, only occasional Indians games were televised on weekends, and then only if they were on the road. Home games could be heard only on the radio, and that's where Herb, and his long line of broadcast partners over a 30-year span, came in. We depended on them, and nobody came through quite like Herb.

Herb Score was a legend to multiple generations of Cleveland sports fans. He was already missed, having stepped away from the microphone after the 1997 season. Now, he'll be mourned, too.

The Bright Side of the Browns’ Latest Loss

Unbelievably, the Browns again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory Thursday night, stumbling through a miserable fourth quarter en route to a 34-30 loss to the Denver Broncos – their second straight shocking collapse at home.

Whatever. Dissect it all you want, wail and cry all you want, but today, I’m a pretty happy man. Because the Brady Quinn era has started, and not a moment too soon.

Nothing against Derek Anderson, who accomplished far more in the position than I ever expected, and actually turned in a memorable year in 2007. A Pro Bowl year, in fact. It earned him a hefty new contract, so let’s hold the tears for D.A. I suspect he may turn up as a starter somewhere else down the road, and if that happens I’ll be rooting for him to do well.

But Quinn not only looked sharp in his professional debut, he said things afterward that sounded like the words of a champion. To wit:

"I told everyone, this one is flat on me," Quinn said. "I know I am good enough that I can make a play at the end and win.”

Hear that, Braylon Edwards?

More Quinn: ''There was no doubt in my mind when I walked out there that we were going to score on every drive. If you don't think like that, you're not going to be successful.''

Imagine that.

And finally, commenting on two Phil Dawson field goals, Quinn said this: "The frustrating thing was coming away with field goals instead of touchdowns. Nothing against Phil Dawson, but we've got to get sevens there."

Think about that. Points weren’t enough. Only seven points would have made him happy. Making plays in the clutch, and scoring on every drive, is the only acceptable result.

When is the last time you heard a Cleveland quarterback talk that way?

And this is the guy that the Browns' brain trust left standing on the sidelines for 24 games?

I’ve been to the stadium to see the Browns twice in the last two years. Both times, during warm-ups, there was one quarterback who stood out in my mind: Brady Quinn. He moved like a leader and threw like he was born to do it. Tight spirals. Accurate throws. By comparison, Anderson, Ken Dorsey, and, last year, Charlie Frye, looked average at best.

Well, all that’s changed. Brady has arrived. Take heart, Browns fans.