The Really Big Show

RIZZO: Buffalo’s here. Buffalo’s in Berea today and tomorrow and I don’t want to hear one word about the score on Saturday, I want to hear about these two days, because these two days are the actual thing. You get the best team in the AFC East across the field from a defensive line that had six guys unavailable on one Wednesday in August and you find out something real.

GOLDHAMMER: You find out something bad.

RIZZO: You find out something! Something is better than the last eight months of everybody in America having a take about this franchise who has never driven down Lorain Avenue in their life.

GOLDHAMMER: Here we go.

RIZZO: No, I’m serious, Aaron. I have had it up to here with the national people. Every one of them. They come in, they do their little bit about the YouTube guy, they get their clip, they leave. Meanwhile the people who live here, the people who called this show crying in 2017, those people have been more decent about this than anybody with a television show.

OLDACH: The people who called this show crying in 2017 also called this show to tell us they were going to the parade.

RIZZO: And I told them what I thought about the parade.

OLDACH: You certainly did.

GOLDHAMMER: Can I do the business for one second. If you’re watching this on YouTube — hello, thank you, we love you, we would love you more if you subscribed — the full three hours ad-free is on Land On Demand and it is nine dollars a month, and the reason we ask is that this station does not survive as an AM signal in 2026. That’s not a joke I’m doing. That is the actual arithmetic.

RIZZO: He does this every day.

GOLDHAMMER: Every day, and one day you’ll thank me.

RIZZO: He’s here. Tony Grossi, the General, ESPN Cleveland and the Daily Grossi on Land On Demand. Tony, good morning.

GROSSI: Rizz.

RIZZO: Buffalo in Berea. What do you want to see?

GROSSI: I want to see them line up. That’s it. That’s all I want out of two days with Buffalo, is a period of team run where eleven men look like they have met each other. Because I sat out there on the tenth and I watched a two-minute drill where they had three penalties in a row before anybody threw the ball, three, and everybody in the press area is typing about the quarterback, and it wasn’t the quarterback, it was — they couldn’t get lined up. In August. With no crowd. Nobody was rushing.

GOLDHAMMER: Every camp has that day.

GROSSI: Oh, sure. Sure it does. And this is a franchise with such a long history of that being one day.

RIZZO: [laughing] There it is.

GROSSI: Look. I’ve been covering this team since 1984. I was at the Stadium for Kosar. I sat in a room and listened to Art Modell tell me things he knew were not true, and I sat in a different room and listened to Carmen Policy tell me a different set of things, and I did Butch Davis, and I did Holmgren, who came in here and told us he was going to fix the culture of the organization and then spent three years being unavailable, and I did Banner, and I did the Haslams for twelve years. Twelve years of the Haslams. So when the new people come in and everybody wants to tell me this is different, I don’t — that’s not skepticism. That’s just having been here.

GOLDHAMMER: But this is different, though, Tony. Objectively. You cannot name me another time this happened.

GROSSI: No, no, this is different! This is absolutely different. I never said it wasn’t different. This is the most different thing that has ever happened to a football team. They ran a search. They ran a full search with a search firm and everything, they flew in the Baltimore offensive coordinator, they talked to the Rams’ defensive coordinator, they did the whole — they did it properly. Everybody said, look how properly they’re doing it. And then at the end of doing it properly they hired a twenty-eight-year-old who came into the building to interview for a job watching college tape. That is what happened. That is the sequence of events. And I’m supposed to look at that and go, well, they must have had their reasons.

RIZZO: They say they had their reasons. Greyson said it in public. He said they went and graded the kid’s public work against what happened.

GROSSI: Right, and I heard him say it, and I believe he believes it. That’s not my problem with it. My problem with it is that they are the ones who decided the record was good, they’re the ones grading the test, and there is not one person in that organization above him. Nobody. He picks the players and he coaches the players and he decides whether the players he picked are any good. Who tells him no? Rizz, who tells him no?

RIZZO: Ownership tells him no.

GROSSI: Ownership. The shipping family. The shipping family is going to tell him no on a third-and-two call.

OLDACH: Nobody said third-and-two.

GROSSI: Nobody has to say it.

GOLDHAMMER: Ninth overall. Max Iheanachor. Every board in America had him in the twenties. Every one. Brugler had him in the twenties.

GROSSI: Twelve picks. Twelve picks is nothing. What’s twelve picks. You’re telling me a scouting department full of people this man hired with the owner’s money couldn’t find one player they liked better than the man everybody else in America had a round later. And maybe they’re right! Maybe every last person who does this for a living had it wrong and the twenty-eight-year-old had it right. Fine. Then he doesn’t need to be right eventually. He needs to be right in about ninety days, because that kid is playing tackle in Jacksonville on September thirteenth in front of a defensive front that does not care how well he was evaluated.

RIZZO: And Garrett. Give me Garrett.

GROSSI: Nobody made them do that. Understand what I’m saying. That’s the part I can’t get past. Nobody put a gun to anybody’s head. There’s no salary cap emergency, they had already eaten more dead money on one man than anybody has ever eaten, in January so what’s another year of Myles Garrett, and they looked at the best defensive player this franchise has ever had, twenty-three sacks, and they decided he was worth more to them somewhere else. That’s not a rebuild. A rebuild is when you have no choice.

GOLDHAMMER: They got the Defensive Rookie of the Year back.

GROSSI: They got a nice player back and three pieces of paper that come due in 2027, 2028 and 2029, and I want you to say those three years out loud on the radio and then tell me who in this building is going to be here when they come in.

RIZZO: He will be here.

GROSSI: Will he? Rizz. Will he? Couch, Detmer, Pederson, Garcia, McCown—

OLDACH: You skipped Holcomb.

GROSSI: I did not skip Holcomb.

OLDACH: You went Couch, Detmer, Pederson, Garcia. Holcomb’s in there.

GROSSI: Holcomb is in there and everybody knows Holcomb is in there and I don’t need to be corrected by a producer about Kelly Holcomb at nine-thirty in the morning. The point is the list. The point is it’s twenty-something names and I have watched almost every one of them get introduced in that same room and every one of them was going to be the guy who ended it.

RIZZO: They’ve got three of them right now and none of them are playing well.

GROSSI: And he won’t name one, and he won’t pretend that’s normal, which — that’s the first honest sentence anybody in that job has said in fifteen years. But it’s still three guys.

OLDACH: Hashtag Hey Tony. We got a lot this week. First one, Doug in North Ridgeville.

GROSSI: Bored. Absolutely bored, and I would be bored with them, and here’s the thing, Doug, bored is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Bored is 7–10. Bored is a competent staff and a defense that lines up correctly and you go to the games and you complain about the third-down calls and your life goes on. That’s what a normal franchise gets to have. We don’t get bored here. We get whatever this is.

OLDACH: Marisa in Lakewood.

GROSSI: Who?

OLDACH: Brett Kollmann. He’s got, like, half a million subscribers.

GROSSI: Never heard of him. Is he a scout?

GOLDHAMMER: He’s a film guy. He does forty-minute breakdowns. He worked for the Texans for a minute.

GROSSI: Then he was a scout.

GOLDHAMMER: He was in video, I think.

GROSSI: Well then I don’t know what he is. Marisa, honey, I don’t know. I do not know these people. I know Dane Brugler. I’ve known Dane Brugler for years and Dane Brugler is excellent and he goes to the games. Whether there’s a whole world out there of men doing this in a basement who are better at it than the people getting paid, I have no earthly idea, and if the answer’s yes then a lot of what I’ve believed for forty years is wrong, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not in a hurry to find out.

RIZZO: That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said on this show.

GROSSI: Don’t make it a thing.

OLDACH: Ken in Canton.

GROSSI: Ken, they’ll trade him. They trade everybody. They traded Garrett, they traded Newsome, they’ll trade Jeudy the first time somebody offers a fourth-rounder for him. And here is the thing about that contract that nobody in this town wants to sit with — Berry signed it on January second. Three days later he’s in a room being told to clean out his desk. Now either the people who fired him let him hand a twenty-nine-year-old corner sixty-two million dollars on his way out the door, which means they weren’t paying attention, or they knew and let it happen anyway, which is worse, and I have not seen one reporter in this market get a straight answer on which one it was.

GOLDHAMMER: You’re a reporter in this market.

GROSSI: I’ve asked!

OLDACH: Last two, quick. Sal in Boardman.

GROSSI: No. 1999 was worse. 1999 they had nobody. But I’ll say this, and Rizz you can yell at me — this is the thinnest it has been since a group I had to feel sorry for, and they put the entire thing on a twenty-five-year-old who was a Ram in May, and Verse is terrific and he is going to be exhausted by Halloween.

OLDACH: And Jeanette in Strongsville.

GROSSI: [pause] Hm.

RIZZO: Tony.

GROSSI: Hold on. Let me come back to that one.

GROSSI: Jeanette. All right. Here’s what I’ll tell you and then I want to move on from it. In January I asked him a question I meant to be unpleasant. I asked him, in front of the whole room, whether he understood that he was the owner’s guy and that meant nobody in the organization could ever tell him he was wrong. I wanted him to squirm. That’s a fair thing for me to want, that’s my job. And he said — and I’m going from memory here — he said that the owner’s guy problem is real, that it’s the thing that has wrecked more front offices than bad drafting, and then he named three people he had already asked to argue with him in writing and told me to come ask him in December whether they still had jobs.

RIZZO: He answered it.

GROSSI: He answered the question! That’s the — I have stood in that room since 1984 and I have asked I don’t know how many hundreds of questions and I have gotten maybe eleven answers. Eleven. He gave me a real answer to a question I asked in bad faith. He didn’t get defensive and he didn’t do the thing where they compliment you for asking it, which is the worst thing they do.

GOLDHAMMER: So you like him.

GROSSI: I did not say that.

GOLDHAMMER: You kind of said it.

GROSSI: I said the man answers a question. That is a small compliment about one thing and I’m already irritated I brought it up, because now you two are going to make a segment out of it and somebody’s going to clip it, and none of it changes the fact that he has never coached a football game and I am going to have to sit there in December and watch him find that out in public.

RIZZO: [laughing] Nobody’s clipping it, Tony.

GROSSI: Somebody always clips it.

OLDACH: We’re clipping it.