I spent three hours on the phone with the showrunner of the NFL's new scripted drama, and let me tell you, this made-up franchise has the intangibles the real front office has been missing for decades.
I have watched the two-minute trailer for "The Land," the NFL-backed scripted drama premiering the day after Super Bowl LXI, no fewer than forty times this morning. While the so-called experts on the morning networks are busy treating this as a mere television show created by the guy who made "This Is Us," I am looking at the tape. And the tape does not lie. For the first time since the Bernie Kosar era, the Cleveland Browns have a roster that understands what it means to put your hand in the dirt.
I sat down with Dan Fogelman over ribeyes at a Midtown steakhouse last Tuesday to talk X's and O's. I asked him point-blank whether his fictional defensive coordinator was going to play press-man coverage against the fictional Ravens in episode four. He looked me dead in the eye, told me he was just trying to craft a compelling emotional narrative about fatherhood, and asked the waiter for the check. That is the kind of tight-lipped, old-school institutional discipline I have been begging the real-life Browns front office to implement for twenty years. No leaks. No excuses. Just execution.
This league has a problem. We have handed the sport over to guys in quarter-zips staring at iPads, calculating launch angles and expected points added. But you know who does not care about your spreadsheet? A television casting director. They do not look at a guy's combine numbers. They look at his jawline. They look at whether he can deliver a monologue in the pouring rain while holding a prop helmet. That is the eye test, plain and simple. You can't teach that kind of raw, dramatic presence.
Take the fictional quarterback we see in the teaser. I don't know the actor's name, but I saw him hit his mark, look deeply into the camera lens, and tell a crying fictional wide receiver that they were going to win the state championship. Is it a little concerning that a professional NFL franchise is talking about a state championship? Maybe. But the leadership intangibles are off the charts. He commands the huddle. He remembers his lines. He doesn't have a fully guaranteed quarter-billion-dollar contract weighing down the cap while he completes fifty percent of his passes.
In another scene from the trailer, the head coach—played by a guy who I am pretty sure was a secondary villain in a recent superhero movie—flips a buffet table because the team isn't respecting the game. That is a statement win right there in the catering tent. The real head coach would just stand at the podium and mumble about a lack of execution. This fictional coach understands that sometimes you have to destroy a perfectly good spread of craft services to get the locker room's attention.
We are currently running a Cover-2 emotional defense, which means our linebackers are responsible for the deep middle third of the field while also confronting their unresolved childhood trauma.
Dempsey gets it. The real Browns have spent half a decade trying to establish a winning culture through draft capital and high-priced free agency, only to repeatedly end up as the laughingstock of the AFC North. Fogelman's Browns built a winning culture in six weeks of pre-production by simply writing a script where they win. It is a stunningly efficient use of resources. Why rely on a fragile running back's knees when you can rely on a three-act structure?
I spoke off the record to a grip who was working on set during the filming of the pivotal third episode. He told me the fictional general manager character actually traded a fictional first-round pick for a fictional veteran safety without once checking an analytics dashboard. He just looked out the window of his office, took a sip of prop scotch, and said "make the call." I got chills. That is how football was meant to be managed.
The solution here is obvious. The actual Cleveland Browns need to immediately waive their 53-man roster and sign the Screen Actors Guild members currently pretending to be them. Are they undersized? Yes. Are half of them British theatre actors doing passable Ohio accents? Undoubtedly. Do any of them know how to take a hit from T.J. Watt without requiring immediate, life-saving hospitalization? We will find out on Sunday.
But until then, I know who my money is on. The real Browns might have the facility, the stadium, and the league charter, but Fogelman's squad has the one thing this franchise has desperately lacked for three decades: a guaranteed storyline where things actually work out.