As the NFL and one of its member clubs continues to slog through the seemingly endless crime-and-punishment cycle, Browns General Manager Ray Farmer is owning his mistake.
Suspended the first four games of the regular season for texting suggestions to the sidelines last year, Farmer told Peter King of TheMMQB.com that he has accepted guilt.
“My mom and dad taught me a long time ago to take responsibility for my actions,” Farmer said. “That’s what I have done. As the time gets closer, I continue to reflect on what I did, and the cost of it. I made a mistake, and this is my penalty, and I am going to serve it.”
Along with the crowd noise penalty in Atlanta (for a team that went 3-5 at home while pumping in fake noise), Farmer’s illegal communications were admitted to, and punished pretty harshly.
What makes the Cleveland G.M.'s penalty so rough is how easily avoided it could have been, since he could have walked next door to the coaches booth in the press box and passed along his message.
But Farmer said that no longer mattered.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Farmer said. “It’s not my job to make up the punishment, or to issue the punishment. My job is the general manager of the Cleveland Browns. And I made a mistake, and I have to live with it.
“I look at it this way: If I’m speeding, and I get caught, depending where it happens, maybe I get a $300 dollar fine, or maybe I get a $1,000 fine. That’s not my job, to decide what the fine is. If I speed and get caught, well, I shouldn’t have been speeding. Someone else determines what the penalty for it is.”
Accountability is a message that seems to be catching on in other parts of the Browns organization at varying rates, so it’s good to see the boss owning his mistake.