Veteran cornerback Rod Hood has had a strange year, to say the least. Cut by the Cardinals in late April, Hood made the rounds before landing in Cleveland.
He signed with the Browns on May 26. On August 31, they released him.
The next day, Hood signed with the Bears. On September 4, they released him.
He finally found a new home -- his fourth of the year -- in Tennessee on October 15. So far, the relationship is working fairly well. His first start came in Week Eight’s 30-13 win over the Jaguars, and Hood contributed an interception to the effort.
Earlier this week, he talked about his experiences with Terry McCormick of the Nashville City Paper. The stuff that caught our attention the most related to his time with the Browns.
“It had nothing to do with my play at Cleveland,” Hood told McCormick. “It was one of those things where I really wanted to get out of there, because I didn’t like how things were going, how things were being run there. I’m just a big guy on character and how things are supposed to be played out, and it wasn’t a good situation for me. It was to a point where football wasn’t even fun for me. It was terrible to me.”
Per McCormick, Hood didn’t provide chapter-and-verse particulars. But Hood said he’d never encountered anything like it during his seven NFL seasons.
“I don’t want to go into it specifically. The owner is a good guy, and the organization in years past, but now they’ve got some people in there that’s not running it the way it should be,” Hood explained. “I’ve never experienced football [like that]. I came from two good organizations in Philly and Arizona, and I’d never seen football handled the way it was when I was there.”
The unspoken target of Hood’s attack is, clearly, coach Eric Mangini. Though some might think Mangini has become a pin cushion for criticism because of the way he handles the media, we get the sense that it runs much deeper than that. A league source recently told us that former G.M. George Kokinis “changed” once he arrived in Cleveland, and that he seemed aloof and always fearful. The source believes that Kokinis changed due to the stress of working with (for) Mangini.
And while we heard in the wake of the team’s first and only win of the year that Mangini had changed for the better, another source told us that Mangini fairly quickly went back the other way.
That said, there likely are more than a few players who don’t have a problem with the way Mangini is running the Browns. For Mangini’s sake, it would be nice if one or more of them would stand up and prop up the team’s embattled coach.