The Cleveland Browns have lost their second game in a row to a team that only had two wins, falling to their AFC North rival Cincinnati Bengals.

In Week 14, the Browns also lost to the then two-win Buffalo Bills.

Head coach Eric Mangini said that the team lacked energy and emotion against the Bills and then after the Bengals loss, both Peyton Hillis and Colt McCoy said the same thing.

Who’s fault is it when a team plays flat and has no energy and/or emotion going into a game?

It is the player’s fault?

Or the coaching staff’s fault?

There is a fine line drawn with this one, but it is up to the coaching staff to lay out the game plan and get their team excited about it.

Perhaps some players did not see the excitement in the coaching staff’s presentation of the game plan the last two weeks, but when players come forward and say the team lacked energy, then that is almost an accusation that the coaching staff was at fault.

“The whole team has to be involved and has to be motivated and stuff like that,” Hillis said according to Cleveland.com. “We have to get to that point. We’re so ‘off and on’ through the whole game. We’ve got to get to the point where we’re like that every drive.”

If Hillis is saying this, then that leads one to believe that the coaching staff is not motivating the team during the games, which is evident by the lack of emotion Mangini and his crew have on the sideline when the cameras show them.

This also means that the coaching staff is not getting into the faces of the players who are not executing properly and that means there is not much “coaching up” of Browns players on the sidelines either.

Could this be reading into Hillis’ quote a bit much, not at all because Hillis has shown to be very humble and honest to the media throughout this season with Cleveland.

“After you get a good (first) drive rolling, you’ve got to come back on that second drive and capitalize on the same opportunities,” McCoy said the Cleveland.com. “You can’t get in a slump like we did and try to come back in the end. We’re pretty good at making drives at the end of the game. We spread them out and throw it and go score. We just can’t put ourselves in that situation over and over and over.”

Do you know what this mean?

This reads like the Browns play better when the pressure is on, so why are the coaches not putting more pressure on the players in-game?

Another question that will probably not get answered seeing as how team president Mike Holmgren might be leaning toward moving on from Mangini and his staff after these last two loses.

On a positive note, it is great to see that Hillis and McCoy are speaking candidly like this to the media and taking charge in their respective leadership roles and that is what Cleveland needs moving forward after the 2010 season.

Hopefully, depending on what Holmgren decides to do with the coaching staff, he brings on leaders to lead the team from a coaching perspective too since the current staff doesn’t seem to be leading the players the way they should be and the players are starting to see that after two tough loses to team they should have easily beat.

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