It’s both obvious and mysterious.

Obvious because, as Lane Adkins puts it, George Kokinis has been “at the front of the lunch line” for the Browns GM job for weeks. Mysterious because the specifics of the team’s progress with Kokinis has been guarded more carefully than the plans for the B-2 Stealth bomber.

The way that the team has communicated their front office and coaching hires in recent days appears to be just another step forward into weirdness, as the team sets new high-water marks for strangeness in the name of secrecy.

Like all Browns fans, I patiently await the moment everything snaps into order with perfect clarity, as the grand plan is revealed.

Perhaps, we think to ourselves in moments of confusion, we have yet to see the end game.

Well before Peter King suggested it, the gang here was musing that hiring Eric Mangini and our new GM (hereafter referred to as “Mr. X”) wasn’t the end of the restructuring.

The Browns, we speculated, might very well add some gray hair into their football operations in the form of an Ernie Accorsi or Charlie Casserly to provide mentoring for the “young” executives hired by the Browns. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio jumped on board yesterday, making a similar suggestion.

But I’m not feeling it anymore. I think we might already be at the end, for three reasons:

• Ernie Accorsi (pictured, looking too much like me) has had some tangential involvement with the team as they go through the hiring process. The NJ Star-Ledger (not the Plain Dealer) broke a story that the team had interviewed David Gettleman for their GM spot. This was largely seen as being a nod to Accorsi. As a result, some might suspect that Accorsi could be a potential senior advisor. However, friends of the Accorsi family recently wrote us, telling us that Ernie Accorsi was very happy in retirement and that there was no suggestion that he might leave it anytime soon.
• During their hush-hush-cone-of-silence meeting earlier this week, as Lane Adkins has previously reported, Mangini and Kokinis talked about splitting decision making, how they would handle certain scenarios, and so forth. If they’ve schemed out how to manage things without direct supervision, what role is there for a third person?
• Perhaps most damning to this theory, Randy Lerner has already come out and said that he would be the executive supervising Kokinis and Mangini. If that’s the case, there’s hardly room for a senior executive to intervene.

So, if you’re getting your hopes up that we’re not, in fact, at the end of the Browns Amazing Front-Office Adventure, I think it’s time to lower your expectations.

An off-season that began with names like Cowher, Parcells, and Shanahan firing up the public has now trailed off with Eric Mangini and George Kokinis playing lil’ Bill and lil’ Scott in Attack of the Patriots Clones, with the hopes that the same thing we tried before will now work because the two people we’ve set up are old pals.

Maybe that will meet with success. I hope so.

Still, some doubts nag at me. I am a small businessman, the OBR is a small business. Whether a business is large or small, they are rarely easy to create. I’ve seen too many friendships turned into partnerships that break up on the rocks over how work is split up, who takes the blame when things go wrong, and the general stress of building something in a competitive market.

It takes more than a friendship to make things work when times get tough. And the NFL, as we all know by now, is as stressful as it gets.