"Covering Bill Belichick in the Super Bowl here this week transports me back to the five years I covered him in Cleveland (1991-95).

They were some of the most difficult years of my life -- and some of the most rewarding.

Belichick was a first-time head coach, and I was a first-time Browns beat writer. We both made plenty of mistakes, but we both learned a lot during those years.

If you can survive covering Belichick your first time up, you can handle almost anything on a beat. In fact, the writers during those years bonded through our adversity and still laugh about it.

There was the time Ed Meyer from the Akron Beacon Journal tried to get to the bottom of why Belichick replaced the outdoor fields in Berea at a cost of about $500,000.

Supposedly, the fields had been flooding and couldn't be used for days. "