When the Browns fired their head coach and general manager after another abysmal season, the sentiment around the league was “Here we go again.” They’ll more than likely sign a new GM with a name but little resume, hire a coach with little name, and big expectations and in two years they will do it all again.
But the Browns decided to think outside the box this year. The first hiring was of Paul DePodesta to be the chief strategy officer in Cleveland. DePodesta, most famous for being a sidekick to “moneyball” maven Billy Beane had spent a career in baseball since 1996. Many laughed at this hiring with the easy brush off that baseball is a completely different sport. However, the strategy of running a sports franchise does have its connections. While he has never scouted quarterbacks and has never picked personnel to fit a defensive scheme, he has dealt with factors like “aging player demands pay raise” or handling a search for a head coach.
Cleveland Browns May Have Finally Got It Right
DePodesta was easy to dismiss on his own, but the promotion of Sashi Brown to vice president of football operations essentially makes the two a tag team at general manager. Brown has all of the football smarts of the two. He has twelve years in the NFL, and Sports Business Journal named him the “Top 40 under 40” football executive to watch this season. His experience so far has been on the contract negotiation and salary cap management side. Essentially they hired two guys who know how to run a professional franchise. One of them knows football and money and the other knows analytics. It isn’t the worst duo to be running a team.
Of course, the biggest news came when the two were able to get Hue Jackson in for an interview. It seemed as though the two had their plan to keep Jackson from the very beginning, and Jackson had a hard time walking away from a franchise he has seen first hand to be dysfunctional.
Jackson is an Xs and Os guy and a pure football coach. In 2010, Jackson was hired to be the offensive coordinator for the Oakland Raiders. That year, the Raiders went from 5-11 to 8-8 and it featured a record of 7-5 with Jason Campbell as his starter as well as a career high in yards and touchdowns for Darren McFadden. It also led to his 2011 promotion to head coach. His first move as head coach was to find a way to bring Carson Palmer to Oakland. We all look back at that as a terribly failed experiment, but Palmer was injured a lot that year, missing seven games, and the Raiders still finished 8-8 despite starting three different quarterbacks. We now look to the 2015 Palmer and have to wonder what patience could have brought to Oakland.
The Raiders moved on from Jackson after his miss on Palmer, but it is the Raiders who truly missed out here. In 2015, those two seasons under Jackson are still the best offensive seasons since 2002 in Oakland, and the only two seasons the Raiders did not finish under .500. The two seasons following Jackson, the Raiders combined to win eight games, something Jackson did in his only year as the head coach.
He then moved on to Cincinnati and in the past two years has been the offensive coordinator. Many wondered how he could do with Andy Dalton after Jay Gruden, the coach who had drafted and developed him, departed for the Redskins. While Gruden went on to success in Washington this year, the Bengals offense was much more successful under Jackson. Jackson preached running the ball and drafted Jeremy Hill who ran for over 1,100 yards as a rookie. The run first offense protected Dalton more than ever and he saw his sack numbers dwindle, while his completion percentage, yards per attempt and interception rate were at career bests.
Jackson had taken an offense that ranked 13th and 17th in efficiency respectively in Gruden’s last two seasons and turned it into the seventh most efficient in his first year, and in 2015 he had the most efficient offense in the NFL. In his four seasons as either offensive coordinator or head coach, he has had a team that is top seven in rushing attempts and rushing touchdowns. He had also churned out career highs for McFadden and Dalton, but also Marvin Jones, Tyler Eifert, Mohamed Sanu, as well as the Raiders Darius Heyward-Bey, Zach Miller and Louis Murphy.
Essentially anything on the offensive side of the ball that he has touched has almost always turned to gold. He now joins a team that has the one of the more stable offensive lines in the league. One would have to assume that played a role in Jackson’s selection of the Browns with two young but proven running backs in Duke Johnson and Isaiah Crowell and his familiarity with receiver Andrew Hawkins from Cincinnati. Jackson has churned out career highs for Eifert and Miller at tight end, and the Browns just so happened to find a diamond in the rough in Gary Barnidge this year. Jackson has been known as a no nonsense guy, and if that can get Josh Gordon back on the field and in a more stable environment it may be the break they need. Of course, he will need a quarterback, and for Palmer being Jackson’s only quarterback selection of his career right now it is hard to knock his ability to scout the position. Palmer didn’t work out health-wise for them, but we can see where Jackson was coming from now. He also has a year of experience as a secondary coach, but you can assume the hiring of his defensive coordinator will be the next move and may be most important to follow.
It won’t be easy, but was turning Dalton into a more efficient passer and turning the Raiders organization around a walk in the park? Jackson has shown success, a track record of respect from players, and has stated that his biggest reason for choosing Cleveland was his ability to get along with DePodesta and Brown. There are a ton of variables, and a column of its own could be about owner Jimmy Haslam and his shenanigans ruining the team. But looking at the three-headed monster that is assembled to build the football operations, you would have to assume if anyone can turn this Browns ship around it is them.
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