I'm tired of drafting QBs. Keep the two you have and get a FA QB next year. I don't care if it's even Murray. Get someone in FA, then build the OL in the draft. Take Proctor and Tate in the 1st round, then get the rest of the OL after that. It's annoying that we have to watch this ****show year in and year out. All this talk about 99 and the rebuild year...CLE got screwed as the NFL changed the rules for the Expansion Draft for CLE after JAX and CAR came aboard.
Most of this info comes from Terry Pluto's
False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail. Here's my original post with nicer formatting.
1: NFL dragged its feet on confirming Al Lerner as the owner of the Franchise in an attempt to drive up the price. they eventually confirmed Lerner in September of 1998. Less than a year before the Browns were legally bound to play their first game. This led to the Browns getting a super late start on hiring and building a coaching staff. p.s. the NFL forbade the Browns from hiring any coordinators who were under contract. So yeah. Which flows into points 2 & 3...
2: The Browns had nearly half the time to get ready from their Owner selection to their first game then any other modern expansion team. Just compare the number of days other modern expansion teams had to get ready... Texans (1,068), Panthers (677), Jags (642) versus the Browns (369). The NFL Owners were fine with this injustice though, because the Jags and Panthers came out and embarrassed the **** out of some of the old guard greats (i.e. they went to the playoffs in their second seasons of existence). So if the Browns floundered, no one would care. Just some added dark humor, the NFL spent 911 days from (almost 3x what the coaching staff had to prepare with) the Browns relocation before they gave ownership to Al Lerner (i.e. the legal ability to officially build a staff.)
3: With this truncated build up, there was no scouting staff in place. There was no research on what to use the extra picks that the NFL mercifully gave to Cleveland on. No idea forjust about any of it. The Texans in comparison, hired an entire GM staff in '01 so they had a complete year to scout everything for the NFL draft and the all important Expansion draft... which leads me to...
4: The ****ing expansion draft was broken for Cleveland and the NFL didn't care. In case you are unaware, the expansion draft is a draft where a new team is allowed to take players from other teams. This isn't as good as it sounds. In 1999, the expansion draft involved each other team choosing 5 players to leave unprotected (i.e. the Browns could sign them off of another roster). Teams couldn't select punters or kickers as one of their unprotected players. If the Browns chose a team's player, that team was allowed to protect another of the remaining 4. The browns could not sign more than 2 players from any one team (this was 1 player less than the expansions Panthers and Jaguars were allowed to take). The ******** sets in when the NFL allowed retiring/injured players to be kept on the expansion list, giving the NFL teams a de facto extra protected player slot. Furthermore, after watching Jacksonville and Carolina aggressively sign free agents that weren't tied up, other teams made damn sure that their major free agents were signed to long contracts. Before the Browns first Free Agency began.
Random aside, WFNY has a great article about the above part.
The Browns were set up to fail. As a result, it was inevitable that the first coach was going to be fired. And everyone knew it. In interviews for the position, coaches would say, "I'd love to be the second coach you're going to hire; but count me out for the first one. It's just not worth the risk." This starts the cycle where each head coach gets 2.9 years on average to build a winner or else they're fired. And it's not really any better for our GM. Constantly switching schemes and systems. We're just ****ed. From day 1.
There's plenty more, but you're going to have to actually pay for the book for that.
Then I went down the rabbit hole of Coaches and GMs since 1999. I don't know if I want to cry, throw-up, or punch someone - maybe all three at the same time?
The first pairing never had a chance. Shafted in the Expansion Draft. No time to build a suitable FO to actually assess talent prior to the draft or FA. Just utter failure.
- Chris Palmer: 1999-2000
- Dwight Clark: 1999–2001
Butch wasn't terrible, but that was compared to Palmer. Savage wasn't great, but again a step up from Dwight. But Romeo proved that not all Belicheck disciples can be a HC. He was a players coach, and his guys loved him. But he wasn't a HC. Good DC. Terrible HC.
- Butch Davis: 2001-2004
- Terry Robiskie: 2004 (Interim)
- Romeo Crennel: 2005-2008
- Phil Savage: 2005–2008
Mangini...ugh...I swear this was some weird get back at the NFL on his part after the NE and NYJ debacle. Kokinis was terrible and I swear both used the Browns franchise as their private playground to do with as they wanted.
- Eric Mangini: 2009-2010
- George Kokinis: 2009
I liked Heckert and thought he had a chance...until he hired Shurmur. Maybe the hire was ahead of it's time, but he was terrible as a OC and even worse as a HC. I think that would be Heckert's downfall here.
- Pat Shurmur: 2011-2012
- Tom Heckert Jr.: 2010–2012
Lombardi....oooh boy. Terrible. Absolutely terrible. Chud was another player's coach. Like Romeo, guys loved him. But he just wasn't that good as a HC. Rough year that was destined for failure.
- Rob Chudzinski: 2013
- Michael Lombardi: 2013
Farmer and Pettine...I put this year so far out of my mind that I drew a blank the first time I thought about it. Just the worst of the worst.
- Mike Pettine: 2014-2015
- Ray Farmer: 2014–2015
Sashi was just a numbers guy. No good at personnel or the draft. The one good thing he did was forget how fax machines work which blocked Hue's terrible trade idea to get AJ McCarron from CIN at the trade deadline. Hue was a terrible choice as a HC, but he did deliver us our only perfect season. I didn't mind Dorsey, but this was the epitome of an owner wanting to be hands off and simply didn't care. He hired the best "football mind" available for the GM role and said "the team's yours". Gregg brought some fire to a team that never had it. But still wasn't HC material. Freddie was just a lazy, bad hire by Dorsey. If Dorsey spent the time to hire a real HC, that might've changed the direction of this franchise. Instead, it set us back again.
- Hue Jackson: 2016-2018
- Gregg Williams: 2018 (Interim)
- Freddie Kitchens: 2019
- Sashi Brown: 2016–2017
- John Dorsey: 2017–2019
Now here we are. As much as the previous GMs have failed, Berry hasn't been that bad in comparison. He's good with the funny money movement, but didn't really say no to Haslam with the whole Watson Trade. Maybe he was in on it as much as they say it was a "team idea". Stefanski was a good OC, and has flashed as a good HC. But now he's just a shell of himself. He needs to move on, if not for the team's sake then for his own sanity. I have no doubt he'll move on and be a good HC somewhere else. But Cleveland isn't the place for him.
- Kevin Stefanski: 2020-Present
- Andrew Berry: 2020-Present
I hate saying it, but it's probably time to blow it up again. Whether Berry stays or we replace both the GM/HC simultaneously, a change is needed. I hate that we lost Vrabel to NE. I thought he would be great here. I don't want to lose Schwartz, but it's inevitable. I can see a path where Stefanski is fired after his next loss and Schwartz is moved to Interim HC and retains that title to become the next HC. My only fear is his past experiences as HC didn't turn out well. Maybe he's learned from those experiences. But if we do fire KS, then the next HC has to be a veteran coach. Look how many times CLE has taken first year HCs since 1999. They need to break that pattern.
Oh how this team frustrates me.....
youtu.be
