Nothing like a Brown
Cleveland’s catastrophic 2015 season is officially over, and it was nothing like fans were led to expect, such as when Jimmy Haslam declared in August that “no doubt we have a better team” than the one that went 7-9 but lost its five games of 2014. Nothing like laying a 3-13 egg, their worst record since the ill-prepared expansion squad of 1999, to redden the furrowed face of the fourth-year owner.
Nothing like a Brown
With a billion-dollar burst, he bought the Browns in 2012 and preached stability and continuity, as exemplified by the franchise he already partially owned, the Pittsburgh Steelers. But we know who set the standard our archrivals eventually achieved, and where the man who coached them to their first extended success, Chuck Noll, came from. Unlike our team’s namesake, whose reign with the original Browns lasted 17 years (equaling the duration of the expansion era), Jimmy Haslam is in name and deed, candidly, nothing like a Brown.
He cleaned house the first off-season after buying the team. He did it again just one year later, ending up with even less experience leading football operations. After an embarrassing search to replace the hastily scapegoated Rob Chudzinski, rookie head coach Mike Pettine arrived promoting the phrase “Play like a Brown.” It was his play to change the culture, to foster competition, tenacity, and confidence. It didn’t take long for the cynicism to reappear and the losses to mount.
Nothing like a Brown
The Browns brand once embodied excellence, excitement, and plain old unadorned professionalism. Instead we’ve seen more and more denigration of a once-great tradition. Accompanying that: aggressive attempts to monetize and “modernize” the best of that brand, alongside once-unthinkable levels of fan apathy.
Nothing like a Brown
After an excruciating season of concussions, in-fighting, fumbles, last-minute lapses, and off-field misbehavior, the defensive-minded head coach of one of the NFL’s worst defenses is gone. The 41-year-old GM, Ray Farmer, is also out of work less than two years after being promoted. The org chart is being scrambled strangely. The one sure thing that Browns fans can hope for is that the latest man to be promoted, 39-year-old lawyer Sashi Brown, the new choice to oversee football operations, will prove to be a better executive than his boss Haslam. Because apparently, for help flipping your head coach and GM for the third time in four years, there’s nothing like a Brown.
The head coach hiring will come next, according to Haslam, and that person will report directly to ownership. He’ll also have input into the next GM, who will be in charge of scouting and draft prep, but it is Brown who will have final say over the composition of the team. Perhaps more behind-the-scenes groundwork has been laid, and the next coach and GM will arrive quickly after meeting Rooney Rule obligations. But based on the pattern we’ve seen in recent years, we may very well end up with more neophytes feeling their way through a tough job for the first time for an impatient owner amid an unsettled organization. Hope may spring eternal, but experience tells me the next man up as Cleveland’s head coach will be nothing like the first.
Nothing like a Brown
