Browns add Hue Jackson, Paul Guenther, Sean McDermott, and Matt Patricia to head coach interview list
January 6, 2016Fully immersed: Diving into baseball’s player development culture
January 6, 2016You know that look a dog gives you when it cocks its head to the side? There was a lot of that in the Dawg Pound yesterday when the Cleveland Browns confirmed the reports that they’d hired Moneyball baseball guy Paul DePodesta to join their front office. As of this typing our readers had commented on that post 234 times, which is something of a modern record, I think. It’s hard to figure out what the conclusion in all this is because it’s a path that I hadn’t ever really considered, at least not recently.
In March of 2013 I was recapping my trip to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, where I met Alec Scheiner for the first time. He had been hired by the Browns in December of 2012 and by January, he’d brought Ken Kovash into the fold in Berea as well. They were at the conference in Boston and I had a chance to meet them both. I’m apparently one of a very few people who’ve ever had the chance to meet Kovash. You might remember that Chuck Klosterman’s bust of a trip to Berea for the NFL draft that produced Barkevious Mingo. In that diary, Klosterman talks about wanting to meet Kovash.
Another person I try to interview is a boyish 35-year-old named Ken Kovash, the Browns’ analytics guru (his official title is “director of football research and player personnel assistant”). Kovash is the kind of guy who needs to shave only once every 10 days and is mercilessly teased by everyone in the building when he unexpectedly shows up wearing a suit on draft day. I suspect he’s the kind of guy who has been teased his whole life, simply because he’s smarter than most normal people (he used to work with Steven Levitt, the Chicago economist who published Freakonomics). Moving forward, the Browns intend to amplify their emphasis on statistical analytics. They intend to be mathematically progressive. Kovash will be key to this, so he seems like a useful person to talk to. But my interview request is denied. I am not allowed to talk to Ken Kovash in any official capacity (we have dinner in a Mexican restaurant, but I have to agree beforehand to print nothing we discuss).
The Cleveland Browns’ hiring of Paul DePodesta makes me want to go to the archives and remember everything I thought was going to happen when the Browns hired Alec Scheiner. It’s everything I thought would happen after hearing him speak in Boston. And yet, with my dumb vision, I never saw this coming in a million years. But I should have. Something Alec Scheiner spoke about that weekend rings throughout the Cleveland Browns’ hiring of Paul DePodesta. At Sloan, the prevailing truth to everyone was not whether or not this revolution needed to happen, but how it was going to be sold to the more traditional stakeholders in a league like the NFL. Back then, Scheiner was insistent that adoption needed to be subtle and implementation done on a project-by-project basis. We’ve seen how that’s worked out for the Browns over the last few years, and here’s guessing that Scheiner won the ear of Jimmy Haslam and said, “You know what? It’s time to stop beating around the bush.”
[Related: All in on Paul DePodesta]
Sashi Brown is elevated. Bill Kuharich and Morocco Brown are fired. Paul DePodesta is hired. Even as all of those pieces moving occur above him, all I can think of is that this is also an early graduation for Ken Kovash, who has now been with the Browns for a little over three years and has the title Director, Football Research/Player Personnel. Back when I was at that conference and I thought the analytics revolution was coming, I thought Alec Scheiner was the champion. Even as he was self-described as “just a lawyer,” I thought it was false modesty more than anything else. It’s interesting that Scheiner’s name is conspicuously absent from all these machinations considering his name still sits at the top of the organizational chart, save for the people with the last name Haslam. Even as you have to assume his fingerprints are all over the scene, the Browns are wiping down all the surfaces and door handles so you won’t be able to prove that Scheiner was there.
It’s really interesting to think about the implications of all this except that it just opens more unanswerable queries. As recently as a few weeks ago, it seemed to me that the Cleveland Browns needed to hire someone at the top like Peyton Manning to recharge their political capital for a coaching search. It seemed to me that short of that, the Browns were destined for another last-on-their-list kind of process that resulted in Mike Pettine. That’s where a lot of the initial frustration and mockery with the naming of Sashi Brown came from around the league, I think. While nobody could come up with a bad thing to say about Brown, it all felt too weird to enable the Browns to execute a successful coaching and GM search. Little did we know that was just the first move.
Paul DePodesta is a culmination. I love Bomani Jones’ podcast and he’s in there mostly for the jokes and entertainment, which for me, he consistently delivers. As he spoke about the Browns and their decision to hire DePodesta, he stopped short of trashing the Browns, but he quipped that they should start with long-division before jumping headlong into some kind of revolution of doing things differently. It’s funny except that it ignores the fact that, despite the miserable failures of the last couple years with Ray Farmer and Mike Pettine, this was planted in the ground a little over three years ago when the Browns hired Scheiner and Kovash under the direction of Joe Banner.
Joe Banner was bad in a lot of ways, but he was a believer in analytics. There’s the famous story of Banner’s $100,000 study on the quarterbacks in the draft that had Teddy Bridgewater rated as the best prospect over Johnny Manziel. As painful as Manziel’s term has been and as much as I think the Browns made the right move by ousting Banner, it now seems very likely that the team learned an awful lot about the value of analytics over this period of time as Manziel helped usher out a GM and football coach with his wild antics. The culmination of all that appears to be Paul DePodesta, but what does that mean?
[Related: Browns add four head coaching candidates]
No clue. When I said the Browns needed someone like Peyton Manning to give them the ability to attract a coach, I hadn’t thought about this outcome. This flips the script on the coaching search even from what I wrote after the Sashi Brown promotion was announced. At that time, I felt like it had created a vacuum for a personnel-minded head coach. Now with the addition of DePodesta, I just have no idea whether this means the Browns will value a coach enough to make a strong play for Sean Payton, or if this screams for them to go get Matt Patricia from the Pats, who championed the modernization of process with computers for Bill Belichick.
The only thing I can say definitively is the punchline to a very long-running Cleveland joke. We’ve lived through some very bad mispronunciations of names over the past few years. We’ve also lived through a lot of misspellings whether we’re talking about Holgrum, Holmgrem, Haslem, Shurmer, Shumer, whatever the hell people have claimed Johnson Bademosi’s name is. Even over the last two days we’ve heard countless media people and coworkers manage to struggle their way into pronouncing Sashi as Sasha for some reason. In Paul DePodesta we’ve got the perfect storm of mispronunciation and misspelling in the making.
Rest In Peace, Paul DePodesta’s name. And good luck with whatever it is you’re going to do next. I’ll be watching with my head cocked to the side like a confused dog.
114 Comments
great post …
1. it does look like the proper seating chart for bleachers expansion
2. They didnt offer bobble heads in the 96-98 era I dont recall
3. that was not the 96 or 98 schedule magnet.
Hey your boy Patricia is coming to town… who else do we need?
Amen brother. Computers are for nerds.
So if the Browns use their #2 pick on Bryce Hanes, we’ll just have to trust the analytics I guess.
Has anyone asked why if DePodesta was so valuable why did Shapiro sell him to Beane?
I don’t know him how about Jabaal Sheard and Dion Lewis too?
More tomorrow..but, yes someone has
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The question I’m left with is this: now that the Browns are all in on saber metrics, which coaching and GM candidates will be chomping at the bit to come in and want the job wanting to use them? There have to be a couple that are excited at the possibility (Gase? Patricia?), and at the least there’s some clarity about what the candidates will need to do in order to get the job …
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