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January 19, 2018As far as I’m concerned, any debates surrounding the merits of the Cleveland Browns releasing Joe Haden are over. It’s been a hot topic in Cleveland since late August when Haden was cut and ultimately signed by the Pittsburgh Steelers. We’ve dissected his final seasons with the Browns. We’ve dissected his season with the Pittsburgh Steelers. The horse was dead, kicked, buried, dug up, kicked again.
But thanks to Joe Thomas it is now buried for good.
On the latest Thomahawk Podcast, Thomas and Andrew Hawkins discussed Haden and the impact of him being released on the 2017 Cleveland Browns. Regardless of diminished skills, cap numbers or any other details we might use to discuss NFL personnel moves, the impact of the move was undeniably awful.
[Related: Hue Jackson, Christain Kirksey wanted to keep Joe Haden]
Listen to Thomas here:
This is the argument-ender on the #Browns and Joe Haden. Regardless of diminished skills or cap numbers, there’s no justification for deflating your team the way Sashi Brown did in executing this move. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Joe Thomas. pic.twitter.com/vmTT6Z5xzZ
— Craig Lyndall (@WFNYCraig) January 18, 2018
Good plans require great execution and when you shock your coaching staff and locker room by cutting a popular leader, leaving your team devastated and befuddled, it doesn’t matter how technically brilliant it might have been. This isn’t Madden. These are real people with personalities and chemistry and dynamics covering the span of leadership, brotherhood, and beyond.
Sashi Brown might not have lost his gig for cutting guys like Joe Haden and Paul Kruger if he had executed those plans better with buy-in from the team and the coaching staff. Maybe it’s as simple as not waiting until the last possible minute at the end of training camp? That’s not something I can know for sure. What I do know for sure is that these moves left the team worse off not because of the players involved, but because of the impact they had on the human beings that were expected to try and win football games.
19 Comments
Yeah, I’m relenting on this one. Apparently it had a real effect on the guys on the locker room. I still don’t care that he’s gone given his performance for the Browns over the last couple years and his performance with the Steelers this year, but I understand that Browns players don’t look at it the same way as me as a fan.
Dweebometrics Unchained. Just look at the carnage.
Haslam certainly has the fecal touch.
Too bad that Joe couldn’t get a playoff win, but the Steelers are a mouthy, entitled bunch, so screw ’em.
Joe nailed it. Even with Haden in decline we were going into the season with a whole 10 guys from before the rebuild. The next highest turnover rate over that period retained 20. That’s just brutal.
But … never mind … onward !
What does it say about the other leaders on the team and the coaching staff that they got so dismayed by move? They know this is a business, and they’ve seen that being likeable isn’t necessarily going to save your job, and the whole “next man up” thing is hardwired into football players from an early age.
There’s always finger pointing after a bad year that involves 20-20 hindsight, and there seems to be some of that in this statement. I wonder if Hue was fired instead of Sashi, where the fingers would be pointing instead.
All it confirms is that we should have cut Joe Haden in March… like most of us who understood his eventual cut were saying.
Yeah, I don’t know if this can be considered a real excuse for the Browns playing poorly. I’m not willing to go that far at all, on game day they still get hyped and do their jobs.
This just seems to me like something Hue would have said after the season in an attempt to cover his rear end. And we would be raking Hue over the coals if he had said that the team just couldn’t get over losing a mediocre talent.
Thomas has built up more than a lifetime’s worth of goodwill in this town, and it was a lost season anyway, so I’m willing to chalk this up as a “whatever” and move on. But if we’re going to pick apart this statement, it doesn’t put anyone still around in any better a light.
I’m willing to infer from Thomas’ statement that there was a decided negative tone in the locker room regarding the decision to cut Joe Haden. Prior to Thomas saying it on the podcast, I didn’t believe even that much. I’m not willing to infer anything beyond that, though.
Hold on to a guy who was always injured or release him. Seems like an easy decision.
fecal touch … nice touch
That move seems to fit into the giving valuable preseason QB reps to Osweiler to dangle him as trade bait, thus preventing the kid you were going to start from getting those reps. Analytics are good, and here to stay. But not good when they run so amok that an org drowns its own goals.
Meanwhile is DePodesta’s secret underground vault…
http://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/mine-gif-17.gif
I don’t know who made what decision exactly (although the fact that Depodesta is still there and Sashi isn’t does give a hint) but I agree. I believe in analytics and defend it’s use in football, but that doesn’t change the fact that players are people, not just commodities. I agreed with many of the structural decisions, who they decided to sign, and how they managed the draft, trading down for future assets. (I accept missing on some picks as inevitable no matter who makes the call) But the failures on Schwartz and Pryor harmed young developing talent, and cutting Haden was completely tone deaf.
Of course, now that it’s over, it’s highly likely that he learns from those mistakes and becomes the next all-time great at what he does a la Bill Belichick, because Browns.
I think for Joe T it represents some emotional fatigue as it pertains to always feeling like they’re getting rid of anybody talented and starting over. You can’t expect the players to be super objective about the declining talent of their friends, even if they do understand it’s a business and are a seasoned veteran. If they made a tough call and the team got better it’s a lot easier to stomach, but I’m sure in the locker room it felt like a strictly cost-cutting move on a team already looking at an uphill slog.
This is a clear example of why Sashi was canned instead of Hue.
But thats a problem fixed before the season and at first in private, when it was crystal clear that they weren’t spending money. It should not have been a surprise to see Haden cut at that point.
Not saying anything until the season is over, and airing dirty laundry about the guy who was fired is straight out of the Hue playbook.
Many have said that an NFL team should be able to luck into a win or two, even with the talent the Browns had. So Sashi had to kill morale as well. All part of the plan…
Letting a player go who hasn’t been good in 4 years isn’t why.