2015 WFNY Author Spotlight : Best of Dave Sterling
January 5, 2016Browns add Hue Jackson, Paul Guenther, Sean McDermott, and Matt Patricia to head coach interview list
January 6, 2016Happy Wednesday, Blawg Pound. I’m all in on the recently hired Paul DePodesta.
Much of my all-in-itude can be derived from two words: Why not? Anyone with eyes or ears, regardless of whether or not they could tell a pigskin from a pork rind, could tell you that none of the Cleveland Browns’ approaches over the past 15-plus years have worked. That’s a reductive thing to say, in large part because I’m not sure I could describe what those approaches have actually been, but you get the idea. They’ve tried poaching coordinators from top teams and they’ve tried bringing in guys who dominated in college. They’ve had coaches who have chosen their own players and coaches who didn’t. They’ve had all sorts of different front offices, from the dysfunctional to the super-dysfunctional. Why not bring in the Moneyball guy? As Yahoo’s Tim Brown wrote, “They won’t be worse for it.”
One thing is for sure: this ain’t the same old Browns. (Save that refrain for the first couple losses.) If nothing else, the Browns are assembling as many Ivy Leaguers as any front office in the NFL.
Ah, and that’s where one might be inclined to holler about the lack of a classic-if-nebulous “football guy” in this simmering stew. One might also remember that Ray Farmer and Mike Pettine were football guys. So was Mike Holmgren. And Phil Savage. And Butch Davis. A lifetime in the sport — in anything — does not guarantee success in it. There’s a decent chance that the Browns have completely outsmarted themselves here, but there ain’t much worse an NFL team can do than 3-13. If you’re in an 0-for-10 slump, why not take a big swing?
And for what it’s worth, DePodesta’s roots are in football. For all the yammering about analytics this and math that, the man isn’t a bean counter who’s been locked in a basement for the past 20 years. He played the game, and his first gig out of college was an internship with a CFL team. He won’t be learning for the first time what a strong safety or a split end is. As the Washington Post‘s Dave Sheinin explains…
For DePodesta, a native of Alexandria, Va., and a product of Episcopal High, the move [to the Browns] is a return to his roots. He had played football since the fifth grade, and he kept playing at Harvard – where he was smart enough to know, as he once recalled, “the sideline was my friend” — even after a shoulder injury forced him to quit baseball.
“As far as I’m concerned, he always was a football guy,” said Harvard football coach Tim Murphy, for whom DePodesta was a senior back-up wide receiver in 1994. “It just took him 20-plus years to figure it out.”
Actually, DePodesta had it all figured out from the start. As a young Harvard grad in 1995, with a degree in economics, his first career aspiration was to become the next Bill Walsh.
“What I really wanted to be at the time was a football coach,” DePodesta told author Steve Kettmann in the book Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets – about one of DePodesta’s baseball mentors. “I loved the strategy of it and I loved the physical competition that went along with it. I was trying to get that experience in the CFL. My hope was the get a graduate assistant job somewhere in football, get a graduate degree and start coaching somewhere.”
The Indians hired him away a year later, and his baseball career began — and it developed into a pretty darn successful one.
We would also be wise to remember that Paul DePodesta is not the general manager. He isn’t the head scout. He isn’t going to be making all the choices on draft day or in free agency. He’ll have some amount of hand in those things, and he’ll have a lot to do with how the Browns approach those things, but he isn’t some boogeyman turning in draft cards based on spreadsheets alone. Resist the urge to let out an Ogre-esque battle cry.
It’s fair to wonder what exactly a Chief Strategy Officer does, and it’s fair to wonder how he will be involved in personnel decisions. It’s fair to be uneasy about the franchise’s direction when we don’t yet know the identities of the head coach or GM. It’s fair to be dubious, given their track record, of most anything the Browns do. It’s also fair to understand, as Anthony Castrovince wrote for Sports on Earth, that any backlash against DePodesta’s hiring says loads more about the employer than employee.
Were this quite literally any other organization in professional sports making such a progressive personnel move, it would be worthy of cautious approval, if not outright applause. DePodesta, after all, is one of many who have proven that in sports, as in business, coloring outside the lines can be richly rewarded.
And let’s face it, if DePodesta — himself a former wide receiver at Harvard, before he went on the baseball trail that led to his latest role as the Mets’ VP of player development — has even a rudimentary understanding of the quarterback position and what it takes to fill it, he’ll be an instant improvement for a franchise that has tried everything from Tim Couch to “Billy” Manziel and sundry other scrubs and flubs in-between.
Any skepticism of this hire, it should be clear, is no reflection on DePodesta himself (he’ll be truly missed by the Mets) but on the team that hired him.
The reflex is to laugh and to mock. I get that as much as anyone. And yeah, maybe this novel approach will fail and the Browns will be a laughingstock. But they’re a laughingstock already. From the on-field product to fan morale, things are as bleak as I can remember. I shudder to say this, as the Browns have long shown the ability to prove me wrong, but things can’t get much worse. Why not give the baseball guy a shot?
136 Comments
I have two things in my entire house that say Browns: one is an old jacket from 20 years ago and another is a t-shirt someone got me. That’s it. I will not contribute $1 to them if possible. Think they’ve noticed? Me neither.
Unfortunately there are millions of people who still do, including the tens of thousands who shell out for tickets. And those millions shout down anyone who tries to point out that the Browns are in the Guinness Book of World Records in the Bad Decisions section.
If the Browns were playing to near empty stadiums every week, you would not believe how responsive they would be to fans.
I have one. It was a gift as well. Even if the stadium was empty, Haslam would still be making millions. If it went on long enough, he’d just take the team somewhere else. Que sera.
Sorry. Don’t buy it. Oakland has generally had the worst attendance in the NFL for a while now and what has that done?
The stadium being empty would be more of a statement/message heck I’d settle for a blackout. Are these even possible anymore? He can’t take the team anywhere for a long time he’s all but cemented to Cleveland. Poor Cleveland.
Perfect.
I mean, it’s not like there’s precedent of that….
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/05/08/browns-spent-100000-on-advanced-study-of-quarterbacks/
This deserves the powder blue comment of the day award!
This deserves the powder blue comment of the day as well. You guys are en fuego!
With the first pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, the Cleveland Browns select, Joe Callahan, quarterback, Linfield College.
http://gifsec.com/wp-content/uploads/GIF/2015/01/Geek-Nerd-Computer-Enough-Internet-Gamer-Gaming-Internet-South-Park-GIF.gif?gs=a
His accuracy from between center line of the pocket to 3.89 yards outside of the pocket (AccCLoP) is a +.876, and his time metric between initial read, release of the ball, and strike of receiver’s hands (TBIRRBSRH) is an astonishing 2.00032. Can’t argue with the numbers.
What is up with the hunting knife?
I think you know.
Freedom and liberty are so, so moronic.
13 more years on the lease….
Well, they are better than the Browns. And let’s see, they’ve been the Super Bowls, the playoffs, and now have a young core that appears to be exactly what the Browns need and didn’t get the last several drafts.
Yeah, gee, what has Oakland done?
We are SO winning the Super Bowl this year!
http://content.randomenthusiasm.com/XZoabMwGz.gif
I’m just hoping for a .500 record in that time is that so much to ask for?
They aren’t watchable and aren’t mediocre so….
Relocated to Los Angeles?
They haven’t been to the playoffs since 2002, their last winning season. Recent poor attendance has done nothing to create a better on-field product.
And he did well at the nerd combine
You mean the Super Bowl season of 2002? And when exactly was the Browns last Super Bowl appearance? How about their last playoff win?
And since Haslam took over, you’re thinking that the Browns have been doing it better than the Raiders, huh?
Keep telling yourself that while rooting for a team that is far, far worse than the Raiders have ever been. Whatever keeps you warm at night.
Nerds: Let’s innovate!
NFL: LETS CRUSH NERDS.
If the Raiders stay in Oakland, the terrorists have won.
Deep breaths. It’s just sports, guy. It’s entertainment, not life and death. If you don’t enjoy following the Browns, don’t follow them. The rest of us are going to keep doing so because, win or lose, we get some level of enjoyment out of it.
Hey, if you get enjoyment out of losing, more power to you. You should be very entertained at this point and have nothing to complain about now or in the future.
But probably not the best thing to change the subject when you’re trying to make a point.
You contend that not going to Browns games will force Haslam to improve the on-field team. You believe that it’s in his power to do so, that he knows how to do it, and simply chooses not to because losing is somehow preferable. That makes zero sense. I have pointed out that there are plenty of examples of NFL teams that have horrible attendance yet continue to be bad. Poor attendance hardly hurts owners because the majority of their revenue comes from broadcasting deals. All poor attendance does is provide owners with an excuse for relocation. Your suggestion that it is in the power of the fans to somehow “make the Browns prove it” and that this will result in a better on-field product is silly, stupid, and naive.
DePodesta: Ummm, Coach, why did you run the toss sweep on third and 4? Our calculations indicate that a WR screen had a better probability of succeeding.
Coach: Wedgy time for you poindexter…
At this point I would prefer he do something stupid like sign a huge free agent. That way we could get irrationally excited from a new perspective, as opposed to the infinitely repeated, “well, at first I was annoyed, but I guess I should reserve judgment”.
Nobody seems to notice that all of the positive sentiments that people are expressing about Sashi Brown and Paul Depodesta are the exact same ones we expressed two years ago, after they whiffed on Kelly and were snubbed by like four other hot coaching candidates. We convinced ourselves (honestly, not entirely wrongly) that Pettine was a sneak prospect at coach; a hard-nosed, straight talking coordinator who had succeeded wherever he had been. We convinced ourselves that Farmer was going to be the answer at GM because Miami had wanted to talk to him and because we were fed up about Banner. Then we did the same thing again when the Browns did nothing in free agency – we talked ourselves (again, not entirely wrongly) into the idea that free agency rarely pays off, that we were buying low on Bowe, that Tramon Williams was a great value, etc. etc.
And here we are again, talking ourselves into the idea that a baseball executive and a lawyer are going to be better than the 79 previous attempts to hire competent football people. I don’t care what Haslam’s reasons are, I haven’t bought merchandise since they were good, which in my case means never and I only want something that is exciting viscerally, as opposed to something I can be vaguely optimistic about if I try hard enough.
Wow, the depth of the delusion here is stunning. The idea that losing tens of millions of dollars in revenue each Sunday would be meaningless to an owner is maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.
But the problem is not that Haslam has the power to fix it, but rather that he does not. Haslam wants to make the decisions himself. Halsam wants to be the genius. He has yet to hire one single person who has experience in the position he hired them for. You think that is a coincidence? This new set of guys is using the smoke and mirrors of analytics to distract you, but at the end of the day it’s a bunch of guys who have never had these positions for, and that is exactly what a megalomaniac wants.
Owners win. Period. Bad owners can occasionally get lucky, but by and large good teams have good owners. The best the Browns can hope for is that Haslam will eventually sell the team. The only way that ever happens is if the fans rebel and drive him away with poor attendance and anger and protest.
Or they could sheeple it up, keep selling out, and let him suck year after year after year. Enjoy that.
LeBron’s agency has dumped Johnny Boy Manziel.
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I have absolutely no issue with you or anyone else choosing to err on the side of skepticism when it comes to anything this franchise does until they finally start to show genuinely positive results on the field. And I’m not chugging any powder-based fruit drink mix they are serving up either. I’m simply not outright dismissing the chances of this new plan to possibly, maybe not end in flames.
Don’t be silly of course there is always a chance the problem is with every reincarnation all I ever hear is this same chance referred to repeatedly. Instead of chance why not just use the word hope? That’s the word that seems to be more appropriate.