In defense of firing John Dorsey: While We’re Waiting

First, allow me to say Happy New Year to all of our lovely readers.¹ The holiday stretch has happened and we are in the new year now. We made it through the glazed over period of time between Christmas and New Years where every day feels like a blur and you have no sense of time nor direction. If you have awoken from the Holiday Haze without having checked your phone, you might have missed some big things that occurred: the Cleveland Indians didn’t sign anybody since bringing in free-agent second baseman Cesar Hernandez. I know! They usually go crazy on the holiday bargain bin!

But really the big news everyone is talking about are the firings of head coach Freddie Kitchens and general manager John Dorsey. While Kitchens was an almost definite ouster, especially after the Week 17 loss to the worst team in the league Cincinnati Bengals, the removal of Dorsey was surprising to most and has set upon another round of #SellTheBrowns and prompted emergency podcasts across the NEOhio blogosphere.² Reports from insiders close to the Browns have said that the Haslams attempted to restructure the front office, asking Dorsey to move away from player acquisition and more to a talent evaluator role, allowing for the hiring of a new GM who would work in unison better with whatever new head coach was brought in, but the ship had sailed. Paul DePodesta is remaining with the franchise, heading the coaching search, but will not take over as head of the football department.

Many have called this “same old Browns” and it is. I am not here as a Haslam stan,³ I think they need to remove themselves from the operations side of things and let the adults in the room handle the thing they were hired for. But when considering the firing of Dorsey, I am finding it harder than pretty much everyone else to get as upset about the situation. Yes, there are a great many things Dorsey did as general manager, picking Baker Mayfield and Denzel Ward, bringing in Jarvis Landry and Odell Beckham Jr, making it arguably the most talented roster since returning to the league chief amongst all these. However, I feel there are enough reasons to think Dorsey isn’t right for the job here and has made enough mistakes to warrant removing him after two years.

The offensive line is…offensive

I will not spare you the dad puns since I am close to being a father of two,⁴ but the moves Dorsey made around the offensive line were downright awful. You can understand the trade of Kevin Zeitler and Jabrill Peppers for OBJ and Olivier Vernon, both the skill positions Cleveland got in return are at a higher premium than the ones they sent out, but there was no plan in place to replenish the offensive line. I say no plan was in place because the plan that was there was stupid: Austin Corbett was the odds-on guess to be the starting right guard after failing to be the for not only Joe Thomas at left tackle, but also Joel Bitonio at left guard (once HE moved to left tackle), as well as JC Tretter at center. He was obviously not up to the task as he was eventually sent packing to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for a draft pick before the trade deadline despite not ever being designated active for the Browns in 2019. Instead, Eric Kush, Wyatt Teller, and others attempted to play guard, and you can imagine how it all phased out.

As bad as the right guard situation was, let us not forget how bad the tackle spots have been in these two years. The first season with no Joe Thomas was a scary look at how lucky we were to be blessed with that national treasure. The Browns rolled with undrafted rookie free agent Desmond Harrison protecting the quarterback’s blind spot and boy howdy I bet you can guess how well that went. Eventually, Greg Robinson was installed as the starter and was passable according to PFF, with overall grades of 59.6 and 66.9 in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Robinson struggled in the run game and with penalties in 2019, logging 12 flags thrown for 10 penalties and 95 yards which accounted for 9.84% of the team’s flags. Chris Hubbard, the starting right tackle throughout 2018-2019, had his own struggles. As with Robinson, he performed well enough in 2018 by PFF grades, but 2019 saw him fall apart both play wise and penalty wise. Eight penalties on the year to tag along with a 50.6 PFF grade this season means the new GM had better be looking at upgrading both tackle spots.

Not my guy, not my problem

It’s understandable to have a predilection to players you bring into a franchise. You selected these players, whether by draft or by signings, and you like seeing them do well. However, when players that were not selected by Dorsey started getting benched or looked over for lesser players, it raised some red flags. Rashard Higgins was a key player in the resurgence of the Browns in 2018. He had a rapport with Mayfield that seemed special. When he went down with yet another injury early on in the season, we all expected him back within the four-week timetable. However, he was not seen from until after the Week 7 bye week, and you could make the argument he was barely ever there when he was suited up. Higgins received eight targets, catching two of them for nine yards in the eight games he was active for, not even registering offensive snaps in three of those games. In his place, Dorsey pick Antonio Callaway⁵ got the call despite being what can best be described as hot garbage. In four games and two starts, Callaway caught eight of 15 targets for 89 yards, no touchdowns, and was routinely out of position, started plays on the wrong side of the ball, and was the perpetrator of the dropped pass for an interception that really turned the tide in the Monday Night Football shellacking by the San Francisco 49ers. Higgins is a free agent now, or will be after the Super Bowl, so while you can make some argument of wanting to see players that *will be* with the club in the future play, that shouldn’t be happening with a team that had playoff hopes as late in the season as Week 16.

https://twitter.com/NFL/status/1181380231107493889?s=20

Higgins wasn’t the only Sashi Brown pick that was seemingly ostracized by the Dorsey/Kitchens regime, as Genard Avery eventually got shipped out to Philadelphia after being a healthy scratch in his own fair share of games. Avery was a difference-maker at times in 2018, collecting 40 tackles, 4.5 sacks, with four pass defenses,  and a forced fumble and fumble recovery each. Many expected him to continue that trend, spelling Myles Garrett and Vernon at defensive end, allowing those two to get more rest than previous years. However, Avery was only active in two games for Cleveland before the trade to the Eagles. Some had said that new defensive coordinator Steve Wilks asked Avery to gain some weight to be on the line and it sapped some of his explosiveness. Whatever the reason, Cleveland was now out another playmaker from a previous regime for little-to-no reason.

David Njoku was a first-round pick, for better or worse, under Sashi Brown, and while The Chief hasn’t lived up to his lofty expectations, he is still a better player than the random name generator we used as starting tight end in his absence. Ricky Seals-Jones, Pharaoh Brown, Demetrius Harris, Steve Carlson all had weird random moments in the midst of the season, but once Njoku returned from the IR, he should have been the one playing without question. However, Njoku was a healthy scratch in Weeks 15 and 16 and didn’t receive a snap in Week 17 ay the Bengals. Kitchens had gone on record as saying the interception that Njoku “allowed”⁶ against the Bengals in their first matchup kept Njoku off the field. Why was one play keeping a superior player on the sidelines? Was it an instance of a GM overstretching and telling his coach not to play a person, or was it simply gross negligence by a coach? If it was the latter rather than the former, the GM is the one that was singlehandedly responsible for the coach’s hire.

Bad apples can ruin the barrel, and just because they didn’t doesn’t make them good

Dorsey has a long track record of attempting to rehabilitate players with off-the-field transgressions. This was apparent from the start when Dorsey used a fourth-round pick on Antonio Callaway in 2018. There were some talent evaluators that had Callaway as a first-round talent but had completely removed the player from their draft boards due to the myriad issues he has while in college, up to and including a possible sexual assault issue. Fourth-round players aren’t usually star players in the NFL, granted, but it is still a higher value than many had given the volatile player. Sheldon Richardson, Kareem Hunt, Josh Gordon, and many others all have had off-the-field instances that have kept teams away from them, and while the two former mentioned above are players that have stepped up for the Browns and performed well, the practice of counting on production from players that have bad histories is one that most teams do not use because it typically does not work out.

Continuity for continuity’s sake is the wrong idea

Many of us were on the Kitchens head coach bandwagon in 2018 because of how well he had made the offense look and that hiring him would bring about an air of continuity that was lacking in this organization. For example, Hue Jackson is the only person to coach for than 32 games for the Browns since Romeo Crennel was the head coach for 64 games between 2005 and 2008. Keeping Kitchens with the organization was smart but it became obvious early on that he was not ready to be the head coach and it only got worse as the season went on, as the team failed to show up for the last three-to-four weeks despite being on the outskirts of a playoff run. Despite that, NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport has said Dorsey wanted to keep Kitchens as the coach, which is the biggest reason for his demise and subsequent removal from the team.

It has been reported that possible head coach candidate Josh McDaniels would not have gotten along with Dorsey and would have asked for his departure if he was going to be hired. Let’s say McDaniels is the right coach, we don’t know for sure we all thought Kitchens was, but for the sake of the argument, McDaniels has turned it around from his Denver days, passed on the Indianapolis job because of reasons unbeknownst to us, learned from the cerebral assassin Bill Belichick and is ready to go. Would Dorsey be impartial and say this is the right hire? As someone simply put it on Twitter: if you can’t trust Dorsey to hire the right coach, then he has to be removed.

It comes down to what you want out of a person. The Haslams wanted Dorsey to stay on as a talent evaluator, basically as the lead scout of the franchise, and Dorsey did not want to take the cut in responsibility. The hiring of Kitchens was on Dorsey alone, DePodesta wanted Kevin Stefanski as the coach, and when the team and season unfolded as it did, it became apparent that changes needed to be made. If you are keeping a member of the front office simply to keep continuity, then you are playing the game wrong. Dorsey has done a lot of good for the franchise, and inevitably, if and when the Browns do well enough to make the playoffs, there will be a new installment in the Sashi/Dorsey Wars. Some will make the statement that you could win with Dorsey and whatever head coach they bring in, and I agree you definitely can, but to say this is just another installment of #HaslamsGoneWild is, in my opinion, wrong.

1. Even the not-so-lovely ones, you’re included. [↩]
2. Included here at Waiting for Next Year where fearless leader Craig Lyndall came out saying the NFL should confiscate the Browns from the Haslams. [↩]
3. That’s the second time I’ve used that word this week here and I feel okay about it. [↩]
4. Baby Bea is due Feb 7, so we are officially in anxious dad “where is the baby hospital bag??” mode. [↩]
5. Remember him? [↩]
6. He had clear possession of the ball and came down with possession, yet the referees in the game overturned the catch call and gave the ball to the Bengals. [↩]