The Ringer - Welcome to Trust the Browns’ Process Week2019-08-23T06:30:00-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/205776202019-08-23T06:30:00-04:002019-08-23T06:30:00-04:00How the Browns and Paul DePodesta Brought Moneyball to the NFL
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<p>Two decades ago, the strategist was an oddity with the Oakland A’s. Now, he’s an archetype, applying the lessons of baseball’s analytics revolution to football one Cleveland draft pick at a time.</p> <p id="KT5z5f"><em>The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week"><em>Trust the Browns’ Process Week</em></a><em>, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="SkPqGb">America was introduced to Paul DePodesta as an unexpected presence in the Oakland A’s draft war room. </p>
<p id="2osMAy">“Paul hadn’t played pro ball,” reads the first description of DePodesta in <em>Moneyball</em>, the 2004 Michael Lewis book on “the art of winning an unfair game” that inspired an Oscar-nominated film and 13 years’ worth of debates and catchphrases. “Paul was a Harvard graduate. Paul looked and sounded more like a Harvard graduate than a baseball man. Maybe more to the point, Paul shouldn’t have even been in the draft room. The draft room was for scouts, not assistant general managers.”</p>
<p id="WIh6En">Lewis described DePodesta as a laptop-toting quantitative specialist whose inclusion in the 2001 draft process was one of the final flash points between GM Billy Beane—the book’s hero—and old-school scouting director Grady Fuson, one of Beane’s several antagonists. A year later, Fuson was gone and DePodesta was one of the key voices in the discussion over which players the A’s should select with their seven first-round picks. </p>
<p id="i7uD3K">Fifteen years later, after an ill-fated two-season stint as Dodgers GM and another decade in the Padres’ and Mets’ front offices, DePodesta once again made headlines as an unexpected presence in a front office with a mountain of draft picks, leaving the Mets not only for a new team but a new sport: football, and a job as chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns. It’s not unprecedented for an executive to jump from one sport to another, but it’s unusual enough that it made DePodesta one of the most visible executives in the NFL overnight.</p>
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<p id="ldEMgv">Baseball was the first major American sport to undergo what’s come to be called an analytical revolution, the first to routinely turn ball clubs over to young, ambitious Ivy League empiricists, like DePodesta, who is as much an archetype in 2019 as he was an oddity in 2001. When the Browns hired DePodesta in January 2016, they brought in not only his own talents but also the institutional knowledge of someone with 20 years of experience in a rapidly evolving field. Baseball and football are obviously quite different, but certain analytical techniques and organizational best practices transfer from one game to the other. Since the industrial revolution, innovations in one industry have frequently been borrowed from another.</p>
<p id="C9OODq">“As a strategy and research group, we’re charged with coming up with good questions to ask or answering interesting questions other people have,” DePodesta tells me over the phone. “And the best answers are rarely within your specific domain. Another way of saying that is we need to know what’s going on in the world of the NFL, but if we want to create really, really interesting answers, ones that give us a potential competitive advantage, then we really need to look outside the NFL for inspiration.”</p>
<p id="PutpSX">DePodesta isn’t the only architect of Cleveland’s turnaround, or, at least, what we assume will become a fully realized turnaround this year; both former GM Sashi Brown and his successor, John Dorsey, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown">will share in the eventual credit or blame</a>. As unusual a sight as DePodesta might have been in the MLB front offices of 20 years ago, Ivy Leaguers with economics degrees are running baseball now. That’s not the case in the NFL, and even though DePodesta played football (as well as baseball) at Harvard, he stands out in a league run by football lifers. If he’s able to help the Browns out of their 30-year rut, and other NFL teams try to find a DePodesta of their own, the league could change dramatically as a result.</p>
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<img alt="Paul DePodesta and Sashi Brown Introductory Press Conference" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/S0d9TKbxpoIuLNYtNk38V6GVcFg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19098427/506084412.jpg.jpg">
<figcaption>Paul DePodesta and Sashi Brown</figcaption>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="NDhrOI">In 2016, less than five months after he joined the Browns, DePodesta once again found himself in an unfamiliar draft room. Cleveland had the no. 2 overall pick that year, but instead of spending it on a player, the Browns shipped the second pick to Philadelphia, along with a conditional fifth-rounder, for five picks spread out over the next three drafts.</p>
<p id="BhWjPp">Which is not to say that the Browns actually <em>used</em> any of those picks. All five picks (from what became the Carson Wentz trade after the Eagles used that no. 2 pick to select their franchise QB) ended up elsewhere, bringing back 12 more draft picks, giving the Browns uncommon draft capital but very little established talent, at least in the short term. All told, from 2016 to 2018, Cleveland made 33 draft picks, six of them in the first round and 21 in the first four rounds, unprecedented in the NFL. </p>
<p id="6jYhWb">Stockpiling draft capital is nothing new in the NFL—Bill Belichick loves trading down as much as anyone, and he’s been around so long he used to be Scipio Africanus’s linebackers coach—but this kind of all-out rebuild, a tank-and-rally, is unusual in football. </p>
<p id="pFwaXe">The most famous tanking project of this decade is the Process. Indeed, a recurring theme of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week">Trust the Browns’ Process Week</a> here at <em>The Ringer</em> has been <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-process">exploring the obvious parallels</a> between former Sixers GM Sam Hinkie and departed <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown">Browns GM Brown</a>, who’s now fittingly with the NBA’s Washington Wizards. But Hinkie’s brazenly extreme experiment in Philadelphia was not the first hard tank in modern sports history, just the one with the best branding. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="4AbvBS"><q>“We need to know what’s going on in the world of the NFL, but if we want to create really, really interesting answers, ones that give us a potential competitive advantage, then we really need to look outside the NFL for inspiration.” </q></aside></div>
<p id="eYh9HS">Almost two years before Hinkie set foot in Philadelphia, Astros GM Jeff Luhnow began the hardest tank in baseball history. In December 2011, he took over a club that had lost 106 games the year before, then pushed them farther down to the Earth’s molten core, losing 107 games in 2012 and 111 in 2013. Houston emerged from the ashes as one of the strongest clubs of the late 2010s and won the World Series in 2017. The previous World Series winner, the Chicago Cubs, had built their team through a similar though less extreme tanking project under president of baseball operations Theo Epstein. (Epstein and Luhnow, like DePodesta, both hold Ivy League degrees and came to work in baseball operations without ever playing or coaching professionally.) Now, the Process (or something like it) is de rigueur for rebuilding MLB teams, who simply aren’t trying hard enough to win in the long term if they’re not piling up the losses (and assets) in the short term. </p>
<p id="jvYzf0">Other sports are going through their own statistical revolutions, each with its own unique language and set of questions to answer. In basketball and hockey, “analytics guys” with no playing background—like Hinkie or<a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/2/17926950/toronto-maple-leafs-2018-19-nhl-season-preview-john-tavares-auston-matthews"> Kyle Dubas of the Toronto Maple Leafs</a>—have found themselves empowered to reject norms and tear marquee franchises to the studs, only to build them up again.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="DQPCzW"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Browns Brought the Process to the NFL. Surprisingly, It Worked.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown"},{"title":"The Great Tanking Debate: Sashi Brown or Sam Hinkie? ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-process"},{"title":"The Browns Have the Brightest Future in Football (If They Don’t Blow It) ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/19/20811756/browns-baker-mayfield-odell-beckham-myles-garrett-john-dorsey"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="cs7KmN">DePodesta’s Browns definitely got torn down to the studs. While two of the first-round picks Cleveland traded away turned into Wentz and Deshaun Watson, the actual Browns went a combined 1-31 in 2016 and 2017 and were outscored by a total of 364 points, or about 11 points a game, the worst two-year record in history for a team with the second-longest playoff drought in North American sports, a franchise whose name has long been <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/22/20827588/browns-fans-pathetic-football-teams-heartbreak">shorthand for failure</a>.</p>
<p id="geTgTN">But the time of stockpiling assets and playing for the future is over, and the Browns, who until a year ago were looking far down the road, are making a serious attempt to compete now.</p>
<p id="J07bAU">“I think you need to be aware of where you are in your organization’s life cycle,” DePodesta says. “You only have so many chances, or windows of opportunity, and when those windows are open it requires a certain mind-set. Our goal is not to be a consistent 9-7 or 10-6. We’re reaching higher than that.”</p>
<p id="qHcH5Q">Last season, DePodesta’s third with the club, Cleveland nearly poked its head back to level with a 7-8-1 record behind the past two no. 1 overall picks: defensive end Myles Garrett and quarterback Baker Mayfield. The Browns have hired their fifth full-time head coach in eight years, Freddie Kitchens, and not only given him Mayfield to work with but actually traded away draft capital to secure a pair of marquee veteran wide receivers: Odell Beckham Jr. and Jarvis Landry. In 2019, Cleveland is a trendy pick to return to the playoffs.</p>
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<img alt="NFL: OCT 21 Browns at Buccaneers" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RPXIPUSKxLvFXKrMYRlYGcAt8_E=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19098420/1052779544.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Cliff Welch/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Baker Mayfield of the Cleveland Browns</figcaption>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="0Hho7h">Over the past 20 years, the word “analytics” has lost most of its meaning as a term of art in sports. Fans, pundits, even coaches and executives have used the term as a shorthand for any kind of empirical study, as an epithet for nontraditional coaching or front office methods, or whatever stray numbers might be lying around. The term has been warped, stretched, and yanked around from casual use and misuse so badly it’s lost its shape. The Moneyball A’s teams that made DePodesta famous were viewed as being on the cutting edge of analytics (or “sabermetrics” in baseball parlance), back when that mostly meant statistical analysis. But almost 20 years later, smart front offices don’t live on numbers alone.</p>
<p id="RZ92vw">“I think there’s a large misconception about analytics in general that it’s all about data,” DePodesta says. “That it’s all about guys sitting at their computers and running through spreadsheets. That’s not the reality. We focus a lot on strategy, we focus a lot on process.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="Rfijf0"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Meet the Founding Fathers of Football’s ‘Moneyball’ Moment ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/15/20806241/nfl-analytics-pro-football-focus"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="80HxU1">For example, <em>Moneyball</em> depicted Beane and DePodesta as operating in opposition to Oakland’s scouting department, favoring numbers, however they got them, over the eye test. Oakland’s draft class was heavy on players who put up big numbers in college but were overlooked by scouts for being pudgy, or slow, or somehow unattractive physically (“We’re not selling jeans here” is one of Beane’s immortal quotes from the book).</p>
<p id="2tkVEU">Baseball has always been, to a large extent, numbers-obsessed, and it’s the easiest sport by far to dissect mathematically. Not only does baseball have an exhaustive statistical record dating back to the 19th century—<a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Beadle's_Dime_Base-Ball_Player">Henry Chadwick was publishing detailed seasonal statistics</a> for baseball before football was even invented—it’s a team sport that features very little in the way of teammate-to-teammate interaction. As opposed to the 22-way square dance of football or the sliding chaos of hockey, baseball is extremely rigid in form, a series of discrete one-on-one contests that can be catalogued and compiled even by amateurs. </p>
<p id="uesZfw">Sabermetrics started out as such a crude mathematical exercise that the mythical founding father of the science, Bill James, began his work as a way to pass the time while working as a night watchman. James had little formal mathematical training and few tools. We have better data and equipment now than James did when he started out, but sabermetrics was for a long time very much a homespun, back-of-the-napkin enterprise. </p>
<p id="V9IwE4">The early 2000s, the Moneyball era, represent sabermetrics at its most quantitatively obsessed, back when cutting-edge analysis could fairly be called analytics. Early 21st-century sabermetricians—both in <em>Moneyball </em>and in contemporary baseball analysis—were frequently overconfident, even arrogant, because of the seductive certainty of numbers. If it wasn’t quantifiable, it wasn’t worth knowing. Smart baseball analysts (or former baseball analysts) have learned from this overconfidence.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="H2XhA0"><q>“You only have so many chances, or windows of opportunity, and when those windows are open it requires a certain mind-set. Our goal is not to be a consistent 9-7 or 10-6. We’re reaching higher than that.” </q></aside></div>
<p id="CoxmgY">“We’re always super cautious about what we don’t know,” DePodesta says, “and that’s an area where we lean really, really heavily on people with vast experience in the space: our scouts, our coaches, our players. They provide so much context and so much richness to any other information we might have.”</p>
<p id="aYRk4k">Mainstream sabermetrics began as a way to test the conventional wisdom of the sport through a distant cousin of social-science rigor. Every assumption was challenged, and when new assumptions took over, they too were challenged and adapted as tools improved and the scope of the inquiry changed. Before long, team building wasn’t just about assembling a roster, and sabermetric principles—as well as the rigor and lust for efficiency that followed them—extended to front office staffing and payroll allocation. The modern MLB GM is no longer an ex-player, but a businessman, for better or for worse.</p>
<p id="OG32Jk">In 2019, a better term than “analytics” would be “empirics.” As data collection improved from box scores to radar tracking to biometric information, the sabermetric movement not only got better at quantifying things, but learned the importance of refining qualitative information rather than rejecting it. Far from fighting with scouts, analytically minded GMs and analysts have learned to refine the eye test and integrate it into quantitative models.</p>
<p id="wvCGwC">“Computers are great at dealing in volume,” DePodesta says. “They can process so much more information than any one of us can individually, and they can do it without bias or emotion. But what they struggle with is context and nuance. That’s hard for a machine, and that’s where the human expertise and experience becomes invaluable.”</p>
<p id="rj14vY">The work of the Browns’ research and strategy group goes beyond scouting, player development, and in-game tactics. DePodesta says his department could even apply these lessons to create a process to recruit better interns, an undertaking that, in his mind, isn’t that different from scouting.</p>
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<img alt="Los Angeles Dodger J.D. Drew Press Conference" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/us8v-vd8E48KKc6ii8STlLpmvts=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19098417/121661507.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Jon Soohoo/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Paul DePodesta, Los Angeles Dodgers general manager, in 2004</figcaption>
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<p id="x1GRxD">TJ Barra is a data analyst in the MLB league office who spent six years working alongside DePodesta in the Mets front office. He praised DePodesta’s ability to work through abstract or complex problems, and dismantle them into components that can be digested and understood by the people—GMs, coaches, players—with the power to act on that information. </p>
<p id="5MgNCq">“I thought the best thing he did was figure out how to take these bigger-scale philosophical issues—in baseball it’s all about having guys who had a good approach at the plate—and figuring out how that trickled down to player development,” Barra says. “Figuring out how that trickled down to the amateur draft and international scouting. I think everyone knows that Joey Votto has a .400 OBP and is an amazing player, but what are those intrinsic values that made Joey Votto a .400 on-base guy? They were going to make Brandon Nimmo, a 17-year-old from Wyoming who played 15 games a year, the same sort of player.”</p>
<p id="CQ8Z2J">The kind of player Barra described—the high on-base guy with power—is precisely the kind of player the A’s targeted in 2002. How teams identify, acquire, or develop such players has changed radically, and Joey Votto types are no longer undervalued the way they were a generation ago. But hitters who can get on base are still the key to a good offense in baseball. </p>
<p id="crd5o7">DePodesta won’t say what the equivalent of a high-OBP player is in football, or even whether such an equivalent exists, but just like he did during his baseball career, he’s trying to identify and acquire underrated players.</p>
<p id="SG45QB">“We are always looking for value where it isn’t readily apparent to everybody else,” he says. “There are some guys who are just so special that it doesn’t necessarily take a trained eye to say, ‘Boy, this guy’s really going to be good.’”</p>
<p id="g7tyVg">DePodesta doesn’t spend much time on those players, but instead looks for hidden gems, particularly in the draft. Baseball has the longest developmental timeline of any sport: A 16-year-old international free agent could wait the better part of a decade before his major league debut, while an NFL draft pick is expected to contribute months after turning pro. That reduces the uncertainty or risk in an NFL draft pick, but makes it tougher to find a unique scouting or developmental angle that could turn a seventh-rounder into a Pro Bowler.</p>
<p id="YllJTt">One way to find that angle is to look at how a player’s college teammates impacted his performance. </p>
<p id="FSR7MV">“If you’re a shortstop and you’re a great hitter, it doesn’t matter a whole lot who your first baseman was,” DePodesta says. “Whereas if you’re a terrific wide receiver in college and you have a quarterback who can’t get you the ball—or even worse, an offensive system that doesn’t throw the ball—that’s a lot tougher to get your arms around.”</p>
<p id="NZbFT1">A receiver with NFL skills but pedestrian college stats due to factors outside his control could end up making a team’s entire draft. Knowing how to filter out the noise and find such a player is like knowing which physical skills, or statistical achievements, separate baseball players who top out in college from those who go on to be successful pros. Actually filtering out the noise—and doing so with less data from fewer games than in baseball, in a game with so many more moving pieces—is the tricky part.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="MyeLxj">One side effect of the empirical revolution and the demystification of team building is the proliferation of the star GM. <em>Moneyball</em> is particularly responsible for indulging the fantasy that a sufficiently clever person could lead a team to success by outsmarting the nitwits running other teams, and the cleverest of these people (or at least the most PR-savvy ones) became folk heroes. Not just in baseball, but in basketball and hockey as well.</p>
<p id="hTHRxf">There isn’t really such a thing as a celebrity executive in the NFL, and definitely not to the extent that there is in other sports. Casual fans know owners and coaches, and die-hards know GMs; in baseball, die-hards know GMs, stat gurus, analysts, and scouting directors. </p>
<p id="9spAfz">The star baseball executive dates back to Branch Rickey, who invented the farm system while GM of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1920s and 1930s, then went on to run the Brooklyn Dodgers, where he became most famous for signing Jackie Robinson. Nowadays, GMs (or de facto GMs; thanks to title bloat, the common name for the person who runs baseball operations is now president or vice president of baseball operations) are stars: Not just Beane and Luhnow, but Epstein of the Cubs, Andrew Friedman of the Dodgers, and many other baseball ops chiefs are viewed as metonyms for the franchise, and more than any other individual, the MLB GM determines the club’s identity and direction.</p>
<p id="SMO5VL">Two factors led to an environment in which an MLB GM could earn such celebrity. </p>
<p id="pHJHUi">First, the big league club is just a fraction of what constitutes an MLB organization. An NFL organization has a roster and a practice squad, while NBA and NHL franchises have one or two farm teams and a handful of players under team control who are playing overseas. A baseball organization, by contrast, is too big for a field manager to keep track of, let alone run, and so the modern field manager no more controls the organization than the hand thinks for the body. </p>
<p id="4dryfr">“When I was with the Mets we had nine minor league teams,” DePodesta says. “What people see on TV is the very tip of the iceberg. It’s the top 25 players out of 300. And nine teams, by the way, is nine coaching staffs and training staffs. [Baseball teams are] moving players almost every single day from one level to the next because of injuries or promotions. In football, what you see on Sundays is most of what’s there.”</p>
<p id="KAhVYB">Having just the one team to worry about, with just 53 active players and a practice squad, definitely means an NFL GM has fewer balls to keep in the air than an MLB GM. But it also reduces the room for error. Make a mistake in the MLB draft and nobody notices—the majority of draft picks, even first-rounders, don’t make much of an impact in the major leagues. But whiffing on a first-round pick in the NFL, when first-rounders are supposed to quickly become impact players on rock-bottom salaries in a salary-capped league, can have dire consequences for a franchise. MLB front offices fish with a net, while NFL front offices fish with a pole.</p>
<p id="jFS3Uw">Second, a baseball manager has less influence over an individual game than a head coach in any other North American sport. Beyond a certain level of baseline competence in lineup construction, tactics simply don’t matter very much in baseball over a 162-game baseball season. Not since Casey Stengel has an MLB manager invented something like package plays or the Cover 2 defense, so managers just aren’t as interesting as their coaching counterparts in other sports.</p>
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<figcaption>Paul DePodesta at the 2016 Cleveland Browns training camp</figcaption>
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<p id="ztAupa">“The coach is the one on the sideline on Sundays, on national TV, and he’s got to make so many critical decisions in the course of every game,” DePodesta says. “And a lot of head coaches are play-callers either on offense or defense, so they’re literally impacting every play of the game. Baseball managers don’t approach a 162-game season that way.” </p>
<p id="YhkRgO">As GMs and field managers came to resemble each other less and less, baseball executives learned the importance of communication, installing a coherent vision throughout the organization and implementing it from top to bottom. The battle between Beane and old-school manager Art Howe was a recurring conflict in <em>Moneyball</em>, in which Beane was portrayed as the victor. It would be more accurate to describe the conflict itself as deleterious to all parties, and MLB organizations know from experience the importance of avoiding such disharmony.</p>
<p id="hxqAYm">Barra says this kind of wide-ranging thinking and ensuing ability to infuse a unified ethos into a large organization is one of DePodesta’s strengths.</p>
<p id="UpzsZ7">“That was the biggest impact he had [on the Mets]: taking concepts that he wanted and most people in the front office wanted, and translating that to players,” Barra says. “It’s about getting on base and hitting for power. If you hit .300 but don’t walk and don’t hit for power, you’re not the player we want in the big leagues. Paul’s idea was to simplify that concept and turn it into a competition for players. It incentivized the players to buy into these concepts and get them out of their comfort zone.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="UmEUBe"><q>“We are always looking for value where it isn’t readily apparent to everybody else.” </q></aside></div>
<p id="yWoDjd">That makes it incredibly important for everyone in the organization to be on the same page, and an NFL GM (or chief strategy officer) can’t just dictate policy to the coach the way an MLB GM can to a manager. The ability to communicate information and get buy-in from coaches and players was one of the last dominoes to fall in baseball’s sabermetrics movement, and it’s still a struggle in other sports. After living through that evolution in MLB, DePodesta views it as one of his primary responsibilities. The questions he sets out to research, he says, are largely inspired by what he thinks Kitchens and Dorsey need to know in order to make good decisions, and sometimes originate with the coach and GM themselves.</p>
<p id="LdvbA9">“More than anything, we try to make information as accessible and actionable as possible,” he says. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff. There’s a lot of neat stuff, but if it’s not actionable, it just isn’t relevant, and what we’re really trying to do is support both our coaches and our personnel people in their decision-making process.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="wMK61j">One thing the Browns ought to learn from other sports is that good process, or at least clever or innovative process, generates interest, but it takes a championship, or something close to it, to win over the last skeptics. The Astros, Sixers, and Maple Leafs have all learned that lesson in one form or another.</p>
<p id="wOOsrS">The big question now for DePodesta and for Cleveland is whether all these lessons from baseball will translate into winning on the gridiron. That question is very much open, and despite their improvement by seven wins last year, the Browns don’t yet have so much as a winning season to show for their rebuild.</p>
<p id="QIgKgp">DePodesta’s innovations, as well as the willingness of Brown, Dorsey, and team ownership to suffer through a few years of discomfort, have paid dividends in the form of a talented and exciting roster. An up-and-coming team with Mayfield, Garrett, and Beckham would be worth watching no matter how it had come together, but the process by which the Browns were assembled puts them under a microscope.</p>
<p id="eVzEvu">What the Browns have done—stockpiling draft picks, unifying the organization’s thinking, looking outside football for ideas—makes success more likely, but not certain. DePodesta knows this.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="QdiRST">“Our job is to try to corral uncertainty as best we can,” DePodesta says. “But we’re never going to reduce it to zero.” </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/23/20829352/paul-depodesta-cleveland-browns-oakland-athletics-moneyball-analytics-nfl-mlbMichael Baumann2019-08-23T06:00:00-04:002019-08-23T06:00:00-04:00Browns Fever Has Taken Over—but Don’t Book Their Super Bowl Appearance Just Yet
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<p>After a breakout rookie performance from Baker Mayfield, the addition of Odell Beckham Jr., and a coach and front office that seem in sync, the NFL hype train has come for Cleveland. That doesn’t mean 2019 can’t end in classic Browns fashion, though.</p> <p id="ckpMrW"><em>The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week"><em>Trust the Browns’ Process Week</em></a><em>, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.</em></p>
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<p id="DY42CI">I hate to be that guy, but someone has to be. Browns Fever has gone full tilt this summer, and we here at <em>The Ringer</em> get that. We planned <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week">a whole week</a> around it. We’ve talked about how the Browns have <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/19/20811756/browns-baker-mayfield-odell-beckham-myles-garrett-john-dorsey">built around</a> Baker Mayfield, how their <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20812881/cleveland-browns-baker-mayfield-freddie-kitchens-2019-excitement">quarterback-head-coach partnership</a> is the perfect recipe for an explosive offense, and how <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20813215/odell-beckham-jr-cleveland-browns-week">Odell Beckham Jr.</a> should launch this team into the stratosphere. But maybe we’ve gone too far. Maybe the Browns—despite their cavalcade of stars and well designed approach on offense—still have too many holes to be considered true Super Bowl contenders. So let me be the one to play <a href="https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4dc57720-9674-4613-9ae3-4810052d83ff">devil’s avocado</a> here, Larry, and take a look at what might hold this team back in 2019. </p>
<p id="jwC9VM">Any case against the Browns must start with the offensive line. Adding Olivier Vernon to a defensive line that already included Myles Garrett is undeniably fun, but to pry Vernon from the Giants, Cleveland had to send them guard Kevin Zeitler. Without Zeitler, the Browns are down to two reliable starters along the OL: center J.C. Tretter and Pro Bowl left guard Joel Bitonio. Elsewhere, questions abound. The hope was that 2018 second-round pick Austin Corbett would step in for Zeitler on the right side, but the word out of training camp is that Corbett is losing the fight to journeyman Eric Kush. That’s not great!</p>
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<p id="zGQPQ4">The post–Joe Thomas era at left tackle also hasn’t been kind to Cleveland. The Browns trotted out undrafted rookie Desmond Harrison for the first half of last season before replacing him with Greg Robinson—the no. 2 pick in the 2014 draft who flamed out with the Rams in 2016 and spent one injury-plagued season with the Lions before landing in Cleveland. The Browns re-signed Robinson to a one-year, $7 million contract this offseason, but only $500K of that deal is guaranteed. Cleveland could still look for help at the position via trade or last-minute addition—which would be smart, because while Thomas may <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/uyueBUao1qyDp6Bt9">look like</a> an Instagram fitness model these days, even a 240-pound version of him might be better than the Browns’ current plan at left tackle. </p>
<p id="fEY1a7">Cleveland’s line actually performed fairly well in pass protection last season: The Browns allowed pressure on only 29 percent of Baker Mayfield’s dropbacks, the fifth lowest rate among 29 qualified quarterbacks. But that rate is partially a product of Mayfield’s unique style—one that resulted in the strangest release time stats of any QB in the NFL last year. Mayfield’s average time to throw was 2.57 seconds, which was tied for the 10th longest in the league, according to Pro Football Focus. But he also ranked 10th in the percentage of his throws that came in 2.5 seconds or less. Those numbers appear contradictory, but the schism shows that while Mayfield typically gets rid of the ball quickly, when he does hang onto it, he <em>really </em>hangs onto it. </p>
<p id="ujSOEo">A significant portion of the Browns’ big gains last year resulted from Mayfield’s extending plays and improvising with downfield throws. He tossed 14 touchdowns on passes that took at least 2.5 seconds, which ranked him tied for 10th among qualified QBs. One more would have put him in a five-way tie for sixth, and every other QB in that cluster had at least 62 more of those attempts. Suffice it to say the Browns feasted on extended plays last season, and while Mayfield’s pocket mobility can sometimes be a benefit for his offensive line, it also means the guys up front occasionally have to hold up a bit longer. If the results of those efforts take a turn this year and shots down the field lead to more sacks instead of big gains, it could spell trouble for the Cleveland offense. </p>
<p id="CUFSIs">It’s still amazing that the Browns were able to produce so many explosive plays last season with Jarvis Landry and not much else at wide receiver, which is why dropping Odell Beckham Jr. into the mix has people frothing at the mouth. But while the thought of a Mayfield-Beckham connection is definitely thrilling, let’s not let it overshadow the remaining questions about this receiving corps. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="xtbmHk"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Browns Brought the Process to the NFL. Surprisingly, It Worked.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown"},{"title":"The Great Tanking Debate: Sashi Brown or Sam Hinkie? ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-process"},{"title":"Mayfield Mania and the New-Look Browns Are Giving Cleveland Reason to Believe","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20812881/cleveland-browns-baker-mayfield-freddie-kitchens-2019-excitement"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="lpcidy">Tight end David Njoku is a former first-round pick with a tantalizing athletic profile, and the threat of him down the seam—combined with Beckham torching cornerbacks over the top and Landry working underneath—could potentially allow the Browns to attack every area of the defense. But Njoku had a maddening 2018 season. According to Pro Football Focus, his 12.5 percent drop rate ranked worst among qualified tight ends and ninth worst among all pass catchers with at least 50 targets. Tenth on that list? Browns teammate Antonio Callaway. The 2018 fourth-round pick came into training camp as Cleveland’s no. 3 receiver, but he’s been suspended for the first four games of the season after violating the league’s substance abuse policy. And it sounds like the Browns’ coaching staff is starting to <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/browns-freddie-kitchens-not-willing-to-put-up-with-continued-mistakes-by-antonio-callaway/">lose patience</a> with the second-year receiver. With Callaway out, 2016 fifth-round pick Rashard Higgins will step in as the Browns’ third option. Higgins is an excellent route runner who caught 238 passes in three seasons at Colorado State. But in three NFL seasons, he’s tallied only 72 receptions. The massive cap hits allotted to Beckham and Landry mean that Cleveland will spend $4.2 million more on its receivers than any other team in the league in 2019, and the group <em>still </em>seems thin. </p>
<p id="sSsrp8">Speaking of thin, let’s talk about the defense. There aren’t many holes to poke in the top spots on Cleveland’s defensive depth chart. A starting defensive line of Myles Garrett, Vernon, Larry Ogunjobi, and Sheldon Richardson is absolutely terrifying. That group is going to haunt quarterbacks this season. But much like the rest of the roster, the drop-off after the starters is worrisome. Emerging star Denzel Ward and rookie ballhawk Greedy Williams could form an excellent coverage duo in 2019, but the rest of the cornerback group is full of players like Phillip Gaines and T.J. Carrie, who’ve spent their careers bouncing around the league. The safeties’ collective ceiling is solid, if unspectacular. Linebacker Joe Schobert was excellent in coverage last season but struggled as a run defender. As a unit, Cleveland finished 25th in run defense DVOA according to Football Outsiders, and based on the personnel, there’s little reason to suspect that this group will be significantly better this year. </p>
<p id="7gXPSB">It’s possible, though, that a scheme change will benefit this unit overall. With Gregg Williams gone, the Browns hopefully won’t be lining up their safeties 25 yards deep on third-and-7. And first-year coordinator Steve Wilks has typically preferred to lean on his front four to get after the quarterback, unlike Williams and his blitz-happy ways. With the pass-rushing group Cleveland is set to deploy this fall, it makes plenty of sense to let Garrett and Vernon do most of the work while dropping seven defenders into coverage. </p>
<p id="hXik9t">But even if Wilks can find smarter ways to use his best players, this group is still notably susceptible to injuries. That may sound like a cheap dig, considering that multiple starters missing significant time would torpedo the playoff chances for most NFL teams. But for the Browns to truly be counted among the contenders, they have to stack up against rosters like the Eagles and Patriots, which are set up to survive injuries at crucial positions in a way that the Browns aren’t. If Bitonio or Tretter go down, it could spell disaster for Cleveland’s offense. If Ward misses time, opposing quarterbacks would have a field day throwing the ball. Again, it might seem like I’m nitpicking, but when discussing how the Browns stack up to the NFL’s best, every detail matters. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="kuonmO">Listen: I don’t like being the one to throw cold water on this party. I want to see Baker, Beckham, and friends take off as much as anyone. But it’s probably too early for the Dawg Pound to start booking their hotel rooms in Miami this February. There are plenty of reasons to think that Cleveland can emerge as a contender this fall. But here’s an important reminder: Winning the Super Bowl is <em>hard. </em>And it often comes down to how a team has built the margins of its roster. This team has the stars and the plan to push the best teams in the AFC <em>now</em>, but there’s still a chance that the Browns are a year or two away from being the powerhouse so many expect them to be.</p>
<aside id="2dugUz"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/23/20827204/cleveland-browns-2019-roster-holesRobert Mays2019-08-22T06:30:00-04:002019-08-22T06:30:00-04:00The End of the Browns’ Tortured QB History
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<p>Revisiting the 29 Cleveland quarterbacks who came before Mayfield, and the scars they left behind</p> <p id="klWfbI"><em>The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week"><em>Trust the Browns’ Process Week</em></a><em>, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.</em></p>
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<h3 id="fOHShN">September 16, 2007</h3>
<p id="vlWAwy"><strong>Quarterback No. 10</strong></p>
<p id="bKgaSd">If you want to pinpoint the moment when the title “Quarterback for the Cleveland Browns” devolved from a distinguished vocation into a running joke, it’s best to start by talking to Tim Brokaw. One September afternoon in 2007, Brokaw, who runs an advertising agency in downtown Cleveland, borrowed a Browns jersey from a friend to wear to that Sunday’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Then, using nothing more than duct tape and a Sharpie, he created perhaps the most effective concept of his career.</p>
<p id="vqag32">At that time the Browns were 0-1, having lost their first game of the season to the reviled Pittsburgh Steelers. That 34-7 final did not exactly come as a shock, given that the Browns had beaten the Steelers only once over the past seven years. A young quarterback named Derek Anderson was set to take over after the previous week’s starter, Charlie Frye, who played college ball at the nearby University of Akron, had been traded to Seattle for a sixth-round draft pick five days earlier. Anderson had lost all three games he’d started for the Browns in 2006; in the last of those, against Tampa Bay, he’d gone 10-for-27 with four interceptions. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="oaArVQ"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"A Browns Fan Comes to Grips With the Browns Being Cool","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/22/20827588/browns-fans-pathetic-football-teams-heartbreak"},{"title":"The Browns Offense Gets All the Hype, But the Defense Is Ready to Dominate","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/22/20827569/browns-defense-myles-garrett-denzel-ward"},{"title":"The Great Tanking Debate: Sashi Brown or Sam Hinkie? ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-process"},{"title":"The Browns Brought the Process to the NFL. Surprisingly, It Worked.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="tVhHrz">In other words, things seemed especially bleak in Cleveland, a city that has long channeled its inferiority complex through sports, and particularly through its football team. The Browns had returned to the NFL as an expansion franchise in 1999, and since then the team’s casualties at quarterback had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZrqC5LL_oo">piled up like Spinal Tap drummers</a>. Anderson became the 10th starting quarterback for an organization that had turned in only one winning season since then-owner Art Modell stole off to Baltimore in 1995, leaving behind a decaying wreck of a stadium on Lake Erie (which had since been replaced) and deflating what was left of the city’s ego. The Browns were already on their fourth head coach (Romeo Crennel) and seventh offensive coordinator (Rob Chudzinski) since being reborn.</p>
<p id="T0XIQ4">Brokaw’s jersey was meant to reflect the angst of that perpetual churn. On it, he crossed out the original name on the back of the no. 2 jersey—that of Tim Couch, the no. 1 pick in the 1999 draft—and using nine pieces of duct tape, he wrote the surnames of each of the Browns quarterbacks who came after him. They trailed down the right-hand side like a Biblical verse: </p>
<p id="9j2eIF"><em>Couch</em><br><em>Detmer</em><br><em>Wynn</em><br><em>Pederson</em><br><em>Holcomb</em><br><em>Garcia</em><br><em>McCown</em><br><em>Dilfer</em><br><em>Frye</em><br><em>Anderson</em></p>
<p id="Pke3Up">All of the names were crossed out except Anderson, who threw for 328 yards with five touchdowns in that day’s 51-45 win over the Bengals.</p>
<p id="VdpEIm">“I wore it to the tailgate, and the attention I was getting—it was almost a little <em>too much</em> attention,” Brokaw says. “This was back in the flip-phone day, and I’m taking pictures with people while I’m going to the bathroom. This was at the start of social media, so those pictures started to go around over email, mostly locally. It was just a quick visual of the suffering.”</p>
<p id="2nAV4v">At that moment, Brokaw says, Anderson seemed like yet another temporary answer to the larger existential question: <em>What is this team even trying to be? </em>The Browns wound up going 10-6 that season, barely missing the playoffs. But concern lay beneath the surface, from fans and writers covering the team (and perhaps even the front office itself), that no permanent fix was forthcoming. Anderson was not a franchise quarterback, and everybody knew it. Nor were any of the other QBs who preceded him, including Couch, who had been beaten down and sacked repeatedly until the Browns released him in 2004.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="gAzjpj"><q>“That’s part of the Browns’ problem. It wasn’t just that they picked the wrong guys—it was that they didn’t know how to nurture them, or how to surround them with the right people. They didn’t put in the right offense. It was a whole cluster of failure.” —Marla Ridenour, <em>Akron Beacon Journal</em></q></aside></div>
<p id="A89KjQ">The feeling among Browns fans was all too familiar: Their city had once again been hexed. It was the same type of curse that had led to a more than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Rocky_Colavito">50-year championship drought</a> for their baseball team, that had caused Michael Jordan <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shot">to bury their best chance</a> at an NBA title in the 1980s, that had resulted in the Cavaliers getting swept in the previous summer’s NBA Finals, and that had triggered the heartbreak of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Right_88">Red Right 88</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fumble">The Fumble</a> for the 1980s Browns. And now it had seemingly concentrated its wrath on this renewed franchise’s quarterbacks. </p>
<p id="CBvXhQ">Brokaw decided that perhaps he’d struck a little too close to the city’s nerve center to literally bear this burden on his back. He couldn’t handle actually wearing the jersey again, so he draped it over a mannequin in his agency’s storefront, assuming it would become an outdated curio when the Browns finally stumbled upon their franchise QB a year or two down the road.</p>
<p id="nGxecn">Instead, Brokaw says, “it felt like <em>Groundhog Day </em>for 20 years.” Every time the Browns signed or drafted a new quarterback, local media would flock to his window to film the new name being scribbled on the jersey. People began to wonder whether the jersey itself was responsible for the curse. A local sports-talk radio host threatened to fight Brokaw. Somebody hurled a rock through the window.</p>
<p id="qDziYr">In 2016, after the Cavaliers won the NBA championship and ended the city’s half-century-long title drought, Brokaw figured he had reason to take the jersey down. But the curse—or whatever it was—lingered, even as the jersey lay in a cardboard box in Brokaw’s storeroom: The Browns went 0-16 in 2017. Finally, in April 2018, the most hapless franchise in the recent history of professional sports drafted Baker Reagan Mayfield out of the University of Oklahoma, the Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback who seemed built to turn the page and bring the Browns into the future. That it took 20 years to get here still boggles Brokaw’s mind. </p>
<p id="tbw7G1">“It’s insane,” Brokaw says. “There is … you know … a sense of … you know … um … confidence?” </p>
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<h3 id="0TnngH">September 19, 1999</h3>
<p id="Y2rmQU"><strong>Quarterback No. 2</strong></p>
<p id="U3bblR">“God,” says Marla Ridenour, as we discuss Brokaw’s jersey and the many <a href="https://www.ebay.com/i/113261702354?chn=ps&var=413549455777&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=413549455777_113261702354&targetid=475515184301&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=9061080&campaignid=1669934843&mkgroupid=65058350579&rlsatarget=pla-475515184301&abcId=1139296&merchantid=101988559&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIyrra2LeP5AIVEcZkCh064A1qEAQYASABEgKeCvD_BwE">T-shirt imitations</a> it inspired. “I can’t believe I’ve lived through all that.”</p>
<p id="XWpXXk">In the 1980s, Ridenour began covering the Browns for the <em>Dayton Daily News</em>. Three decades later, she’s still covering the team, now <a href="https://twitter.com/MRidenourABJ">as a columnist</a> for the <em>Akron Beacon Journal. </em>She watched the Browns barely miss Super Bowls in the 1980s; she watched them disappear to Baltimore in the 1990s; and she watched them regroup and flounder for two decades. The original iteration of the Browns would break your heart in key moments, she says, but the franchise’s recent ineptitude is an expansion-era development. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="pt5K4I"><q>“I was just as drunk as everybody else. It was based less in reality than, ‘We deserve this, for what we’ve gone through.’ We kind of forgot that we were Cleveland.” —Jonathan Knight</q></aside></div>
<p id="OI3rhe">Ridenour could sense something wasn’t right about this version of the Browns from the start. They couldn’t settle on anything, becoming the manifestation of the NFL’s worst instincts, a short-attention-span franchise full of demagogic characters who kept taking stabs at drafting or signing potential saviors. The answer to every unsuccessful season was to turn over a huge portion of the roster and start anew, to fire assistants or head coaches or general managers, to bring in yet another quarterback who could <em>maybe</em> provide some semblance of stability at the position. </p>
<p id="FMXM1a">By the time Mayfield started his first game in 2018, the Browns had churned through 29 other quarterbacks, making this perhaps the most prolific run of ignominy at a single position on a team in sports history. “There are so many egomaniacs in the NFL that want to do it their way,” Ridenour says. “That’s part of the Browns’ problem. It wasn’t just that they picked the wrong guys—it was that they didn’t know how to nurture them, or how to surround them with the right people. They didn’t put in the right offense. It was a whole cluster of failure.”</p>
<p id="LdXytc">Full disclosure: Marla and I worked together at the <em>Beacon Journal </em>in the late 1990s, and in the fall of ’98 I drove to Lexington, Kentucky, to watch and speak to the man who’d likely become the Browns’ no. 1 pick the next spring. I thought that Tim Couch was the real deal, and for the most part so did Ridenour, who insists that Couch is still the best Browns quarterback of the expansion era (at least until Mayfield proves he’s for real). I remember people telling me back then that he just <em>looked </em>like a franchise quarterback: tall, handsome, charismatic, and <a href="https://www.si.com/vault/1995/11/20/208351/pride-of-hyden-tim-couch-king-of-the-kentucky-mountains-is-also-americas-best-high-school-passer">groomed for the job by his father</a> since he was in grade school. </p>
<p id="1MFgYx">Couch reminded people of Peyton Manning, who had gone no. 1 to the Colts earlier that year. So the Browns took him in 1999, and it seemed that with a keen offensive mind in first-year head coach Chris Palmer and a front-office brain trust that included general manager Dwight Clark and team president Carmen Policy (who had helped perpetuate the 49ers dynasty in the 1980s and 1990s), Couch would bridge the gap between expansion and maturity.</p>
<p id="sGGG35">“I mean, I was optimistic,” says <a href="https://www.jknightwriter.com/about">Jonathan Knight</a>, a Browns fan and the author of 10 books about Cleveland sports. “I was just as drunk as everybody else. It was based less in reality than, ‘We deserve this, for what we’ve gone through.’ We kind of forgot that we were Cleveland.”</p>
<p id="z6t6ce">The Browns initially planned to give Couch time to acclimate to a complex NFL scheme after playing in Kentucky’s simple Air Raid offense. They signed veteran Ty Detmer as a placeholder, but after a 43-0 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 1, the Browns—for the first of what would be myriad times—hurled their plans out the window. On September 19, 1999, Couch started against the Tennessee Titans. The Browns lost 26-9. Couch suffered through more than 100 sacks over the next two seasons; he <a href="https://www.news-herald.com/news/couch-breaks-thumb/article_6bc9d417-1f66-570e-9a11-e3b1682332b6.html">broke a thumb during practice</a>; the Browns went 5-27 between 1999 and 2000; and Palmer got fired and was replaced by Butch Davis. Couch changed his grip on the ball, then hurt his shoulder. By 2002, <a href="https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2002-10-08-0210080222-story.html">the fans had turned on him</a>, cheering his injuries and nearly moving him to tears.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="XLqUuF"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="a0XuGw">At that point, the Browns were pretty much willing to try anything. In 2000, they spent a sixth-round pick on a small-college quarterback named Spergon Wynn, who started one game and is best known for being the last quarterback chosen in that draft class before Tom Brady. But mostly, as Couch’s body and psyche unraveled, the Browns began to alter their team-building philosophy.</p>
<p id="vJPwYh">“Maybe they got scared off by the rookie high pick and they started going after veteran guys at quarterback instead,” Ridenour says. “But then I just feel like a lot of those guys were beaten down by the ringer the Browns put them through.”</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Browns v Steelers" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/E1bn6-uVQFYiakKfk9Q8C4lU0YY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19085777/1729183.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Andy Lyons/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Kelly Holcomb</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<h3 id="33gSgD">January 5, 2003</h3>
<p id="Jwy3Dd"><strong>Quarterback No. 5</strong></p>
<p id="FQydrD">Sixteen years later, as he drives home from moving his daughter into college in Tennessee, Kelly Holcomb wonders how different things would have been if the third-and-12 pass that he threw to Dennis Northcutt hadn’t <a href="https://youtu.be/DgUMyF1p50I?t=752">bounced off his receiver’s hands</a>. Maybe if the Browns had converted a first down and not <a href="https://www.foxsports.com/nfl/laces-out/story/cleveland-browns-pittsburgh-steelers-tbt-playoffs-2002-kelly-holcomb-tommy-maddox-123115">fallen victim to a furious Steelers comeback</a> during that AFC wild-card game, both his and the franchise’s trajectory would have headed down alternate paths. </p>
<p id="EUpdU2">But it’s also possible that nothing would have changed at all. Even back in 2003, the Browns had succumbed so completely to their own impatience that their failure had seemingly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “There’s been no stability at the quarterback position,” Holcomb says. “Or in that organization whatsoever.”</p>
<p id="tWJ7mn">Holcomb arrived in Cleveland before the 2001 season as a 28-year-old out of Middle Tennessee State. He’d thrown 73 total passes in the NFL, all of them with the Colts in 1997, with one touchdown and eight interceptions. The assumption around Cleveland was that he would back up Couch, which he did that first season. But by 2003, Browns offensive coordinator Bruce Arians saw <em>something </em>in Holcomb, and as Couch wore down amid the injuries and the pressure, Holcomb stepped in. </p>
<p id="XeQKQ5">Despite the inherent on-field dysfunction in Cleveland, Holcomb loved the feeling within the organization: the way the players got their shoes shined, had access to a massage therapist, and had someone who started their cars in the winter. He loved the fans, too, who treated him as well as any in the NFL ever did. But at the same time, Holcomb knew the Browns’ internal politics were precarious. In October 2002, the team’s original expansion owner, Al Lerner, died and passed on the team to his son, Randy, who some fans viewed as being <a href="https://bleacherreport.com/articles/280275-randy-lerner-is-destroying-the-cleveland-browns">primarily interested in his European soccer club</a>. And when Cleveland lost that playoff game despite Holcomb passing for more than 400 yards, Butch Davis—who served as both coach and general manager in 2002—decided to reshuffle the roster once more.</p>
<p id="UqR4KH">“After that Pittsburgh game—which is still a bitter deal to me—there were a lot of personnel moves that were made, and I don’t think the guys that had been there agreed with some of those moves,” Holcomb says. “It’s kind of sad when you think about it. It’s sad for me. We had pieces in place and just didn’t keep it together.”</p>
<p id="hEfz0z">In the summer of 2003, Ridenour traveled to Tennessee to visit Holcomb at his house. When she got there, she says it was almost as if Holcomb—who would eventually outplay Couch for the job during that preseason—couldn’t quite fathom that he was on the verge of becoming a starting NFL QB. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he kept saying, and that’s when Ridenour had a feeling that this quarterback—as disarmingly nice as he was—might not last. Holcomb started eight games in 2003, with Couch taking the other eight. The Browns went 5-11. In 2004, Holcomb started two games, Luke McCown started four, and 34-year-old journeyman Jeff Garcia started 10. The Browns went 4-12, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/sports/football/as-browns-plummet-davis-quits-as-coach.html">Butch Davis resigned midseason</a>.</p>
<p id="RZSl44">Holcomb left for Buffalo that offseason, moved briefly to Philadelphia, and played a few games in Minnesota. He retired in 2008 without appearing in another playoff game. He’s still friendly with Couch, even after they spent those years competing for the same job. Perhaps that’s in part because they both recognize that they were dealt a bad hand. </p>
<p id="3mWip2">“I don’t know if they had our backs,” Holcomb says of the franchise’s decision-makers. “I think it’s easy for a head coach, when he’s got two guys who can play, I think they kind of hold that over your head. When you start worrying about that, subconsciously, you start thinking in the back of your mind, ‘Hey, if I mess up here, they’re going to put him in.’ And you just can’t play that way.”</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="2014 NFL Draft" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/e_extBEFMbLeQ2KHu24PjNMfGvo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19085779/488845517.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Elsa/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Johnny Manziel</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<h3 id="7OPgWw">May 8, 2014</h3>
<p id="mY31X3"><strong>Quarterback No. 21</strong></p>
<p id="KBUva7">So the pattern was set: The Browns would try, fail, start over, then try again, fail again, and start over again. No quarterback has started all 16 games in a season for Cleveland since Couch in 2001, though if everything goes as planned this year, Mayfield should break that cycle. The Browns are on their ninth coach and seventh general manager since Butch Davis, and their third owner of the expansion era. </p>
<p id="0i0Rf1">While all this was happening, Tim Brokaw’s jersey began to trail names nearly to the floor. There is now a lost generation of Browns fans who have grown up both seeing and presuming the worst. In a rust-belt region that’s long been driven by its passion for football, the Browns became a hopeless cause. And their Homeric odyssey to find a franchise quarterback was the overarching symbol of that futility.</p>
<p id="eVrb0t">The low moment? Take your pick. Maybe it’s Jake Delhomme starting four games of yet another lost season in 2010; maybe it’s the wilderness of the Brandon Weeden season in 2012, which began with him literally <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mToSXz3JEcM">getting trapped under the American flag</a>. There was the three-game reign of Ken Dorsey, who completed 47 percent of his passes with no touchdowns and seven interceptions in 2008; there was the time Jeff Garcia went 8-for-27 with three interceptions in a 2004 loss to the Cowboys.</p>
<p id="7st8tO">“You know when you’re in the middle of whatever the shit is at the moment and you don’t even realize what the hell it is?” says Jarid Watson, who <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andy-jarid-cleveland-beyond/id1437930151">hosts a Cleveland sports podcast</a> with Andy Billman, the director of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary <em>Believeland. </em>“You just kept going OK, what next? Who next? Who’s the third-string quarterback? Because that guy will be starting by Week 15.”</p>
<p id="LE9YkQ">“I hit the wall with Delhomme,” Billman says. “I really had this feeling like, ‘We’re fucked, and we have nowhere to go.’”</p>
<p id="ivv1EH">It’s kind of remarkable, though, how every time the Browns appeared to have bottomed out, they’d find someone else to provide their fan base with a glimmer of hope. Ridenour literally squealed with joy when the Browns selected local product Charlie Frye in 2005, even though she realized that the likelihood of him becoming a franchise quarterback was slim to none. Then came Brady Quinn (taken with the 22nd pick) in 2007, Colt McCoy (a third-round selection) in 2010, Brandon Weeden (also the 22nd pick) in 2012, Cody Kessler (another third-rounder) in 2016, and DeShone Kizer (a second-rounder) in 2017. These picks were the little rays of light that Browns fans needed to keep going. They allowed the fan base to subsist on an irrational belief that things <em>had </em>to turn around sometime.</p>
<p id="1RUesD">“I did it with Kizer,” Watson says. “I did it with Quinn. I did it with McCoy. I did it with Charlie fricking Frye.”</p>
<p id="OF51po">“But I’ll tell you the ultimate faceplant,” Billman says, and before he even utters the name, I already know where he’s going. I know because literally everyone I’ve spoken to has mentioned the name. May 8, 2014. Cleveland once again has the ill-fated 22nd pick of the first round. And the Browns select Johnny Manziel, a wayward soul who was not prepared to be anything resembling a franchise quarterback, who reportedly <a href="http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000635209/article/johnny-manziel-showed-up-drunk-to-december-practice">showed up drunk to practice</a>, and who may or may not have been taken in part because a homeless man in Cleveland <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/jimmy-haslam-says-homeless-man-convinced-him-to-draft-manziel/">suggested it to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam</a>, who bought the team from the Lerner family in 2012. </p>
<p id="ksJGyS">“Manziel was the low point,” Ridenour says. “That was a disaster from the get-go. You can find that [alleged] <a href="https://brobible.com/sports/article/johnny-manziel-scouting-report-new-england-patriots/">Patriots’ scouting report</a> that was leaked out about him, and everything in it was true. The Browns weren’t doing their homework. All of that was out there. Just the whole failure to recognize it is what gets me.”</p>
<p id="VHO1aX">Maybe, Knight says, if the Browns had chosen to cultivate Brian Hoyer—himself a Cleveland native—rather than be dazzled by Manziel’s fleeting potential, they could have at least been, you know, OK. That’s what the franchise had come to by the mid-2010s: The bar was set so low that a slightly-above-average quarterback who could produce an 8-8 or 9-7 season felt like the best Cleveland could ask for. </p>
<p id="tZbT4W">“You just get so used to misery and complete incompetence, that if you see anything that is at all serviceable, you go, ‘OK, we can work with this,’” Knight says. “You know that saying about how in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king? That phrase has never applied anywhere better than the Cleveland Browns huddle.”</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="New York Jets v Cleveland Browns" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/EC6mf_eUWxwZmaG60MEnH_rdX2I=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19085796/1128062690.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Baker Mayfield</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<h3 id="AzTWS2">September 20, 2018</h3>
<p id="XcR2Hy"><strong>Quarterback No. 30</strong></p>
<p id="tGifg5">You can forgive Browns fans, then, if they aren’t sure what the hell they’re supposed to feel right now. The team has a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20812881/cleveland-browns-baker-mayfield-freddie-kitchens-2019-excitement">truly dynamic quarterback</a>, a colorful and (apparently) competent head coach, and a general manager <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/19/20811756/browns-baker-mayfield-odell-beckham-myles-garrett-john-dorsey">who seems to know exactly what he’s doing</a>. It’s like a strange dream. Some of the people I talked to, like Andy Billman, are unrelentingly optimistic. “This is going to be a total fucking faceplant if this doesn’t work out,” he says. “But I think 11 or 12 wins are in play. I’m in. I’m totally hooked.”</p>
<p id="Sz3dP1">Others are understandably cautious, unsure whether they can trust their own buoyancy. “I do think we [in the media] look at the weaknesses they have and think that could be the fatal flaw,” Ridenour says. “We’ve gotten jaded. You don’t want to jump on that runaway train to the Super Bowl until it’s time.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="vcUsgc"><q>“There’s been no stability at the quarterback position. Or in that organization whatsoever.” —Kelly Holcomb, Browns quarterback no. 5</q></aside></div>
<p id="Twe13H">Don’t get me wrong: Everyone I spoke to is convinced that Baker Mayfield is an entirely different breed of quarterback than the 29 who preceded him since 1999. That became clear last September when, in his first professional appearance, he led the Browns to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPzLxyCwvUY">swashbuckling comeback victory over the Jets</a>, ended the franchise’s 19-game losing streak, and even delivered <a href="https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/07/browns-baker-mayfield-sassy-response-jets">a timely put-down in the process</a>. Mayfield exuded a kind of youthful swagger that Browns fans had waited decades to embrace; it was as if, with one win, he helped fans shake off years of self-loathing. And that feeling only grew over the second half of the season and into the offseason, when a mustachioed Mayfield <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPI0Z7p7Kf8">bit into a beer can and shotgunned it</a> at an Indians game, which may be the most Cleveland thing any quarterback has ever done.</p>
<p id="zWhbr2">But there are still things like luck to take into consideration, and the Browns haven’t exactly flourished in that area throughout their history. “A lot can go wrong,” Knight says. “This is great. I’m happy for everybody. Last year was a really fun year. But we’ve been here before.” </p>
<p id="n7itQn">Still, Cleveland is not in the same place that it was 20 years ago, either <a href="https://www.clevelandfoundation.org/news_items/millennial-residents/">economically</a> (though <a href="https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2019/04/19/study-cleveland-continues-to-experience-significant-neighborhood-economic-decline-little-measurable-growth">deep issues remain</a>) or emotionally. The Cavaliers winning a title lessened some of the Sisyphean burden that the city seemed to put on itself. This is still a football town above all else, but perhaps it’s more willing<em> </em>to believe than it was in the past. And Mayfield’s presence is a huge part of that. </p>
<p id="EN8j0k">The mannequin in the window of Brokaw’s advertising agency now wears a Mayfield jersey. Brokaw says he has no idea whether Mayfield is even aware of its predecessor, which now sits in that storeroom, in a container labeled “Box of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRBDMMVctu8">Sadness</a>.” If the jersey never comes out of the box—if it becomes the Cleveland equivalent of the <a href="https://youtu.be/FRP0MBNoieY?t=69">Ark of the Covenant</a>—Brokaw is totally cool with that. Maybe, he thinks, the Pro Football Hall of Fame will want it someday. Or maybe Mayfield will want to burn it if he goes on to lead Cleveland to a Super Bowl win. </p>
<p id="T65hHR">Last Christmas, Brokaw sent out company greeting cards. On the front, a message acknowledged what a horrible and divisive year it had been in America. But, it said, there’s one thing we can all agree on. Inside were the before and after photos of the mannequin: the old jersey laden with surnames next to its replacement, which carried just one. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="C5kt6T">The caption: <em>We won’t be needing duct tape for a while.</em></p>
<p id="nXuqzn"><a href="https://twitter.com/MichaelWeinreb"><em>Michael Weinreb</em></a><em> is a freelance writer and the author of four books.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/22/20826854/cleveland-browns-quarterback-carousel-20-years-baker-mayfield-tim-couchMichael Weinreb2019-08-22T05:50:00-04:002019-08-22T05:50:00-04:00A Browns Fan Comes to Grips With the Browns Being Cool
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/E9ApqtKTZZ0Kqecxnw1Fn6o1kXs=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65088162/browns_cool_getty_ringer_4.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After a lifetime of causing heartbreak, Cleveland could be on the verge of something great—or setting fans up for even greater heartbreak</p> <p id="9trlfs"><em>The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week"><em>Trust the Browns’ Process Week</em></a><em>, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="Ta7O0A">
<p id="Ykd8l1">On October 14, 2012, the mighty Cleveland Browns <a href="https://www.espn.com/nfl/game?gameId=321014005">defeated the lowly Cincinnati Bengals</a> 34-24, raising their record to a respectable 1-5. The Browns, in fact, had dropped 11 straight dating back to the previous season, which at the time struck me as an abnormal number of games to lose in a row. But on this dazzling autumn Ohio afternoon, led by rookie quarterback and budding superstar <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2015/9/22/9365093/the-saga-of-brandon-weeden-the-cowboys-qb-who-prayed-he-wouldnt-have">Brandon Weeden</a>—who celebrated <a href="http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d8285ec25/article/at-28-brandon-weeden-asks-teams-to-ignore-his-age">his 58th birthday</a> by throwing for two touchdowns, including a 71-yard hookup with fellow budding superstar Josh Gordon—justice prevailed, angels (in latex dog masks) sang, a prosperous new era dawned. </p>
<p id="MMAGpF">Browns win! The Browns won. Yes. A victory. For the Browns. Not a loss; not a tie. A win. Indeed. The Browns, from Cleveland. This, too, was abnormal. Here, for example, was my 1-year-old son’s immediate reaction.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tOd_gvnMfiFGzAcnW6GOfq7IE9Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19085472/surprise.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy Rob Harvilla</cite>
</figure>
<p id="xnGOfC">To be a Browns fan is to regard any positive development—such as a win, or for that matter a person on the internet writing that <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20812881/cleveland-browns-baker-mayfield-freddie-kitchens-2019-excitement">they might win a game at some future time</a>—with utter shock and immediate suspicion. It has to be a joke, a bit, a cruel setup for future humiliation. The Browns are supposed to be good—perhaps even great—this season. <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week">Maybe you heard about it</a>. Maybe you don’t yet quite believe it. Maybe you are, in fact, 15 percent excited and 85 percent braced for some newer, crueler, more public and prolonged form of total degradation. Maybe you are, in short, a Browns fan. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="KaBAdy"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The End of the Browns’ Tortured QB History","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/22/20826854/cleveland-browns-quarterback-carousel-20-years-baker-mayfield-tim-couch"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="VsXlve">Here is the part where I need to summarize for you just how much this team has sucked, and for how long. This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. </p>
<h4 id="j7WIOm">Top Five Personal Browns Moments in the 21st Century (All Emotions Eligible) </h4>
<h5 id="2HQ5D2">5. Bottlegate</h5>
<p id="ym2DgX">This was the December 2001 game vs. the Jacksonville Jaguars when the Browns (riding high with a 6-6 record and led by budding superstar QB Tim Couch) got boned by the refs on a fourth-quarter fourth-down call, sealing the game for the Jaguars and compelling the righteously displeased crowd at Cleveland Browns Stadium to <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/browns/2014/12/bottlegate_oral_history_cleveland_browns.html">throw a bunch of shit on the field</a>. True story: Oblivious to these events, I walked into the official Columbus Blue Jackets arena team shop at the exact moment the bottles started flying, looked up at the TV screens, observed a bunch of Browns fans looking furious while a bunch of Browns players looked dejected, and said, out loud, and I quote, “Yep.”</p>
<h5 id="D8Vufw">4. The Helmet Game</h5>
<p id="vfPQkW">This was the 2002 season opener, in which the mighty Browns beat the lowly Kansas City Chiefs, except on the final play linebacker Dwayne Rudd <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/09/sports/nfl-week-1-browns-penalty-gives-chiefs-unlikely-victory.html">took his helmet off</a>, threw it 15 yards in celebration, got flagged, and watched as the Chiefs kicked a last-second field goal to win. The next morning I wrote like a 2,000-word post on my Yahoo fantasy football message board imagining that I beat up Rudd, dragged him down the length of an Applebee’s salad bar, and threw him out a plate-glass window. It was hilarious. </p>
<h5 id="m28Utn">3. The Christmas Eve Miracle </h5>
<p id="nCFtGZ">This was in 2016 when the San Diego Chargers <a href="https://www.espn.com/nfl/recap?gameId=400874528">biffed a last-second field goal</a> and the victorious Browns thusly raised their record to a respectable 1-14, avoiding, at least, the ignominy of an 0-16 season. Both my sons screamed at the television for like 20 minutes.</p>
<h5 id="YSro9x">2. When the Browns actually went 0-16 the following year and somebody threw a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/1/8/16861824/cleveland-browns-perfect-season-parade">Perfect Season Parade</a> around the stadium in January 2018, during which my phone got so cold it turned itself off. </h5>
<p id="B47QlE">At one point during the actual parade, I glowered up at a banner of Myles Garrett glowering down at me glowering up at him glowering down at me in a perfectly Brownsian feedback loop. </p>
<h5 id="qAAV1o">1. The Browns beat the Steelers 21-21.</h5>
<p id="2vvYRb">This was the 2018 season opener, in which the mighty Browns tied the lowly Pittsburgh Steelers, not losing <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/9/9/17839010/cleveland-browns-are-not-going-0-16-again">for the first time in 624 days</a>. Browns don’t lose! The Browns didn’t lose. Yes. A near-victory. For the Browns. Not a loss. A tie. Indeed. The Browns, from Cleveland. Two games later, during a farcical <em>Thursday Night Football</em> matchup with the New York Jets, rookie quarterback and actual budding superstar Baker Mayfield took the field, and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/9/21/17887048/baker-mayfield-browns-jets-hue-jackson">the Browns actually won a game</a> and finished out the season an ungodly triumphant 7-8-1, and an actual prosperous new era dawned, theoretically, maybe.</p>
<p id="y5A4G8">I am a lifelong Browns fan with vivid memories of, for example, grown men guzzling whiskey out of Hershey’s syrup bottles during midwinter games in the early ’90s at the old Municipal Stadium. But I have kept my fandom at a detached, somewhat ironic remove that permits me, for example, to drive around buying hockey apparel during big games. If being a Browns fan is cool now—or at the very least, not abjectly terrible and humiliating—most of my friends and loved ones deserve<em> </em>far more credit, and deserve <em>an actual winning season</em>, far more than I do. My buddy Mike once greatly upset his wife by admitting (pre-children) that he would live as a homeless person for a year in exchange for the Browns winning a Super Bowl. (Mike, who punishes himself after especially painful sports losses by eating at Arby’s—he hates Arby’s—also “refused to study for a law-school exam” after Bottlegate.) My brother-in-law had season tickets for 13 years, despite <em>living in L.A. for the last nine</em>. They deserve this. This is their time, their birthright, their Golden Era to enjoy. Theoretically. Maybe.</p>
<p id="vS0Wwn">(Also: Midway through writing this, I went to the dentist, who informed me that she’d quit rooting for the Browns several years ago because she’d “become a very angry person.” She and her husband are having people over on Friday to watch Browns-Buccaneers, which is a preseason game.) </p>
<p id="5b35CC"><em>Deserve</em> is a squishy word; Cleveland as a whole has struggled mightily over the years to avoid wallowing in overwrought championship-drought misery à la Boston, a curse both mitigated and exacerbated by the Indians in their various good-but-not-quite-good-enough years, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zd62MxKXp8">finally broken by LeBron</a> in 2016. But as shitty as they’ve been for as long as they’ve been, the Browns own the city like no one and nobody else, such that the highlight of an early-August Indians game in the midst of their recent surge was the surprise sight of Mayfield on the Jumbotron shotgunning a beer while flaunting a classic Long-Suffering Browns Fan mustache. Gaze in wonder upon Cleveland’s large adult son, an absolute unit, dilly dilly, so on and so forth. </p>
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<p id="8bYUpW">The run-up to this NFL season, in which the Browns are generally purported to win their division (for starters), has a surrealist zeal that can end only with either (a) indeed, a Browns Super Bowl win or (b) the sports equivalent of the <em>Carrie </em>prom scene. And with apologies to my good friend Myles Garrett or even Odell Beckham Jr. (<a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown"><em>The Browns front office did a good thing</em></a><em> </em>is another sentiment I am not used to seeing expressed), it all hinges on Mayfield. It is bizarre beyond expression that a Browns quarterback is getting <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/baker-mayfield-is-feeling-dangerous-profile">the <em>GQ</em>-article</a> “he pokes at his plate of chicken milanese” treatment, is giving quotes like “Looking back on it, I kind of was built like a little bitch,” is <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/browns/2019/08/baker-mayfield-texts-giants-daniel-jones-to-clear-the-air-and-explain-he-was-taken-out-of-context.html">trash-talking other teams’ quarterbacks</a>, is photographed wearing thousands of dollars worth of clothes, plus a belt from Prada captioned as “price upon request.” <em>I have never even considered asking Prada how much a Browns quarterback’s belt cost</em>. This is the highest profile one of our QBs has had since Brady Quinn was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THT_yUbX3wE">throwing footlongs at people in a Subway ad</a>. It’s delirious. It’s awesome. It’s terrifying. </p>
<p id="kYW6Kd">It could also all end at any time. Specifically, it could end Sunday, September 8, with a shocking Week 1 loss to the Tennessee Titans, followed by Mayfield getting hit by a bus, followed by the Browns losing their nigh-unprecedented four prime-time games by a combined total of 250 points, followed by my buddy Mike eating Arby’s for a month straight, followed by my dentist throwing her couch off her roof. This is, in short, the first Browns season in half a decade at least where they have … <em>expectations</em>. Where anybody other than the Dawg Pound denizens guzzling whiskey out of chocolate-syrup bottles is paying attention. Where there is more to lose, further to fall, more pain to feel. <em>They still suck; who cares</em> was not a rewarding fan sentiment, but it was familiar, easy, and, above all, <em>safe</em>. It is mortifying that any of you people are willing to read 1,400 words about the Browns under any circumstances. It is, indeed, cool to be a Browns fan now. It is also, to paraphrase our protosuperstar QB, an awfully dangerous feeling. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="uAlwGT">You know who <em>really</em> deserves a redemptive Browns arc, by the way? Actual-superstar Browns offensive tackle Joe Thomas, who retired in 2018 after 11 seasons, 10 Pro Bowls, a record <a href="https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/10/22/joe-thomas-consecutive-snap-streak-ends-cleveland-browns">10,363 consecutive snaps</a>, and <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/browns/2016/04/cleveland_browns_joe_thomas_is.html">literally no playoff games</a>. I have never felt worse for a pro athlete, in any context, than Joe Thomas; he ought to get a Super Bowl ring if and when the team manages to win one, even if he is long dead, even if the planet as we know it is, even if merely imagining this scenario is to invite further disaster. For the first year in maybe literally forever, this might be our year. It is almost certainly a trap. But at least it’s ours. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/22/20827588/browns-fans-pathetic-football-teams-heartbreakRob Harvilla2019-08-22T05:30:00-04:002019-08-22T05:30:00-04:00The Browns Offense Gets All the Hype, but the Defense Is Ready to Dominate
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<p>With Myles Garrett, Denzel Ward, and a host of talented veterans, Cleveland looks poised to shut down opposing offenses. While Baker Mayfield and Odell Beckham Jr. get the most time in the spotlight, this is a complete football team ready to make a leap.</p> <p id="o5xgmp"><em>The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week"><em>Trust the Browns’ Process Week</em></a><em>, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.</em></p>
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<p id="lwDGYa">Browns GM John Dorsey has followed the playbook for <em>Maximizing Your Quarterback’s Cheap Rookie Contract Window</em> to a T over the past year, aggressively utilizing <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown">his stockpile of assets</a> to build a talented offensive nucleus around Baker Mayfield. Cleveland’s blockbuster trade for wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. was nothing less than a coup—an acquisition that <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20813215/odell-beckham-jr-cleveland-browns-week">should elevate not only Mayfield’s game</a> but boost the effectiveness of the entire offensive unit. But while Mayfield, Beckham, and the Browns’ ascending offense has stolen most of the spotlight in the run-up to the 2019 season, the upgrades Dorsey has made to an already-promising defensive core seem to be flying under the radar. </p>
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<p id="HgNMa4">Thanks to a flurry of moves over the past year―from trades and free agency to the draft―the Browns defense looks poised for major improvement in 2019. The offense may grab more headlines, but this underrated Cleveland defense has talent at every level―and it could give the Browns the balance they need to conquer the AFC North. </p>
<h3 id="37TrAd">The Pieces for a Dominant Front</h3>
<p id="VcaGri">Just about every great defense is built around an elite, Defensive Player of the Year–caliber playmaker, and for this Browns group, defensive end Myles Garrett is that guy. The third-year pro is already one of the most devastating edge rushers in the game, mixing prototypical size and length, an explosive first step, flexibility, and underrated power to wreak havoc on opposing lines. </p>
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<p id="wjdhXE">In 2018, the former top overall pick <a href="https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/25074144/nfl-pass-blocking-pass-rushing-stats-final-leaderboard-pass-block-win-rate-pass-rush-win-rate">beat his blocker within 2.5 seconds 30 percent of the time</a> (seventh among defensive ends and outside linebackers). He totaled 67 pressures (also seventh), per Pro Football Focus—just behind Chicago’s Khalil Mack and tied with Minnesota’s Danielle Hunter—including 36 hurries, 16 hits, and 13.5 sacks. What’s scary about that performance, though, is that the 23-year-old is just scratching the surface of what he can do. Garrett’s played only a handful of preseason snaps this summer, but the early reports out of training camp have been, you could say, promising. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Myles Garrett has people audibly gasping with the way he’s exploding off the snap.</p>— Zac Jackson (@AkronJackson) <a href="https://twitter.com/AkronJackson/status/1160934482112864258?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 12, 2019</a>
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<p id="qSPDCk">Crucially, the Browns went out this offseason and got Garrett some help, <a href="http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000001021511/article/giants-to-trade-olivier-vernon-to-browns-for-ol-zeitler">acquiring bookend edge rusher Olivier Vernon</a> in a trade with the Giants. Vernon has battled multiple ankle injuries over the past two years, which have robbed him of nine games and stifled his overall stat lines, but he remains one of the <a href="https://www.pff.com/news/pro-z-the-nfls-most-underrated-player-at-each-position">most underrated</a> pass rushers in the game. His 18.2 percent win rate ranked ninth at his position, per PFF, and in just 11 games he finished tied for 30th among edge rushers with 46 total pressures, including 25 hurries, 13 hits, and 7.0 sacks. The trade obviously comes with some risk for the Browns, who took on Vernon’s $15.25 million in base salary in 2019 and 2020, but they’re betting that the 28-year-old former Giant will stay healthy this year and get back to putting up elite numbers. In Vernon’s last full season (2016), he finished second among edge rushers with 86 pressures; playing opposite Garrett—who will attract more attention in the form of tight end and running back chip-blocks—should provide Vernon the opportunity to get his numbers back up toward the league’s leaders. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="YYlGUN"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Mayfield Mania and the New-Look Browns Are Giving Cleveland Reason to Believe","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20812881/cleveland-browns-baker-mayfield-freddie-kitchens-2019-excitement"},{"title":"The Browns Brought the Process to the NFL. Surprisingly, It Worked.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown"},{"title":"The Great Tanking Debate: Sashi Brown or Sam Hinkie? ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-process"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="pMCNfM">That edge-rushing duo should get a boost, too, from the team’s upgrades on the interior. On the same day that Cleveland traded for Beckham, the team also quietly signed former Vikings defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson to a three-year, $37 million deal. Richardson, a stout, powerful penetrator who ranked 14th among interior linemen last year with 47 pressures, will join up-and-coming defensive tackle Larry Ogunjobi to help push the pocket, slice through the line, and force quarterbacks to retreat into Garrett or Vernon’s area. And while Richardson’s a relatively well-known name, Ogunjobi is on the brink of becoming one himself; in his second year in the league, the former third-round pick ranked 21st among all interior defenders with 36 pressures, per PFF—including 21 hurries, 8 hits, and 5.5 sacks—and showed flashes of power and quickness off the snap. If Ogunjobi <a href="https://twitter.com/jake_burns18/status/1163916695372804097">can keep adding to his pass-rush arsenal</a>, he could be in for a breakout season in 2019. </p>
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<p id="KHJa5q">Past that potentially elite front four, Cleveland has some up-and-coming talent playing in depth roles on the line. Versatile linebacker/end hybrid Genard Avery leads that group; the 2018 fifth-rounder <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/browns/2019/08/genard-avery-is-a-little-bit-of-everything-for-the-browns-defense.html">has been working on his pass-rush moves all offseason</a>—boosted by a trip to <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/browns/2019/06/browns-d-lineman-larry-ogunjobi-attended-von-millers-pass-rush-summit.html">Von Miller’s pass rush summit</a> back in June—and figures to be one of the team’s top nickel package rushers on the edge. As a rookie, Avery grabbed 40 tackles, four pass deflections, and 4.5 sacks. He’s joined by defensive tackle Devaroe Lawrence, who’s been “<a href="https://www.clevelandbrowns.com/news/zegura-s-deep-dive-analyzing-the-defense-after-3-weeks-of-browns-training-camp">unblockable</a>” in training camp, according to head coach Freddie Kitchens. And second-year defensive end Chad Thomas has <a href="https://www.clevelandbrowns.com/news/zegura-s-deep-dive-analyzing-the-defense-after-3-weeks-of-browns-training-camp">reportedly been another camp standout</a> (even after being temporarily sidelined with a neck injury earlier this month). Put together, the Browns have elite talent on its starting defensive line and plenty of intriguing depth behind it. </p>
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<h3 id="8g5gAo">Added Depth in the Linebacker Corps</h3>
<p id="m0rsyW">The Browns head into 2019 without the services of former All-Pro Jamie Collins (who was released in March), but that loss could end up being a net gain as the team turns to a potentially deeper and more reliable group this year. Joe Schobert—a fourth-year ’backer who went to the Pro Bowl in 2017—remains the anchor in the middle of the field, where he’ll have a chance to post 100-plus tackles for the third straight season. And he’ll be bolstered by the return of rangy sidekick Christian Kirksey, who missed the final seven games last year. </p>
<p id="ebsF94">Behind that duo, the Browns can tinker with subpackage roles for Avery and rookies Mack Wilson and Sione Takitaki. Wilson, the former Crimson Tide star who Cleveland grabbed in the fifth round, has already shown signs of being a major steal: He grabbed two interceptions in the team’s first preseason game, including this one, which he returned for a score:</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">To.<br>The.<br>House.<a href="https://twitter.com/5mackwilson1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@5mackwilson1</a> with the pick-6! <a href="https://t.co/49ARjVj5dG">pic.twitter.com/49ARjVj5dG</a></p>— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) <a href="https://twitter.com/Browns/status/1159625529558876160?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 9, 2019</a>
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<p id="P2BuMO">Wilson was voted <a href="https://923thefan.radio.com/articles/cleveland-browns-2019-training-camp-ends">the most outstanding rookie in Browns camp</a> and is versatile enough to play multiple linebacker spots, showing flashes of ability against both the run and pass. He has a chance to earn major playing time in year one. </p>
<h3 id="08qy6s">An Ascending Secondary Got Another Boost</h3>
<p id="qy0ojL">The Browns raised more than a few eyebrows last spring when they took cornerback Denzel Ward with the fourth pick, eschewing the chance to grab NC State pass rusher Bradley Chubb. But the former Ohio State standout showed glimpses of superstar potential as a rookie. Ward boasts elite athleticism and natural ball-hawking instincts; he finished with three picks and 11 passes defensed, surrendering a paltry 70.7 passer rating against in coverage—good for 12th among all corners, per PFF. Ward proved sticky in coverage, showed instincts in zone and frequently reading opposing quarterbacks’ eyes to get a jump on passes to pick them off. </p>
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<p id="3HpZfY">Ward, who is still just 22, joins Garrett to form a pair of cornerstone defensive pieces for the Browns. Crucially, he gives Cleveland the ability to match up with opposing teams’ no. 1 receivers; after finishing 29th in Football Outsiders’ DVOA against those pass catchers in 2017, the Browns jumped all the way up to 12th last year. </p>
<p id="yxRBda">Opposite Ward, the team returns veteran corner Terrance Mitchell, who <a href="https://www.ohio.com/sports/20190819/browns-terrance-mitchell-self-proclaimed-underdog-says-vying-with-greedy-williams-has-brought-out-best-in-him">will battle it out with rookie Greedy Williams</a> for the starting job. Williams—<a href="https://nfldraft.theringer.com/">my second-ranked corner prior to the draft</a>—reportedly fell into the second round due to concerns over his ability to take on the run. But, as Dorsey <a href="https://twitter.com/dan_labbe/status/1121934725378191361?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1121934725378191361&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2F247sports.com%2Fnfl%2Fcleveland-browns%2FArticle%2F2019-NFL-Draft-Browns-and-John-Dorsey-Hit-Jackpot-with-Greedy-Williams-131612634%2F">said after the draft</a>, “corners are paid to cover,” and Williams is a top-flight cover man with length, instincts, and ball skills. If he can win the job, Williams brings potential to form, with Ward, one of the strongest cornerback duos in the league. Add in veteran slot corner T.J. Carrie, whom Dorsey signed in March, and the Browns’ cornerback coverage group is strong across the board: Per the Football Outsiders Almanac, only the Bears defended inside receivers better than Cleveland last year, in large part due to Carrie’s excellent play. The 29-year-old finished with eight passes defensed and a pick. </p>
<p id="f1J5wX">The Browns’ decision to trade for Packers defensive back Damarious Randall last March turned out to be prescient one. Cleveland moved Randall back to his more natural free safety position, where he thrived. In new defensive coordinator Steve Wilks’s scheme, Randall should have no trouble playing either deep middle or split-safety looks alongside some combination of Morgan Burnett, Eric Murray, Jermaine Whitehead, and rookie Sheldrick Redwine. Perhaps most important, none of the team’s safeties will have to play <a href="https://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2017/09/22/gregg-williams-explains-why-jabrill-peppers-is-his-guardian-angel-on-defense/">20 yards off the line of scrimmage</a>. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Shoot Gregg Williams to the moon <a href="https://t.co/iqP7PJGJiE">pic.twitter.com/iqP7PJGJiE</a></p>— Justis Mosqueda (@JuMosq) <a href="https://twitter.com/JuMosq/status/940132690925252608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 11, 2017</a>
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<h3 id="rbRcMc">A New Coordinator Pulling the Strings</h3>
<p id="1hU4QQ">The Browns should benefit from the rule of addition by subtraction in going from Gregg Williams to Wilks. Williams’s penchant for playing his safeties far too deep wasn’t the only thing holding Cleveland’s defense back. The Browns finished second in the league in base-defense snaps (90) against 11 personnel last year, per Football Outsiders, a strategy Wilks is almost sure to abandon. Wilks favors nickel looks, often utilizing 4-2-5 schemes with two linebackers and three versatile safeties on the field. This should give Cleveland a better chance to match up with some of the league’s more dynamic pass offenses while still giving the team some size to stop the run. </p>
<p id="ceyLVY">The Browns are likely to blitz far less this season as well. Per the Football Outsiders Almanac, Cleveland ranked first in the league in six-plus-man blitzes, and rushed with just four less than any other team. With the upgrades to the defensive line, Wilks won’t have to send the house on every other play, allowing him to drop more defenders back and mix up coverage schemes. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="iMmVYS">Wilks will have an older, savvier group to work with as well. The offseason acquisitions of Vernon, Richardson, and Burnett—together with the returns of Kirksey and Mitchell from season-ending injuries—should help turn what was the <a href="https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2019/2018-snap-weighted-age">second-youngest defensive group</a> last season (by snap-weighted age) into a more experienced and disciplined one. Cleveland, which finished <a href="http://www.espn.com/nfl/statistics/team/_/stat/givetake/sort/takeTotal/position/defense">second in the NFL in takeaways last year</a> (31), must weather what’s bound to be an inevitable turnover regression, but the Mayfield-led offense isn’t the only reason Cleveland’s <a href="http://www.vegasinsider.com/nfl/odds/futures/">favored to win their division</a> for the first time since 1989. The team’s infusion of talent—along with the potential performance leaps from Garrett, Ward, and Ogunjobi—gives this Browns defense a chance to dominate in 2019. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/22/20827569/browns-defense-myles-garrett-denzel-wardDanny Kelly2019-08-21T10:31:53-04:002019-08-21T10:31:53-04:00The Browns Brought the Process to the NFL. Surprisingly, It Worked.
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<p>Under Sashi Brown, Cleveland stockpiled draft picks by trading down and losing (a lot). John Dorsey turned those assets into a talent-laden roster. The result is an unlikely NFL success story.</p> <p id="lq8flx"><em>The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week"><em>Trust the Browns’ Process Week</em></a><em>, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="coSMtP">In 2017, Richard Thaler was awarded the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2017/thaler/facts/">Nobel Prize</a> for his work in behavioral economics. This is, obviously, one of the greatest accomplishments on the planet. A few years earlier, Thaler tried to do something even more prestigious: Save the Washington Redskins. </p>
<p id="ayfimL">Thaler, a professor at the University of Chicago, met Redskins owner Daniel Snyder at an on-campus entrepreneurship panel. Over lunch, Thaler explained a 2005 paper he coauthored with Cade Massey, now at the University of Pennsylvania, which argued that top NFL draft picks are overrated. Instead, teams should be patient and accumulate assets by trading back, taking advantage of other franchises that are willing to pay a high price to move up in the draft. Fascinated, Snyder sent several Redskins employees to meet with Thaler and Massey. “We explained to his guys how it all worked,” Thaler said. “And they understood it. And the draft came—they were borrowing picks, trading up. And that was that.” It’s an apt description for how NFL teams operate: They appear to be receptive to new ideas, but against actually implementing them. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="zaqpyv"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Great Tanking Debate: Sashi Brown or Sam Hinkie? ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-process"},{"title":"Mayfield Mania and the New-Look Browns Are Giving Cleveland Reason to Believe","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20812881/cleveland-browns-baker-mayfield-freddie-kitchens-2019-excitement"},{"title":"Odell Beckham Jr. Is Exactly What the Browns Need to Take the Next Step","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20813215/odell-beckham-jr-cleveland-browns-week"},{"title":"The Browns Have the Brightest Future in Football (If They Don’t Blow It) ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/19/20811756/browns-baker-mayfield-odell-beckham-myles-garrett-john-dorsey"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="vn7GyW">The two academics did not completely invent the strategy—the Eagles, led by president Joe Banner, a future Browns executive, and the Patriots were both known to trade down and collect picks before Thaler and Massey published their findings. But their research provided teams with data about adding value in the draft. A team could essentially charge more than a 100 percent interest rate when trading a pick, so long as it was comfortable waiting a year before realizing the return. A patient team could hoard draft picks, and with enough time, talent. One person who listened was Alec Scheiner, who was an executive with the Dallas Cowboys when the study was published. He went on to become Cleveland Browns president in 2012, a job he held until the spring of 2016. Thaler and Massey found an eager audience in this version of the Browns organization. During that time, the team hired former baseball executive Paul DePodesta as chief strategy officer and promoted general counsel Sashi Brown to run football operations. Both of them were prepared to play the pick-hoarding game. Everyone, it seemed, believed in the philosophy to be as patient as possible and collect draft picks. </p>
<p id="IvovMJ">In the 2017 draft, Cleveland traded out of the 12th pick, which it had acquired the year prior by trading out of the second pick. Brown was <a href="https://www.clevelandbrowns.com/news/sashi-brown-hue-jackson-press-conference-4-28-18789672">asked</a> by a reporter if there is such a thing as trading down too much. Brown conceded there was, but after being asked when that might be, he responded: “Not yet.”</p>
<p id="oSTXjQ">The story of how the Browns developed into a legitimate contender must include this strategy, the NFL’s version of the Process. It must also include John Dorsey, Baker Mayfield, and Odell Beckham Jr., all of whom arrived in Cleveland after Brown was fired in 2017. The cap space and the draft picks helped move everything along, however. Yes, the Eagles and Patriots valued trading down, but no team built a franchise around it or hired a baseball executive profiled in <em>Moneyball </em>to help them. “It was neat,” Massey told me, “to be working with an organization that was using this as central principles.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="nThrO8"><q>“The pantry was stocked over years by this philosophy, and the current regime is cooking with that pantry. It’s one of the better stockpiles you’ve ever seen, very intentionally.” —Cade Massey</q></aside></div>
<p id="RUdK48">On the one hand, these moves were crucial for the Browns’ team-building. On the other hand, the two picks the Browns traded in 2016 and 2017 became Carson Wentz and Deshaun Watson. There’s an easy conclusion to draw about Brown’s four-year tenure in Cleveland: Even though Dorsey, Cleveland’s current general manager, assembled the bulk of the talent on the 2019 roster, a substantial chunk of that talent was attainable only because of the cap space and picks left behind by Brown’s front office. In 2018, the Browns had the <a href="https://www.wkyc.com/article/sports/nfl/browns/cleveland-browns-lay-claim-to-most-draft-capital-in-nfls-modern-era/95-526345537">most draft capital</a> of any team in the salary cap era. The trade with the Texans eventually netted the Browns Denzel Ward. Another deal with Houston—a delightfully innovative trade in which the Browns acquired a second-round pick for taking on Brock Osweiler’s contract—netted them promising running back Nick Chubb. Brown’s failure to get a franchise quarterback was the biggest indictment of his tenure. But his deals (and the losing seasons that produced back-to-back no. 1 picks) delivered assets that helped the roster in the years to come, including the 2018 no. 1 pick and franchise quarterback Mayfield. As I <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/7/22/20704244/sashi-brown-washington-wizards-cleveland-browns">said</a> when Brown was hired by the Wizards last month: He did not save the Browns, but he set Cleveland up for saving. </p>
<p id="iuGucR">The Browns’ current plan under Dorsey is as good <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/19/20811756/browns-baker-mayfield-odell-beckham-myles-garrett-john-dorsey">as any in the league</a>, and there are few general managers you’d pick to run an NFL team before him. He took the good parts the Process had produced—Myles Garrett, David Njoku, Larry Ogunjobi, the cap space, the picks—and built a much better 53-man roster than the one he inherited. If the Browns have the type of success their young core is capable of, there will be a lot of debate about who deserves the credit. The answer is everyone.</p>
<p id="rgLLVj">“They got enough assets, and they’ve used them effectively, and they have, on paper, a very, very good team,” Banner, who had a massive influence on the Browns’ Process, told me. </p>
<p id="rp5dYa">The timeline, like most things with the Browns, is choppy: Scheiner and Banner were hired in 2012. In 2013, Brown joined. In 2014, Banner was fired. Brown was the team’s executive vice president and general counsel until 2016, when he was promoted to run football operations. He controlled the draft in 2016 and 2017, to mixed results. How you view those drafts probably determines how you view Brown’s tenure. He took some elite talent but passed on quarterbacks. (Aside from Watson and Wentz, Cleveland picked Garrett no. 1 in 2017 when Patrick Mahomes was on the board, though the Texas Tech star was rarely discussed as a candidate for the top pick.) Cleveland went 1-27 with Brown in charge. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="jI6Ahy"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="f1N1QP">After Brown was fired, <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/sashi-brown-on-dismissal-i-know-that-turnaround-is-coming-in-cleveland/">he said</a>, “I know that turnaround is coming,” and he was very quickly proved right. He was replaced by Dorsey, who changed the fortunes of the franchise by drafting Mayfield, trading for Beckham, and collecting talent at nearly every position. Brown is often <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-process">compared to former 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie</a>, who, like Brown, implemented the Process but left before the turnaround was complete. Neither stayed long enough to enjoy their team’s success, and there’s no way of knowing whether that success would still have come had they stuck around. Instead, they both get the consolation prize of knowing the Process was sound. </p>
<p id="0Ieqei">During my training camp tour, I asked a few general managers what they thought about the Process as implemented by the Browns. One respondent—a fairly traditional football mind—told me Brown had “some great ideas” but cautioned that football people like him will almost <em>always </em>advise against implementing such a plan because it opens the door for non-football types to run franchises. Brown moving down the hall from general counsel to head of football operations would qualify. When you ask people around the NFL whether the Browns’ Process could work, the answers usually have nothing to do with the strategy itself, but with the impatience of NFL ownership. Hinkie’s methods led to the NBA changing the <a href="https://www.nba.com/article/2017/09/28/nba-board-governors-approves-changes-draft-lottery-system">draft lottery odds</a>. The NFL is unlikely to ever make such an adjustment because few if any teams have even considered implementing their own version of the Process, due to a combination of job preservation and a general reticence to try new things. The Browns are better than they were, but the league remains the same. </p>
<p id="Q12k39">Brown has developed into a bit of a symbol of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/12/19/18148153/nfl-analytics-revolution">analytics in the NFL</a>, after he became the face of a front office that developed the plan over five years. </p>
<p id="AX1R6S">“It is criminal to think of it any other way,” Massey said. “The pantry was stocked over years by this philosophy, and the current regime is cooking with that pantry. They still have to make good choices. It’s one of the better stockpiles you’ve ever seen, very intentionally.” </p>
<p id="Rj4jtO">It’s fair to say the Process worked because the Browns have, on paper, one of the most exciting young rosters in the NFL. I asked Jabrill Peppers, who was sent to New York in the trade for Beckham, how Brown’s plan will be remembered. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="Kdq2Wy"><q>“It takes a lot of patience that I don’t think a lot of people have. They are reaping the fruits of his labor now, even though they don’t want to attribute it to him.” —Jabrill Peppers, former Browns safety</q></aside></div>
<p id="FCIGdM">“I definitely think it was built upon. Dorsey inherited a lot. He was in position to make some good moves with that team,” Peppers said. “I think a lot of the fans and media were hard on Sashi because they weren’t seeing results right away. Even though people know that’s not the point, when it’s happening, no one wants to hear that. </p>
<p id="D0YA5i">“[Sashi] definitely did a good job of getting the picks, getting the cap to where he got it to, to where you can go out and get any player you want. I definitely think his mantra could be used again. It takes a lot of patience that I don’t think a lot of people have. But they are reaping the fruits of his labor now, even though they don’t want to attribute it to him. He definitely has a big part of what’s going on there.”</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Cleveland Browns v Cincinnati Bengals" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ooz_FFDDKXbcF-EGpmPfFj5s6Qk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19083607/885466470.jpg.jpg">
<figcaption>Sashi Brown</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="NZZAj5"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="VQrdJc">What is going on there is that the Browns have some of the best young talent in football. The remarkable part of the Process is how many people in the Browns organization believed in it and implemented it and how, if not for some rather dramatic franchise stops and starts (detailed well by ESPN’s Seth Wickersham <a href="https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/25797430/inside-cleveland-browns-front-office-where-hope-history-collide">earlier this year</a>), the Browns might have started reaping the benefits even earlier. </p>
<p id="hwKAhN">When Banner joined the Eagles in the mid-1990s, he and team owner Jeffrey Lurie had conversations with a handful of smart football minds, among them former 49ers general manager Carmen Policy and former Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson. The Super Bowl–winning Johnson explained to Banner and Lurie that he believed in a strategy that would now be called the Process. “He said ‘Here’s the reality: almost everybody picking is hitting at 50 percent of their picks and if I can get 10 picks and everyone else gets seven, after a number of years I’m going to have a huge advantage,’” Banner remembered. Johnson stockpiled assets to build his Cowboys dynasty by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Walker_trade">trading</a> star running back Herschel Walker for a Vikings package that included <em>eight </em>picks. </p>
<p id="feeqr5">Banner continued: “The best general manager in the league will do better than other people, but you’re talking about a few percentage points, so give him extra picks, and you’ll have a huge advantage. Very small percentage points can matter a lot.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><div id="9LlxnA"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/1Rkru68XfE3DuDPXwLxxOl" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="D0fE2J">By the time Sashi Brown took over football operations, Cleveland had already bought into the concept of hoarding picks. In 2013, the Browns traded Trent Richardson to the Colts for a first-rounder, one of the best examples of a team taking advantage of an opponent that is shortsighted about picks. The Browns almost traded Josh Gordon to San Francisco for a second-round pick that same year, which would have given them two picks in each of the first three rounds. It was a significant number, Banner said, because a member of the Browns analytics team told him that three previous teams had that kind of draft haul in football history and all three eventually reached a Super Bowl. Ownership vetoed the trade, and that version of the Process eventually came undone: Banner and his general manager, Mike Lombardi, were fired. The next general manager, Ray Farmer, traded up for Johnny Manziel and, well, things got sidetracked, to say the least. Farmer was fired in 2016. Yes, it’s exhausting to keep track of these events. </p>
<p id="0wyt6Q">“The two key players, Garrett and Mayfield, they got with their own pick. It had nothing to do with that strategy,” Banner said with a laugh. “You end up with the first pick twice in a row, and you use it correctly, you end up with Garrett and Mayfield.” </p>
<p id="ijddpc">Losing, of course, is the most significant part of the Browns’ plan. Brown built teams over two years, and they went 1-31. “It was definitely new for me,” Peppers said. “I’ve been a winner my whole life and to go somewhere and not win any games, you definitely learn a lot of valuable lessons. Built a lot of character, formed great relationships. When you come from the bottom, there’s only one place you can go. We were trending in that direction when I was there. Fell just short of the playoffs last year. I think the building blocks are there for them.” </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="6bSHI9"><q>“If you can propel yourself from 8-8 to 11-5, go for it, but you’re usually better going backwards and that won’t be done by anyone afraid of their own security.” —Joe Banner, former Browns and Eagles executive</q></aside></div>
<p id="V9RKvj">Banner said that this strategy to take steps back in the win column, while painful, was smart in the end. “You can get stuck in the middle of the pack,” he said. “You can do something proactive to bang yourself up or down or be stuck in jail. If you can propel yourself from 8-8 to 11-5, go for it, but you’re usually better going backwards and that won’t be done by anyone afraid of their own security.” </p>
<p id="veaPe9">Thaler wonders what would have happened if the Browns had a better coach than Hue Jackson (3-36-1 with Cleveland). But he also wonders whether any professional football coach would align themselves so closely with an analytically minded front office—aggressively going for it on fourth down, rarely running the ball, among other big ideas. He points out, for instance, that Rockets general manager Daryl Morey has coaches who at least value the same things he does: 3-pointers, for instance. Of course, no head coach, not even Eagles coach and analytics god Doug Pederson, goes for it on fourth down as much as the analytics say you should. </p>
<p id="gHUDfF">I asked former Browns quarterback DeShone Kizer about his time in Cleveland: “There’s a lot of things that go into winning, it takes a lot of experience, trust, skillful athletes, and good coaching to get winning done. When one thing pulls from another, it makes it very difficult to win. I’m just excited that the guys I came in with, from David [Njoku] to Larry [Ogunjobi] to Myles [Garrett], now get to experience all the things together and all the dots connecting.” </p>
<p id="dHpnU5">Yes, the dots finally connected. And there were a <em>lot </em>of dots. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Cleveland Browns Training Camp" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zTyc_YEzOa637XLWFl7ROvGc2p8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19083612/1160090218.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Don Juan Moore/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Baker Mayfield and Odell Beckham Jr.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="dNS6nX"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="JnEUhT">At an analytics conference three years ago, DePodesta said something incredibly prescient. He <a href="https://twitter.com/bykevinclark/status/717875592662745093">told the audience</a> that building a team around analytics was like riding a roller coaster and that he did not want ownership to ask to get off the ride when it got scary. Of course, this is what happened in Cleveland: Brown, Banner, and Scheiner all departed before Dorsey arrived. He’s as good a talent evaluator as there is, and it appears to have all worked out. DePodesta remains with the team. The Process is over, and it worked. </p>
<p id="0JksVa">So, did the NFL learn anything? </p>
<p id="DxBsJ1">“My impression is that nothing has changed,” Thaler said. “I don’t think there’s been a lot of learning.” </p>
<p id="eiNpdi">Many people I spoke to in the NFL agree with Thaler. Even if the Browns explode into legitimate contention this year, the Process will not exactly catch on like wildfire. If anything, Massey thinks people might learn the <em>wrong </em>lessons. The idea for their study originated after the 1999 draft. Thaler was fascinated with Mike Ditka’s approach to trade his entire draft for Ricky Williams, and Massey was focused on how teams <em>never </em>rank quarterbacks right, yet think they can. “This was before behavioral economics was a big thing. It was novel to look at real data,” Massey said. “People had studied overconfidence in labs, but no one was looking at the NFL.” </p>
<p id="gWbSND">Twenty years later, overconfident teams continue to trade up in the draft. “The Browns showed teams can have two first-round picks forever,” Thaler said. Banner thinks Miami is using the Process “a little bit” during its <a href="https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2019/05/13/nfl-power-rankings-fmia-peter-king/">rebuild</a>. “But so many teams are still so embedded in how they do things and how things have been done,” Banner said. “We will see more of this, but it will not sweep the league.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="FL7Ta6"><q>“Both Sam Hinkie and Sashi came to symbolize more than what they were actually doing. It’s about saying ‘Hey, this is what we are doing, we’re taking a new approach, and we’re going to be fairly transparent about it.’” —Kevin Cole, Pro Football Focus data scientist</q></aside></div>
<p id="58DDFi">During Brown’s Cleveland tenure, Kevin Cole, a data scientist at Pro Football Focus, started a podcast called <em>What Would Sashi Do?</em> At the beginning, Cole played the longest possible game for every scenario (for instance, a conversation about building around Philip Rivers ends with the Chargers signing Rivers’s kids in a few decades). Cole jokes that he is a Brown apologist. “Both Sam Hinkie and Sashi came to symbolize more than what they were actually doing,” Cole said. “It’s about being so explicit in what you’re doing, where you’re saying ‘Hey, this is what we are doing, we’re taking a new approach, and we’re going to be fairly transparent about it.’” </p>
<p id="b5E50M">Cole is not a Browns fan, just a Sashi Brown fan, and said he doesn’t really have an NFL team. He roots for whoever is doing smart things (he loves Chris Ballard in Indianapolis at the moment). He thinks that football people have “mellowed no matter what side you are on” about analytics. “It was,” he said, “like taking sides in a battle.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="rQw6Mu">The good news for Browns fans is that the battle is over and, well, they have a good roster to show for it. Brown, like Hinkie, was fired before his team reached the promised land of contention. While the ultimate success of those teams remains to be seen, though, both former executives have seen their names become shorthand for playing an unfinished long game. The Process worked. Brown may not change football, but he certainly changed the Browns.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brownKevin Clark2019-08-21T05:50:00-04:002019-08-21T05:50:00-04:00The Great Tanking Debate: Sashi Brown or Sam Hinkie?
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bGSsv--Oosode3iNohn6tNdui3k=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65079384/BrownVHinkie_3000x2000_v1.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://codypearson.design" target="_blank">Cody Pearson</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hinkie pioneered the Process and revolutionized the NBA. Sashi shook the NFL and helped resurrect the Browns. Which cult hero’s effort was more impressive? Two writers have it out.</p> <p id="NWynrX"><em>The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/20/20813579/welcome-to-trust-the-browns-process-week"><em>Trust the Browns’ Process Week</em></a><em>, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="TMV8Ca">
<p id="n3CLtP">The general managers responsible for two of the worst seasons in modern professional sports history are now hailed as heroes. In 2013, Sam Hinkie took over as GM of the Philadelphia 76ers and pioneered the Process, a controversial strategy of prolonged tanking designed to net draft capital. Hinkie resigned in 2016 a few weeks before the Sixers completed a 10-72 campaign, just one win better than the worst single-season NBA record of all time. In 2016, Sashi Brown became GM of the Cleveland Browns, and started out with a 1-15 season. He similarly prioritized the future over the present and similarly watched as things got worse: He was fired late in 2017 as the Browns stumbled to the second 0-16 NFL record ever.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="GJoeqp"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Browns Have the Brightest Future in Football (If They Don’t Blow It) ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/19/20811756/browns-baker-mayfield-odell-beckham-myles-garrett-john-dorsey"},{"title":"Five Fantasy Questions for the Cleveland Browns ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/19/20811901/cleveland-browns-fantasy-football-baker-mayfield-odell-beckham"},{"title":"Odell Beckham Jr. Is Exactly What the Browns Need to Take the Next Step","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20813215/odell-beckham-jr-cleveland-browns-week"},{"title":"Mayfield Mania and the New-Look Browns Are Giving Cleveland Reason to Believe","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl-preview/2019/8/20/20812881/cleveland-browns-baker-mayfield-freddie-kitchens-2019-excitement"},{"title":"The Browns Brought the Process to the NFL. Surprisingly, It Worked.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20826377/cleveland-browns-the-process-sashi-brown"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="HBUU9p">Both tank jobs worked. The Sixers drafted Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. In this year’s Eastern Conference semifinals, they pushed the eventual NBA champion Toronto Raptors to a Game 7, losing on a preposterously unlucky buzzer-beater. It seems like the best is yet to come for their promising core. Meanwhile, the Browns drafted Baker Mayfield, Myles Garrett, and Denzel Ward and then traded for Odell Beckham Jr., and are now poised to deliver their best season since the franchise was reborn in 1999. I know, that’s not saying much. But Cleveland is projected to make the playoffs for the first time since 2002, which would end the league’s longest postseason drought.</p>
<p id="7AGAUk">Both Hinkie and Sashi were criticized for taking tanking further than it had ever gone in their respective sports. Both men departed at the nadir of their teams’ valleys, and both have since watched other GMs reap the rewards of their intentional failings. And both have inspired cultlike followings among their former fan bases, who view them as bold visionaries who sucked aggressively enough to turn things around. </p>
<p id="tBnLpJ">So whose efforts were more impressive? <em>The Ringer</em>’s Chief Process Truster John Gonzalez and Head Sashi Supporter Rodger Sherman debated which GM did a better—or perhaps, purposefully worse—job. </p>
<p id="u0NNQL"><strong>Sherman: </strong>We’re dealing with two very similar men here: two outsiders with fancy degrees who climbed the corporate ladders in their respective sports until they were put in charge of player personnel decisions, despite never having played, coached, nor scouted at the professional level. Both Sashi and Hinkie stripped their organizations’ rosters of virtually all talent in a single-minded pursuit of draft capital. And both were removed from power before they could experience the fruits of their labor.</p>
<p id="WZZteg">John, why don’t you start things off by making your basic pitch. Why do so many Philadelphians view Hinkie as a sports messiah? (No. 2 behind Nick Foles, presumably.) </p>
<p id="fbwOlH"><strong>Gonzalez:</strong> You have to understand what was happening in Philly before Hinkie. The Sixers were run by this unwieldy, atavistic front office collective of Doug Collins, Rod Thorn, and Tony DiLeo. Collins once <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ball-dont-lie/doug-collins-no-interest-advanced-stats-blow-brains-195542758--nba.html">famously told</a> <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ball-dont-lie/doug-collins-no-interest-advanced-stats-blow-brains-195542758--nba.html">reporters</a> that he would “blow my brains out” and “kill myself” if he had to read advanced stat sheets. He also signed Kwame Brown to a contract that was longer than it needed to be—in that he gave Kwame a contract at all. This was end-of-his-career, bloated Kwame. He used to hit the buffet hard after every game. It became a thing that I would monitor—how many plates Kwame would eat after catching a DNP-CD. He led the league in postgame buffet performance.</p>
<p id="bbpfd4">So yeah, Hinkie was a welcomed change for lots of reasons.</p>
<p id="mSZGWK"><strong>Sherman:</strong> Hold on. I need to backtrack here. Did you seriously just hit me with a “you have to understand what was happening” in a post where the other option is the CLEVELAND BROWNS? Are you kidding me?</p>
<p id="SYnJsd">Forget the 17-year-and-counting playoff drought. This franchise has long been dysfunction incarnate. In the eight years before Sashi arrived, the Browns went through five head coaches (Romeo Crennel, Eric Mangini, Pat Shurmur, Rob Chudzinski, and Mike Pettine) and five general managers. From 2012 to 2015, Cleveland made seven first-round draft picks, and all of them flopped: Trent Richardson, who couldn’t find a hole on a Connect Four board; Brandon Weeden, who was already receiving AARP benefits when he was drafted; Barkevious Mingo, whose name remains the best part of his career; Justin Gilbert, who was traded for a sixth-round pick two years after being drafted; Johnny Manziel, who can’t really be described in a sentence; Cameron Erving, who was eventually traded for a fifth-round pick; and Danny Shelton, the most successful of the bunch, and also a player who has achieved most of his success on the Patriots. </p>
<p id="2q2csE">I get that the Sixers were bad, but the Browns didn’t make a positive move for damn near a decade before Sashi regrouped things.</p>
<p id="LVwXJL"><strong>Gonzalez:</strong> <em>Actually</em>—and imagine me saying this in my most obnoxious Philly explainer voice—the Sixers weren’t bad before Hinkie. They were average. Sometimes slightly below average. Sometimes slightly above average. But usually right around there. That is the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/1/11/16875180/middle-class-heat-bucks-pistons-wizards">worst spot to be in in the NBA</a>. Bad would have been welcomed. And it was. That’s partly why a large segment of the fan base immediately latched on to the concept of bottoming out in order to climb higher on the ladder than the .500 rung. The promise of building something big, special, and lasting sounded a lot better than maybe making the playoffs with Spencer Hawes and Lavoy Allen. </p>
<p id="A1xdsY">And when you say “Sashi regrouped things,” you might be getting ahead of yourself. We’re talking about the same Cleveland Browns, right? The team that went 7-8* last season, 0-16 the season before that, and 1-15 the season before that? Those Browns? That feels not great as far as regrouping goes. </p>
<p id="q13SvN">*<em>Sorry: Their 2018 record was 7-8-1, obviously. Congrats on that tie, Cleveland! The Browns are back! </em></p>
<p id="9i9hra"><strong>Sherman:</strong> They closed 5-2-1, John! And those five wins came after Baker Mayfield took over as starting QB and Hue Jackson was fired as head coach. </p>
<p id="lArbB9">The NFL is different from the NBA, because that waylaid perma-middle class you mentioned doesn’t really exist in football. It’s common for a team to swing from good to bad and back over an incredibly short stretch. Take your Eagles, who this decade alone have gone from 10-6 to 4-12 to 10-6 to down below .500 a year before winning the Super Bowl. (Did you know the Eagles won the Super Bowl, by the way?) </p>
<p id="04XS7b">The only team exempt from the NFL’s giant game of Chutes and Ladders has been the Browns. Cleveland won four or five games in every season from 2008 to 2013. And that’s what makes Sashi so bold. He opted out of the potential to participate in the NFL’s ebb-and-flow for two years, producing teams that went 1-31 while racking up the <a href="https://www.wkyc.com/article/sports/nfl/browns/cleveland-browns-lay-claim-to-most-draft-capital-in-nfls-modern-era/95-526345537">most draft capital any team has had in the history of the sport</a>. And guess what, John: The Browns are favored to win their division this year! Sure, it’s with some players (like Mayfield) Brown’s successor John Dorsey drafted, and a superstar (OBJ) Dorsey traded for. But Brown allowed Cleveland to break the cycle.</p>
<p id="P0Io9X">Brown’s accomplishment is especially remarkable because the Process isn’t built for football. It’s much harder to build a competitive 53-man roster than it is to assemble a starting five through a handful of draft picks. I don’t think what Brown did would make sense for most teams, but the Browns aren’t most teams. </p>
<p id="ImpaHg"><strong>Gonzalez:</strong> Yes, I am aware that the Eagles won the Super Bowl. But I’m all for you reminding everyone as much as you’d like.</p>
<p id="eX5Tas">Now, what was that about closing 5-2-1 and using players some other GM drafted? Because of what Hinkie did, the Sixers have two of the NBA’s best young players in Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. Or, sorry, they have two of the NBA’s best players, full stop. (I will not hear <a href="https://twitter.com/kevinoconnornba/status/1117164444864458753?lang=en">Kevin O’Connor’s slander</a> about how one of them shoots with the wrong hand.) And because they have those two players, the Sixers came within four freak bounces of beating the eventual world champion Raptors in the Eastern Conference semifinals. That was by far the toughest series the Raptors played in the postseason. By the transitive property, the Sixers basically won the 2019 NBA championship. But it’s cute that the Browns are favored in the … [<em>checks notes</em>] ... [<em>hold on</em>] ... AFC North. Impressive! </p>
<p id="obvoCb">Baker Mayfield’s mustache is cool, though. </p>
<p id="9jN7rU"><strong>Sherman:</strong> You seem pretty focused on the fact that the Browns haven’t yet turned their struggles into championship contention. You’ve got a point: Sashi took over the most moribund franchise in football all the way back in 2016. Then he made that bad team intentionally worse. Somehow, three years later, Cleveland is in a position to make the playoffs.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="qb1O21"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="r76alD">Let’s compare that with the scenario involving Hinkie, who took over the Sixers in 2013. Six years later ... you’re puffing your chest about nearly winning the conference semifinals? If we were to plot the Sashi timeline onto Hinkie’s tenure, we’d be in 2016. What were the Sixers doing in 2016? Oh yeah, finishing 10-72. That’s around when Hinkie resigned and Bryan Colangelo drafted Ben Simmons. (Hinkie, who resigned ahead of the 2016 draft, is as responsible for Simmons as Sashi, who was fired ahead of the 2018 draft, was for Mayfield.) I’ll accept defeat in three years if the best thing the Browns have accomplished is losing on a quadruple-doinked extra point in the second round of the 2023 playoffs.</p>
<p id="EuW6oS">It took Sashi two years to reinvent the Browns. It took Hinkie twice as long to turn around a roster a quarter of the size. Browns fans didn’t need to Trust the Process because the rebuild didn’t last long enough to require the construction of an entire religion around it. </p>
<p id="tDMOYL"><strong>Gonzalez: </strong>Wait. Wait. Wait. Hinkie was in charge for only three years because of something you conveniently skipped over. I love how you yada yada’d not one but TWO Colangelo coup attempts. The second one got him and, yes, he resigned. But Hinkie knew back then what everybody knows now: Neither Colangelo was as capable of running that organization and zooming the Sixers into the future as well as he was. Bryan Colangelo did the obvious thing and took Simmons in 2016, but that wouldn’t have been possible without Hinkie handing him that delightful parting gift on his way out the door. We all saw how badly BC was exposed on his own: Danny Ainge emptied his pockets of various assets in the disastrous high-stakes Markelle Fultz deal.</p>
<p id="u7Sq6J">Because of what Hinkie put in motion, the NBA tried to reconfigure its system—twice. The league <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/10/22/7039037/nba-draft-lottery-reform-veto-owner-vote">failed on lottery reform</a> five years ago before <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2017/9/28/16381426/nba-draft-lottery-reform-passes">succeeding</a> in 2017. Hinkie is the Wilt Chamberlain of GMs. He dunked on his peers so hard that the NBA had to step in and change the rules. Think about that. There’s a reason we’re currently discussing who did “the Process” better and not whatever as-yet-unnamed transition period one team in Cleveland did. That term became ubiquitous and is now shorthand for altering the trajectory of an entire league—if not how we think about sports writ large. As front office rock stars go, it’s not close. <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/3/5/17077644/sam-hinkie-philadelphia-76ers-interview">Hinkie is the headliner</a>.</p>
<p id="GWIXYR"><strong>Sherman:</strong> He may be the bigger name, but Sashi’s efforts could prove more successful. And to that end, I find it strange how both Hinkie and Sashi’s successors are impacting the way that they will be remembered. The guy who followed Hinkie made a massive trade to acquire Markelle Fultz—a player who forgot how to shoot basketballs—and then got fired for yelling about himself online. Meanwhile, the guy who followed Sashi traded for OBJ, which sets Cleveland up to potentially win a Super Bowl. </p>
<p id="FmUcr1">Hinkie’s reputation is bolstered by the failures of his successor. No matter what happens from here, he’s going to look good. If the Sixers win a title, even in 2024, Hinkie will be remembered as a savior. If they fail, he’ll be remembered as a martyr who fought the good fight and was felled by idiots too foolish to understand his ideals. If the Browns win the Super Bowl in 2020, Sashi may get less credit than Dorsey, who swooped in and made a 1-31 team competent. Never mind that he did so thanks largely to the resources acquired by Sashi.</p>
<p id="SrjtyC">So yes, Hinkie is the rock star of this movement. But Sashi is the artist who will never get the recognition he deserves. Way to be mainstream, John. </p>
<p id="n5HYNN"><strong>Gonzalez:</strong> I don’t think winning a title is necessary for us to see that both men were good at their gigs. Daryl Morey hasn’t won a championship on the Rockets, and he’s rightly hailed as one of the best executives in the NBA. For the record, I think Sashi did a fine job. And bully for him. But this is a silly debate. Get back to me when Sashi <a href="https://www.rightstorickysanchez.com/podcast/2016/8/20/082016-all-the-right-moves-grading-every-sam-hinkie-sixers-transaction">has a billboard</a>. </p>
<p id="XXBT4Q"><strong>Sherman:</strong> I’m willing to concede a lot of points to Hinkie. He was the innovator. He was the icon. And to date, his moves as general manager have generated more success. </p>
<p id="3dChQQ">But I ride for Sashi. Football is more tanking-resistant than basketball is, and Sashi had the courage to bottom out. More importantly: The team he fixed was the Browns. THE BROWNS! Other people have made the Sixers good. Reviving the Browns took a miracle.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="jwZ5DO">I guess the answer here will come down to one thing. Hinkie has done post-Sixers consulting work for the Broncos, while Sashi <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/7/22/20704244/sashi-brown-washington-wizards-cleveland-browns">now has a job with the Wizards</a>. The real test of who’s better will be whether the former NBA guy’s NFL team becomes good before the former NFL guy’s NBA team. And only one of those teams just traded for Joe Flacco. I like Sashi’s chances.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/8/21/20813898/sashi-brown-sam-hinkie-browns-76ers-tanking-trust-the-processRodger ShermanJohn Gonzalez2019-08-20T15:14:36-04:002019-08-20T15:14:36-04:00Final Training Camp Takeaways and Browns Week
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<img alt="Indianapolis Colts Training Camp" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fgAAFuTeZ2dLmE8PLF3dZMYIDVE=/484x0:5348x3648/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65071509/1168073792.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Robert Mays and Kevin Clark discuss the state of the league after their training camp circuit, what to look forward to in the upcoming season, the Browns, and more</p> <div id="IRHb2r"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/1Rkru68XfE3DuDPXwLxxOl" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="Vpkjot"><a href="https://art19.com/shows/the-ringer-nfl-show/episodes/945e314e-fa56-4fb1-a03f-c4edf0b2600c">After completing our yearly training camp circuit</a>, we share our overarching takeaways on the state of the league, the things we underestimate about team building, and what’s to come in the 2019 season (2:30). Then we wonder whether the Browns are really going to be this season’s most exciting team and share the rest of the franchises that we think have a chance at that title (26:34).</p>
<p id="r4CitF"><strong>Subscribe:</strong> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Fthe-ringer-nfl-show%2Fid1109282822%3Fmt%3D2">Apple Podcasts</a> / <a href="https://art19.com/shows/the-ringer-nfl-show">Art19</a> / <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ringer/ringer-nfl-show">Stitcher</a> / <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ringernflshow">RSS</a></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2019/8/20/20814089/nfl-show-final-training-camp-takeaways-browns-week-and-teams-were-most-excited-for-this-seasonRobert MaysKevin Clark