Take a good look at where the Cleveland Browns were going into that offseason. It’d been 12 years since the last time they had finished .500 or better, 17 years since their last playoff appearance and 25 years since their last playoff win. They were hiring their fifth head coach and fifth general manager in eight offseasons. During that span, they had 0–16, 1–15, 3–13 and 4–12 records, and a raft of high first-round picks washed out.
There was plenty of reason to doubt the Haslams, who were installed as owners midway through the 2012 season, going into the first offseason of that stretch.
I did, and it turns out I was wrong.
In January 2020, I thought the right thing for Cleveland would be to bring home a couple of locally bred New England Patriots guys—Josh McDaniels and Dave Ziegler—to change the face of the organization. I thought, at the time, that the direction the Haslams chose was really just more of the same, since they were, essentially, doubling down on Paul DePodesta, the baseball executive that they’d hired in ’16.
To that point, DePodesta had been seen as a lightning rod in the organization, and emblematic of the four-year squabble between the traditional football and the analytics people in the organization. He was also one reason why the Haslams shied away from McDaniels. who’d advocated for restructuring in a way that minimized DePodesta.
At the time, it at least looked like going the other way, and hiring Andrew Berry from the Philadelphia Eagles as GM and Kevin Stefanski from the Minnesota Vikings as coach, was pushed by DePodesta as a measure of self-preservation. After all, Stefanski’s candidacy was, at least in part, a result of how he’d interviewed the previous January, impressing DePodesta and, among others, Berry, who was in Cleveland from 2016 to ’18 but would leave for Philly four months later. Berry liked Stefanski so much, in fact, that the two resolved to stay in touch, with an eye on working together in the future.
That the Haslams hired them in tandem the following January, to me at least, felt like more of the same for a lost franchise. It was nothing against Berry or Stefanski—I liked both. It was just that, at least on the surface, this was a team that needed a detonation, not a double-down.
Good for the Haslams ignoring the outside noise.
Turns out, they were right about Berry, whom he’d had in his building for three seasons and had become one of the best GMs in football and is still just 37. And Berry was right about Stefanski, who’d done enough to get two interviews in Cleveland in 2019, a year before he’d land the job, despite not even having had a full year of coordinator experience at that point.
They haven’t gotten everything right, but they’ve stabilized the league’s unstable franchise, and the future is bright in Cleveland. They’ve made the playoffs twice already. Last year, they got there by winning games with four different quarterbacks, their fourth and fifth tackles starting, and a ton of injuries on defense (particularly in the secondary), as well.
So, now, they’ve been rewarded with extensions—Stefanski is actually the first head coach to land one in Cleveland since Bill Belichick in the early ’90s. And rightfully so.
