Shuffling Deck Chairs on the Goodtime III
Browns fire Kevin Stefanski and keep Andrew Berry: a belated half-measure
For my non-Clevelander readers, this is the Goodtime III.
In an underrated classic episode from Season 9 of The Simpsons, Krusty the Clown decides to retire from comedy. Krusty had not previously realized that his predictable antics and ubiquitous merchandizing had made him into a punchline, and in a prescient prediction of today’s anti-cancel-culture crusaders he insists the problem is “comedy ain’t funny anymore” rather than his own tired act. But his has-been status isn’t news to the rest of Springfield, so the first question Krusty gets at his farewell press conference after he announces his retirement is:
“But Krusty, why now? Why not 20 years ago?”
This line was the first thing that popped into my head when the Cleveland Browns announced that they had fired Kevin Stefanski after six seasons as head coach. And with the concurrent news that general manager Andrew Berry will be retained, it’s a scene that I’ll surely be thinking about again in a year or two, too.
As a general rule, I don’t speculate about sports leaders’ job securities or call for them to get fired because there is a real human cost to such decisions. I have worked in professional sports. I’ve been in the building when coaches and executives were let go. It sucks. Even if you saw it coming, even if it’s the right decision, even if it’s ultimately good for your own career — and especially if the foregoing do not apply — a pall is cast over the office. I feel badly for the countless lower-level Browns employees whose names and roles fans don’t know, who may be concerned for their own job security under a new boss or sad to see their friend get canned.
Having said that, when you take the top job in a locker room or front office, you know you are kicking off a countdown clock until the day you are dismissed. Great coaches and executives get fired. Hall of Famers get fired. Stefanski’s (and Berry’s) six years on the job are a pretty good run for a head coach in the NFL, especially when it’s been five years since their last playoff win, and especially in an organization that had averaged a high-profile firing every year over the preceding two decades.
More to the point, I find it hard to feel sympathy for Stefanski or Berry given their respective efforts to rehabilitate Deshaun Watson’s personal reputation. Venerating the character of a man whom at least 30 different women have accused of sexual assault or harassment has been one of the Browns brass’ key job responsibilities since their ill-fated trade for him four years ago. Berry presented himself as having led the front office’s vetting efforts (creating the pretense for welcoming such a heinous man into the organization), while Stefanski has proven an indefatigable font of empty clichés about how hard Watson is working and how devoted he is to his teammates. You can tell how little they respect the fanbase and care about the issue of sexual violence by contrasting the specific qualities they choose to adulate with how Watson conducts himself in interviews and on the sidelines — they can’t even be bothered to lie well. Maybe Stefanski and Berry sincerely believe he’s a good guy, maybe their defenses of Watson are disingenuous, maybe they resent the party lines they are expected to parrot. Whatever the case, in my book their running cover for such a monster is far grosser than my wanting an NFL team employee to lose their job. If they’re offended by a lack of fan decorum, I guess they know how the rest of us feel.
The announcement of Kevin Stefanski as head coach in 2020 was one of my most exciting days as a Browns fan. Stefanski was young. He came from a successful organization. He cared about analytics and having good decision-making processes. He had a reputation as a dynamic strategist who was creative in designing plays and bold in calling them. In short, Stefanski was the exact antithesis of the kind of hire Cleveland normally makes, and therefore exactly the balm this sorry franchise needed.
His tenure got off to an auspicious start. The 2020 Browns finished over .500 for the first time in over a decade and made the playoffs for the first time in nearly two. Stefanski’s club won a playoff game for the first time in 26 years, though he was quarantined in his basement for it. I will go to my grave certain that Cleveland would have gone to the Super Bowl if not for a particularly egregious blown call in Kansas City a week later. Stefanski was a genius!
The success proved fleeting. The Browns went 8-9 in 2021 as Stefanski’s working relationship with young quarterback Baker Mayfield soured on every level. Was the famously brash Mayfield too pigheaded to take responsibility for his own performance? Or were the team brass more interested in finding a scapegoat for a disappointing season than giving their quarterback the support he needed while he managed nagging injuries? Every Browns fan has their own theory for how to mete out the blame. Here’s one thing we do know: Two years after Stefanski was hired (in large part due to a belief that he could unlock Mayfield’s full potential) the partnership between the wunderkind coach and his face-of-the-franchise mentee had irreparably frayed. Here’s another: Mayfield has led his new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, to two division titles in three years, while Stefanski got sacked before he won his first.
Luckily for Stefanski, the front office provided him with a top-notch replacement as QB1. Say what you want about Deshaun Watson off the field, but at least the Browns landed one of the best signal callers in the sport. Indeed, the player for whom Cleveland gave up three first round picks, a record-breaking contract, and the organization’s soul thrived in Stefanski’s system. Oh wait — my mistake. Watson has ranked among the worst quarterbacks in the league since entering Stefanski’s tutelage. In each of the three seasons in which Watson has taken snaps (between all the time he has missed while suspended or injured), the offense has played conservatively, aimlessly, and sloppily with him under center. That’s two separate theretofore franchise quarterbacks who flamed out on Stefanski’s watch. How many does it take to decide that the players aren’t the only problem?
Stefanski hasn’t clicked with any quarterback since that first year with Mayfield. You’d think a coach who’s considered as creative and dynamic as Stefanski is could mold a seemingly unexceptional player into a great QB1. Yet the Browns cycled through 13 different starting QBs in his six-year tenure, and none found sustainable success — including 2025 draftees Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders, who have some of the worst results of anyone who’s taken snaps in the NFL this year. A year ago one would have made an exception for Joe Flacco, who signed off his couch down the stretch in 2023 and became Stefanski’s muse for an aggressive offensive scheme en route to an unlikely playoff run. Then the Browns tried to run it back with Flacco this year and he too was terrible…until he was traded to the cross-state rival Cincinnati Bengals, and the 40-year-old veteran spent a month playing like one of the best quarterbacks in the sport as soon as he started working with a new coach.
A less-remarked-upon but nonetheless conspicuous hallmark of Stefanski’s teams has been clubhouse dysfunction. Per the most-recent NFLPA player survey, Stefanski was less popular in his own locker room than any other head coach in the league — only four coaches last year earned grades below a B for being respectful of players’ time and responsive to internal feedback, and the other three had already been fired by the time the results were published. Locker room frustrations spilled out publicly in four of the last five seasons. This year the drama started before kickoff, as the team’s preseason quarterback competition was handled so clumsily that even the winner publicly complained about not being put in a good position to succeed. Chemistry is a chicken-and-egg thing and it’s hard to conclusively compartmentalize these issues from the general frustration of losing, yet Stefanski’s failure at and/or disinterest in fostering a constructive clubhouse environment has been palpable since at least 2023.
Speaking of losing, Stefanski’s career record in regular-season and playoff games for which he was physically present stands at 45-58. He has a .391 winning percentage since he watched the miraculous playoff win against the Pittsburgh Steelers — the lone postseason victory of his tenure — from his couch. In six years he never won the AFC North, and he climbed out of the last two places in the standings only once. Recent tanking notwithstanding, remember that Stefanski achieved this while mostly overseeing rosters that were talented on paper and believed themselves to be championship contenders.
Kevin Stefanski will reportedly be sought after for other coaching vacancies around the league, but I can’t fathom why. His players didn’t like him. Every quarterback he touched turned into a pumpkin. His clubhouses were a mess, both figuratively and literally. His vaunted playcalling genius never materialized. As far as I can tell, his only distinct skill was being shameless enough to show up every week and tell reporters that actually Deshaun looked pretty good out there today. And he never won anything, even while helming rosters that had Super Bowl aspirations. A team that hires Stefanski may as well sign Zach Wilson to play quarterback — either way, you’re basing a personnel decision on how the industry talked about a guy five years ago. It’s not surprising that Stefanski got fired. The only shock is that it took this long.
It’s hard to evaluate an NFL GM from the outside. In a sport like baseball, it’s easy enough to infer who makes decisions. There may be some nuance in how day-to-day responsibilities are split between a titular GM and a higher-ranking president role, and the broad direction of the team is subject to budgetary constraints from above, but at the end of the day you generally know who calls the shots. Contrast that with football, where it’s common for the head coach to have a hand in personnel decisions, and owners often get involved in ways that their counterparts in other sports do not. The latter certainly applies to the Haslam family, who own the Browns and are not exactly known to be silent partners. For Cleveland the ambiguity was further heightened by the presence of chief strategy officer Paul DePodesta, who until November held some degree of dotted-line influence on football moves that was never clarified publicly.
So let’s start with what we do know. Andrew Berry was hired as the nominal head of football operations at the end of a dramatic tanking process. He took the reins in 2020 for what was supposed to be a nascent championship core’s first taste of success, then stood by as the team steadily stumbled backwards. Now it’s 2026, and the man who oversaw the premature collapse of the last Cleveland dynasty is being trusted to guide the next rebuild.
The Watson trade alone should have been sufficient grounds for cleaning house. Forget the moral repugnance of wanting such a despicable man to lead your team. The front office identified Watson as the missing piece who would take them to the promised land; it would be hard to bring in other significant upgrades after spending $230 million of salary cap space and three years of first-round picks on Watson. And he sucks! The guy for whom the Browns cashed in all their chips is one of the worst players in the NFL. When he’s on the field, that is: Between his legal and health issues Watson has missed 50 of Cleveland’s 69 games since he became the face of the franchise. In their zeal to consummate this Faustian bargain, Berry and his staff committed the single biggest failure of player evaluation in the history of modern sports. Other GMs get let go for far less.
And even if Watson had played well, the trade was fundamentally oxymoronic in its motivations. Cleveland finally had an incumbent quarterback who could play at a respectable level, even after a down year when he was banged-up. But heading into the 2022 they convinced themselves that Mayfield was holding the team back, and upgrading under center was essential for making the most of their nascent contention window. Fair enough. Naturally they traded for a quarterback whom everyone knew was facing a lengthy suspension that would cost him much (if not all) of the following season. By dealing their next three years of first-round draft picks, the Browns doubled down on 2022 being their best chance to win a trophy — while simultaneously punting that season by building the roster around a player who would miss it. This dissonance was apparent at the time even to a schmuck like me. Why didn’t it occur to Berry?
Many fans were (and remain) convinced that the Haslams engineered the Watson trade over the objections of the team’s football operations leaders, particularly Berry. It’s never been clear whether this rumor was substantiated beyond a cognitive-dissonance disbelief that an ostensibly smart front office would make a decision this stupid. Still, even if it were true, it’s hardly exculpatory for Berry. Why does the GM have so little trust inside the organization that the team would make a franchise-defining move without his buy-in? Shouldn’t Berry, armed with insights from the industry-class analytics department he oversees, have been able to talk the Haslams out of their mistake? Or at least convince them to cut their losses and get a new quarterback in 2024, once it was clear that Watson was unplayable and (as had allegedly been the case with Mayfield two years prior) holding back a potential contending team?
It’s reductive to judge Berry’s six-year tenure by one transaction, but the fact is the Watson trade overshadows every other decision he’s made. You can point to several savvy smaller moves he’s pulled off, and he’s forged a reputation as a shrewd drafter. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Berry owes his job security to the success of his 2025 rookie class. (Naturally, one of his selections has faced disturbing off-field allegations. He certainly has a type.) Yet there’s a limit to what you can do when so many first-round picks, so much cap space, and so important a position are all already locked up thanks to the worst trade this team (and maybe any team) has ever made.
The results speak for themselves. In over a half-decade on the job, Berry’s teams have never won the AFC North. Their only playoff win came in his first year as GM, with a roster he had mostly inherited. After two straight last-place finishes, the locker room has neither as much talent nor reason to hope for the future as on the day Berry was hired. If he is doing his job well and the Watson deal is a mere exception to the rule, why is the team in such sorry shape?
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the value of MLB front office personnel, offering a framework for understanding team employees’ impact analogous to that of evaluating players. While my focus was baseball, not football, the general principles from my MLB research should apply to the NFL (where the stratification of rosters is wider and the prospect-development timeline is shorter and therefore less subject to factors besides scoutable talent). Among my main takeaways was that owners should be quicker to cut bait with mediocre executives. Once you find yourself questioning your confidence in your GM, indecision comes at a meaningful cost:
In today’s game team owners typically give underachieving GMs a season or two to improve the team…. However, if even a moderately below-average GM can cost his team several wins a season, by the time a subpar incumbent has performed poorly enough for his job to be in jeopardy, giving him an extended last chance to prove himself is probably not worth the considerable risk of continuing to trust the team to someone who is not running it very well.
Think about where the Browns were when Andrew Berry took over. Look at them now. Do you want the same person who built this roster to oversee the next rebuild? To hire the next coach? Do you have faith in this braintrust — who went all-in on Deshaun Watson, who chose Jameis Winston (another multiple-time sexual assailant) over Joe Flacco two years ago, who crammed every warm body they could find into the quarterback room last summer and still never found a respectable starter — to identify Cleveland’s future QB1? I’m open to the possibility that Berry will be a good GM from here on out, that if you wipe the slate clean the next chapter of his tenure will be a positive one. But after six years of failure, the smart money is clearly against it.
I’ve observed before that the Browns’ decision-making process makes more sense if you assume that the Haslams care more about signaling their opposition to cancel culture than fielding a good football team. In that case you can see why they are happy to stick with Berry, a suitably respectable yet pliant figurehead who could probably rationalize signing Jeffrey Epstein if his measurables were good enough. Perhaps the Haslams will make a change if they ever decide they want to win.
The Browns are better off today than they were yesterday. In cutting ties with Stefanski, the team has finally taken a step forward. But retaining Berry means that the other leg, the one that’s been standing on clearly shaky ground for even longer, is still stubbornly rooted in place. And if one foot is moving while the other remains planted, all you can do is walk around in circles.
In that fateful Simpsons episode, Krusty’s retirement announcement accidentally turns into his sharpest comedy routine in years. He enjoys a brief career resurgence as a George Carlin-esque social critic before once again heeding the call of the lazy sellout. It’s a fitting comparison for the Browns, whose organizational stewards are not just clowns but cynical hacks. And here I am still rooting for them, so the joke is on me.
Great analysis. I wonder how much decision makers subscribe to the sunk-cost fallacy.