The Cleveland Browns Are Fine with This
The notoriously fickle franchise's strange loyalty to this leadership group
In the first 21 years after the franchise was reborn in 1999, the Cleveland Browns hired and dismissed 11 different head coaches. That’s an average of under two seasons per coach, spread over more than two decades. By the time the Browns began their most recent search in 2020 (after they fired Freddie Kitchens), it had been 15 years since they last hired a coach who ended up lasting even three full seasons.
The organizational turmoil also boiled up to the front office. The Browns churned through nine heads of football operations in those 21 years, with none lasting more than four seasons. In 11 of the 12 NFL drafts between 2009 and 2021, their war room was overseen by a general manager who’d been on the job for less than a year and a half. This Thursday will be the first time a Browns GM with over two years experience has made a first-round pick since before Jimmy Haslam bought the team in 2012.
Obviously this instability is not something to aspire to. Discerning cause from effect in how the Browns paired historic on-field incompetence with revolving-door leadership is a chicken-and-egg riddle. Did Cleveland become the laughingstock of the NFL because the team kept hiring blatantly incompetent leaders? Or was the internal turmoil from the two most-visible non-player roles in the organization collectively averaging a firing every year why they failed to win a single playoff game from 1999 until 2020? To say nothing of the human costs of such upheaval, doled out among countless hardworking lower-level staffers whose names the fans don’t know.
Regardless, the point is that this organization is not known for its institutional loyalty. (Just look at the infamous quarterback jersey.) To the contrary, they have earned a reputation as one of the most fickle organizations in all of professional sports.
Which makes it all the stranger that the Browns, after a miserable 3-14 season, are heading into 2025 — starting with this week’s NFL Draft, the premier roster-upgrade event of the league calendar — with their longstanding leadership group still intact.
The NFL Players Association’s annual player survey offers unique insight into what professional athletes think of their employers. For 2025, the Browns’ median grade across the 11 categories was a C-. They earned an A for their newly built weight room; they got an F- for their cramped locker room, and their stretched-too-thin training staff ranked last in the league for player satisfaction.
Among the categories players reviewed were their head coaches: how respectful they are of players’ time and how receptive they are to internal feedback. Just four NFL coaches earned grades below a B this year, three of whom are no longer employed. The New Orleans Saints fired Dennis Allen in the middle of the season. The Chicago Bears and Jacksonville Jaguars cut ties with Matt Eberflus and Doug Pederson, respectfully, at the end of the year. The only one still leading a team is Cleveland’s Kevin Stefanski.
That the Browns have clubhouse issues is not breaking news. Their messiness (figuratively and literally) was a major storyline of three of their last four seasons. For at least two years we’ve seen enough smoke to infer that Stefanski is disinterested in or incapable of managing the discord, and may in fact be part of the problem. It got lost in the afterglow of his Coach of the Year honors last year, but he earned similarly subpar reviews in the 2024 player poll, too. While his #29 (out of 32) ranking in using players’ time efficiently held steady from last year, Stefanski’s overall survey grade dropped from a B- to a C in 2025 because his perceived openness to feedback fell from 23rd in the NFL to 30th (third-worst).
A lack of respect for players is not necessarily a dealbreaker for an NFL coach if it comes with success on the field. (See: Belicheck, Bill.) Yet Stefanski has not distinguished himself here either. He took the reins in 2020 amidst lofty expectations for an ascendant Cleveland dynasty, and led the Browns to their only playoff win in my living memory in his first season at the helm. Since then, Stefanski’s teams have gone 29-41. He heads into his sixth season with a career winning percentage of .471 (including the playoffs) while leading rosters that had mostly fancied themselves contenders. Despite his reputation as a playcalling wunderkind, both of the ostensible franchise quarterbacks Stefanski has been handed have faltered under his watch. Yes, he deserves credit for reaching the postseason two years ago while running the offense through a signed-off-the-couch Joe Flacco. But of the 11 players who have suited up under center for Stefanski, Flacco remains the only one you could say has succeeded in his system.
Eventually, evaluating a player becomes more about the success they’ve shown in their career than the promise teams saw when they first signed them. The same ought to apply to a coach. How much longer before Stefanski’s actual record is weighed against his boy-genius reputation?
Upstream on the org chart is General Manager Andrew Berry. Like Stefanski, Berry is starting his sixth year on the job, and has overseen the Browns’ devolution from a nascent juggernaut into a new era of mediocrity. The defining decision of Berry’s tenure came in 2022, when he traded Cleveland’s next three years of first-round draft picks for Deshaun Watson, then signed him to a record-setting $230 million contract. It’s not hyperbole to call this the worst deal in the history of American sports. Watson has missed 63 percent of his team’s games since he arrived in Cleveland — a number that will presumably rise further in 2025, as an Achilles injury may cost him the entire season — and has played like a legitimately good NFL quarterback for exactly one half of a single game. There remains some ambiguity about whether it was really Berry’s decision to sell the farm for Watson and to remain committed to him as the QB1 long after his poor play became apparent. (More on that in a bit.) But Berry is the titular head of football operations, he presented himself as having led the internal research into Watson’s off-field character, and he continues to affirm that he was “on board” with the deal.
Let’s set aside the moral grotesqueness of the Browns hitching their wagon to a man whom at least 30 women have accused of sexual assault or harassment. (Except insofar as I find those who condone what he did sufficiently unsympathetic that my usual discomfort with speculating about sports executives’ job security does not apply.) Critiquing the Watson trade is not mere Monday-morning quarterbacking. There were valid reasons to question the wisdom of deal from the beginning, from running Baker Mayfield out of town a year after he came one blown call away from leading the Browns to the AFC Championship Game, to squeezing their contention window from both ends by punting the 2022 season while Watson served a lengthy suspension as well as squandering the draft capital and cap space that could have helped Cleveland augment their core as they aged. And while no one expected Watson to be this bad, a player who’d sat out the previous year clearly carried elevated performance risk.
Yet even that framing is unduly deferential. A GM’s job is to make the team better, not to be merely no wronger than the fans. The biggest transaction of Berry’s tenure (and perhaps the history of the Browns franchise) was a failure so massive that it singlehandedly overshadows the sum total of every shrewd move he has made over the last five years. Berry and his staff completely misevaluated Watson as both an athlete and a person. The simplest theory to explain the front office’s bizarre enamoredness with Watson — to the point where, when they correctly identified last offseason that Flacco would be a threat to usurp the starting quarterback job once Watson returned from injury, their solution was to replace Flacco with a worse and less-popular backup (who is also accused of multiple instances of sexual assault) — is that Berry’s decisions flow from a first principle of embracing of the most-odious man in the NFL, and that this reactionist ideology takes precedence over building a winning football roster.
The Browns have finally signaled that they are seeking a new QB1 in the wake of Watson’s latest injury. As he surveys the names on the draft board, what has Berry done to give anyone confidence that his next attempt to find Cleveland’s franchise quarterback will go better than his last one? I’m not the only one with doubts. Just ask Myles Garrett, the team’s most popular player, who has so little faith in the front office’s ability to right the ship that he publicly requested a trade from the only organization he has ever known (and required a record-breaking contract extension to rescind his skepticism).
Finally there’s Paul DePodesta, who is entering his 10th season as the Browns’ Chief Strategy Officer. He has carved out an enviable position in which he has considerable influence but minimal accountability. (Assuming he gets another contract extension, he will be in striking distance of Paul Brown’s 17 years with his eponymous franchise.) The vagueness of DePodesta’s job description has arguably become a meme, to the point where even reporters who cover the team struggle to understand what exactly he does. Yet there are two areas where his impact has been unambiguous.
The first is building out the analytics department. DePodesta is known as a pioneer in sports analytics, a field that I am obviously quite supportive of — I once looked up to him, and I was thrilled when Cleveland first hired him. In this regard he has been at least outwardly successful, as the R&D group he fostered is considered the best in the NFL. But there is a conspicuous dissonance between the reputation of the Browns’ decision-making processes and how their moves play out. Contrast Cleveland’s slapstick-esque ineptitude with the other two consensus top-analytical front offices in the NFL: the Baltimore Ravens, who have the second-best record in the league over the nine seasons since DePodesta’s hiring; and the reigning-champion Philadelphia Eagles, who have won two Super Bowls in the last eight years. To put it another way: When the Browns recommitted to Watson as their QB1 last year, did their vaunted R&D department somehow miss that he hadn’t played at an NFL-caliber level since 2020, as anyone who looked up his metrics (or just watched him play) could have told them? Or is Cleveland’s decision-making process so mercurial that having accurate models and insightful analysis was not relevant?
DePodesta’s other clear achievement is the scorched-earth rebuild he embarked upon when he first took the job. Cleveland had a 1-15 record in his first season with the club, then famously went 0-16 in 2017. Such flagrant tanking for high draft picks, combined with a more-enlightened approach to player evaluation, was pitched as an expedited plan to infuse a dynasty’s worth of young talent into the organization. Eight years later, his plan has yet to bear fruit. The Browns have an abysmal 55-95-1 record (counting their three playoff games) since DePodesta took the reins, including a staggeringly mediocre 54-64-1 record after those first two humiliating years. His near-decade tenure has featured just two winning seasons and only one better-than-bottom-two ranking in the AFC North. Compare that to the division-rival Ravens, who have finished .500 or better and in first or second place in eight of the last nine seasons; and the Pittsburgh Steelers, who haven’t had a losing record since 2003. At one point they at least appeared to be on a better track than the Cincinnati Bengals, who were stuck in last place while the Baker Mayfield-led Browns appeared ascendant. But the rebuild down I-71 has ultimately proven more successful: Cincinnati has enjoyed four winning seasons in a row (including a Super Bowl appearance) since Cleveland’s last (and only recent) playoff win.
Professional sports is a production business. The architect of a botched rebuild rarely sticks around to take a second crack at it.
If you care enough about Cleveland sports to be 2,000 words into an article about the Browns, you’re probably waiting for me to mention Jimmy Haslam. Haslam, who co-owns the franchise along with his wife Dee, is notoriously impetuous and enjoys an active role in running the team. Any critique of the Browns front office carries the caveat that the decisions they are blamed for may be coming from over their heads. For example, it has been speculated that Berry was not a fan of the Watson trade, or at least that it wouldn’t have mattered if he weren’t. I assume there are frustrated folks inside the organization who have seen how things work and would quibble with my laying so much blame at the nominal decision-makers’ feet.
But as the saying goes, you can’t fire the owner. And even if they aren’t the problems, five years into the Head Coach and GMs’ respective tenures and nine seasons into the Chief Strategy Officer’s, it’s safe to say they aren’t the solutions, either.
Building an NFL roster while working under Haslam’s thumb seems like a particularly thankless task. Still, managing up is part of any job. Berry could be the best football-operations mind in the league, but if he is making major transactions under duress, the team would be better off with a less-shrewd GM whom Haslam trusts with more autonomy. The meddlesome-owner alibi is flimsier for DePodesta, who by all accounts has Haslam’s ear, and whose self-described primary role boils down to ensuring disciplined organizational alignment in how they make decisions. It also does nothing to excuse the constant discord in Stefanski’s clubhouses. Nor, in an age when well-reputed sports executives are increasingly selective about whom they work for, does it ameliorate the gross and demonstrably disingenuous personal adulation each man has lavished upon the serial sex pest in the locker room.
The Cleveland Browns went 3-13 in 2015. It was their worst season in 15 years, an embarrassing showing even for an infamously ignominious franchise. In an impressive display of self-awareness, they recognized the need to change course and made a bold pivot, entrusting their strategic vision to an innovative trailblazer from another sport.
Now it’s 2025 and the Browns just went 3-14. The remedy this time? Running it back with the same leadership group, for the sixth season in a row: the GM who made the worst trade in sports history running the draft, the least-popular incumbent coach in the league leading the clubhouse, and the executive who engineered the last failed rebuild overseeing the vision. After decades of constant internal turmoil, it’s nice to see the Browns enjoy some organizational stability. If only that didn’t mean they were locked into such mediocrity.