Then Browns owner Randy Lerner called General Manager Phil Savage as the disappointing 2008 season was ending and told him that head coach Romeo Crennel had to go.
Savage agreed.
Lerner then added, “And you have to go, too.”
Savage did not agree.
But it didn’t matter, because the owner had already made up his mind that he was going to take a big broom and sweep everybody and everything right out the door and start fresh.
Not long thereafter, Lerner was having an off-the-record meeting with media members about where the team needed to go when he was advised by a staffer that Eric Mangini had just become available after being fired as head coach of the New York Jets.
The look on Lerner’s face, as if he had just been given the answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?,” and his perked-up attitude and his directions to that staffer to, “Check into it,” put the Browns onto the fast track — a dead sprint, really — to hiring the worst head coach in their history. He makes Freddie Kitchens look like Don Shula, and Hue Jackson resemble Paul Brown, in comparison. It was hard to tell what was worse, Mangini’s lack of football acumen or his rotten, negative and disparaging attitude toward everyone in the building, including his own general manager.
The whole episode set the organization back from the Crennel era from which Lerner wanted to distance the Browns.
So, what’s the point of all this?
It’s a lesson to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam that as he contemplates what to do with beleaguered — there’s that word again — head coach Kevin Stefanski and General Manager Andrew Berry, he needs to remember that the easiest thing to do with an employee is to fire him. The hardest thing is to be able to find a replacement who you are certain is better. You can’t go backward while trying to move forward.
I think Haslam really likes Stefanski and Berry and wants to keep them, especially after the team had the best NFL Draft class in the league this year, but at the same time, this thing has got to get better and this team has to win. The NFL is a bottom-line business.
In the end, after some very deep thought and recalling back to his days as a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who make changes at the top about as often as the Browns got first downs in last Sunday’s loss to the Chicago Bears, he will give them another chance, and a warning that the clock is ticking.
Or he could fire them right now. Who knows? But whatever he does, it has to be the right decision.
Steve King
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