Browns head coach Hue Jackson wants to win ASAP.
Sure, he knows it will take a while to get back on track a team that has suffered through eight consecutive losing seasons. It’s obvious that the turnaround won’t happen overnight. So he’s going to grit his teeth, plant his feet on the ground and endure it, as best he can, as a necessary evil.
But no one likes to lose, and Jackson is certainly among them. As such, while he knows he must most assuredly lose for a while before he can have a chance to begin to win, he doesn’t want it to last any longer than it has to. There’s been enough losing in Cleveland since 2008, so more losing isn’t going to help anything.
He wants to speed the process along and is well aware that it can’t happen until he gets his quarterback. That’s why he stepped up to the plate and went after Robert Griffin III, eventually landing him Thursday when the Browns signed the free agent to a two-year contract. And it’s why he will step up to the plate again in about five weeks and, with the approval of Executive Vice President of Football Operation Sashi Brown, use that No. 2 overall pick to get who he views to be the best quarterback in the 2016 NFL Draft.
Quarterback is the only position on which a team should be willing to overspend if that’s what it takes. In almost all cases, you don’t overspend at right guard, left linebacker and tight end. You just don’t. The importance of those spots pale in comparison to that of quarterback, the most critical position in team sports.
The Browns have no issues with overspending, and doing whatever is necessary to try to fortify a position that has been a bottomless pit of problems for a seemingly bottomless pit of seasons.
And they are willing to do it now – not tomorrow, next year or the year after that, but now, this moment, this instance.
Good for them.
Actually, great for them.
And even greater for the fans.
To mesh a sense of urgency with common sense is what has been lacking with the Browns since way back in 1985, when, with then General Manager Ernie Accorsi leading the way, they went all out in trading the top half of two years’ worth of their picks in the regular draft to get the No. 1 overall choice in the 1985 Supplemental Draft, which they used to take Bernie Kosar. That worked out pretty well, didn’t it?
What gets lost through history is that the Browns had to outmaneuver their AFC Central rivals, the Houston Oilers, to do it.
The Browns knew it was not an option to fail to get Kosar, the guy they identified as the answer to their quarterback problems. If they didn’t get Kosar, they knew they’d have to face him twice a year, every year, when they played the Oilers.
There are no awards given out to second-place finishers.
Compare 1985, and what the Browns did Thursday, to what they did – and didn’t do – under President Mike Holmgren and GM Tom Heckert in 2012, the first time RG III was up for grabs at the top of the draft.
In a race with Washington, the Browns made a great run – or so they wanted you to believe – as they tried to work a trade with the St. Louis Rams to get their pick, and the right to select Griffin. But the Browns lost out to the Redskins and right away Holmgren moaned and groaned that the process was rigged in Washington’s favor.
If the truth be told, Holmgren wanted only the perception that he had tried his best to get RG III. He didn’t really want the Baylor product, for that would have put the Browns on the spot to get much better, much quicker. By standing in the back of the room and continuing to parade a line of incompetent quarterbacks in and out of town, Holmgren was buying time to push the Browns back toward respectability at a slow crawl. With that – with no sense of urgency and instead choosing to implement a multi-year plan as if it were 1973 and patience was still being looked upon as a virtue – Holmgren was setting himself up to keep getting paid millions and millions and millions of dollars every year for working four-hour days, every day, setting an NFL record for highest per-hour wage. He could do so because he was in charge of the team while Randy Lerner chose to be an absentee owner.
What money-grabbing Holmgren didn’t count on was what came out of nowhere, Lerner selling the team to Jimmy Haslam, thus foiling his grand scheme. The look on Holmgren’s face when he was asked about the ownership change was one of a person who, with stunned amazement, was having to come to the grips with the realization that the party was over.
If Holmgren were in charge today, the Browns would still be meandering along with this process, making sure not to go too fast – or try too hard to get that big-time quarterback, which he knew full well he had to have to have any chance of succeeding — lest the pressure be on him to win. That would have made him go to work and perhaps start putting in some eight-hour days here and there.
That was a great disservice to Browns fans, who deserved so much better, and still do.
So those fans should applaud the fact that the current regime, with Hue Jackson leading the charge, is working very hard right away to get that quarterback and try to jump-start the rebuilding process. It may not – or it may – work out. We don’t know that yet, and won’t for quite a while.
But the fact the Browns are trying – really, truly trying as hard as they can, as fast as they can – is a breath of fresh air.
And as an aside, you have to wonder if any of this has ever crossed Mike Holmgren’s mind as he counts his millions and sips out of those libation-filled glasses with the little umbrellas in them.
