The Browns were the targets of a Terminal Tower-sized amount of ridicule when they brought in all these smart, nerdy Harvard guys with calculators and non-football-like thinking to run their front office.

 

Were the Browns forward-thinking?

 

Or just exhausted and exasperated and out of options?

 

Or a little of both?

 

We’ll take the last one.

 

Anyway, make no mistake about it, the Browns tried the traditional football route to find people to run the team when it was re-born in 1999 to start the expansion era.

 

They hired Carmen Policy, but he was too interested in spending billionaire owner Al Lerner’s money as fast as he could on frivolous things. They hired – or, should, I say, Policy hired — Dwight Clark, his buddy from their days with the San Francisco 49ers. But Clark, whose great hands enabled the 49ers to get to their first Super Bowl (which they won to start a dynasty for a team that had been pretty much terrible since it entered the NFL with the Browns in 1950 after the break-up of the All-America Football Conference), fumbled everything he touched as the director of football operations.

 

They hired Butch Davis, whose record didn’t match his ego.

 

They hired Phil Savage, who did a lot of good things and would have been with the Browns longer had he not told a fan on social media to go root for the Buffalo Bills, and threw in an expletive deletive for effect to boot.

 

They hired Eric Mangini, who was mean, maniacal and misguided.

 

They hired Mike Holmgren, who was lazy, uncommitted and living in the past as a legend in his own mind. Holmgren, in turn, hired Tom Heckert, a nice guy who made poor choices, in and out of football.

 

They hired Joe Banner, who thought – mistakenly so – that was he was responsible for the Philadelphia Eagles in the Andy Reid era. Like Mangini, he was mean and craved power. Banner, in turn, hired Mike Lombardi, who was not a dependable person – or a dependable talent evaluator, either.

 

And at the very end of their long, unsuccessful stretch on the field and in acquiring people to run the team, they hired Ray Farmer. Add together all the non-desirable qualities of the men who preceded him in the expansion era, and you have Farmer, who will forever be remembered for continuously wiping sweat off his bald head with a towel under the bright, hot lights at a press conference, as if he were a criminal suspect being pinned down by police in an interrogating room. To be sure, Farmer did indeed perpetrate a crime when he administered the dagger that, added to all the others that had been administered, finally killed the Browns’ attempts to do things the traditional football way.

 

So, in understanding all this, then, and not being afraid to think in a non-traditional way, Jimmy Haslam, the Browns’ third owner in their expansion life, decided to swerve way off the beaten path in going with these Ivy League guys.

 

And, judging by the way this trade for Brock Osweiler and a second-round pick in the 2018 NFL Draft for, in essence, $16 million, is getting such positive reviews for the way it allowed the Browns to “buy” a draft choice, which the NFL says in no uncertain terms is prohibited, maybe – just maybe, not for sure, but simply just maybe – they have finally gotten it right.

 

Thus, after being so far behind the curve in the expansion era that they were fading from view, the Browns may have not just caught up to the curve. Rather, they could be ahead of it.

 

So no more ridicule. In the very least, the Browns have now caused their doubters to scratch their heads and begin to wonder.