NEW KIND OF NFL COACH IS THE NEW BROWNS COACH

By STEVE KING

He’s young.

He’s offensive-minded.

He’s innovative.

And the players like him.

And as such, the Browns’ Freddie Kitchens fits the profile of all – or at least most – of the head coaches being hired in the NFL right now.

Kitchens, a native of Alabama and a former three-year starter at quarterback for the University of Alabama two decades ago, might be a good ol’ boy, but he and all these other new hires in the league are not products of the once-popular good ol’ boy network, where retreads kept getting jobs because general managers and owners couldn’t seem to conjure up original thoughts.

But those days are pretty much gone, and you can thank for that guys like Dayton native and Miami of Ohio graduate Sean McVay, who has had a lot of success in a very short period of time as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams.

Still, if someone had said a year ago almost to the day – Jan. 24, 2018 –when Kitchens was hired by the Browns as running backs/associate head coach, that he would be head coach of the team for the 2019 season and beyond, people would have laughed you right out of the building. For that matter, if you had said that only a little over two months ago when he was named offensive coordinator in the mid-season shake-up that cost Hue Jackson and Todd Haley their jobs, they still would have made fun of you.

But nonetheless, with his meteoric rise through the ranks, here Kitchens is with the opportunity to possibly guide the Browns to all kinds of places where they’ve not been in this expansion era. It just goes to show if that a coach can produce results when given the opportunity, like Kitchens did almost immediately in jump-starting Cleveland’s struggling offense, there are jobs waiting for them at the highest levels of the NFL.

As is the case with almost everyone, I like the hire. I really do.

And Browns General Manager John Dorsey obviously does, too, because he has staked his job on it.