The first Browns team in 1946 had just 19 employees.

That is, 19 employees other than players.

That includes the owner, Mickey McBride, the secretary/receptionist, the publicist, the business manager, the equipment manager, the traveling secretary, Entertainment Director George Bird of Massillon High School fame, the trainer and head coach Paul Brown and his assistants – all five of them in backfield coach Blanton Collier, tackles coach Bill Edwards, ends coach Dick Gallagher, who would go on to be the first director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and guards coach Fritz Heisler, whose wife is still alive and well and living in Aurora.

I say all this as a launching point into a short reaction to the great story written recently by the talented Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who has covered the Browns for 30 years but doesn’t look it. Attending the Senior Bowl practices in Mobile, Ala. last week, she wrote a piece about some NFL executives being upset with the Browns’ Harvard trio of Sashi Brown, Andrew Berry and Paul DePodesta. The execs do not like the fact that these men, who came to their jobs in a very non-traditional sense, are taking jobs that should have gone to men who did it “the right way,” worked their way up in the manner that “everybody” does.

That is, the execs are mad about the Browns not tapping into the old-boy network.

I was incensed when I read this, and you, as regular working stiffs like me, should be incensed, too.

Real incensed.

First off, the Browns tried the traditional route with the old-boy network. And you know what? It didn’t work. Not at all. Numerous times.

So they are going with a different approach. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So give credit to the Browns for shuffling the deck to see if that might work. I’m all for it.

Change is always hard to take, which I can understand.

But here’s the real rub for all of us who don’t make hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars by working in the NFL: There are enough personnel people and scouts on every team to choke an elephant. Ditto for assistant coaches, who often becomes scouts and personnel people, and vice-versa. Every team has more than 19 assistant assistant coaches alone. Somewhere Paul Brown has just gasped, then smiled, for he started it all.

So there are plenty of jobs in those areas. There have been for a while, and that number will only increase in the coming years as the game continues to grow.

When the economy got sacked at the end of the last decade, almost all of us lost our job or knew someone who did. We all took a hit. But no one in the NFL did. They all just kept on rolling.

Those guys didn’t worry about us then, and we don’t need to worry about them now. They’re still doing very well – much better than we are, thank you very much. For them to spit and moan about that is repulsive. It’s like a pig groaning that there’s not enough to eat right after he has gorged himself.

The world is constantly changing, evolving. What was in vogue yesterday may not be so today and probably won’t be so tomorrow.

If the Browns have happened upon a major change in pro football, then good for them, and good for you guys, the fans. Maybe this endless misery with all the losing, will end.

And if that leaves the old-boy network behind, then so be it. We’ll put up a display in the Smithsonian so people can remember it.