People targeting Head Coach Kevin Stefanski for the Browns’ struggles don’t understand a thing about organizations. They don’t understand what makes a winning culture. They don’t understand the history of how the Browns have suffered under the reign of an egomaniacal owner who can’t help but meddle in business he has no experience in.
The fingers are pointing after an abysmal 3-14 season in which the Browns were, yet again, the laughingstock of professional football. But the team is running it back with Stefanski and GM Andrew Berry in 2025, which any person paying attention could deduce to mean that Jimmy Haslam was the primary agent in the trade for Deshaun Watson. If Berry was the genius who pushed for the trade, he would be fired at this point.
But let’s remember when the Watson reach-around began in 2021. Berry stated after the move that the team’s brass embarked on a “5-month odyssey” to bring Watson to Cleveland, enduring to sort through piles of legal jargon, allegations of sexual assault and NFL code of conduct. Tracing the trade and signing to the time when Haslam and Company decided to kick the tires on Watson puts us in late October or early November 2021.
The Browns, coming off a season in which they took the Chiefs to the final drive of the divisional playoff round, were 4-4 by Halloween. On November 7, a week after the Browns let Odell Beckham Jr. go due to boiling conflict with the team, the Browns went into Cincinnati and destroyed the Bengals 41-16. Baker Mayfield, who at this point had already torn his labrum and was playing with half an upper body, threw for 216 yards and two touchdowns with no interceptions.
So the question is: what compelled the Browns to embark on this odyssey for a quarterback who was exiled for the 2021 season due to a litany of troubling allegations, all while their own team was at or above .500 following a playoff season? This respectably competitive half of the 2021 season also transpired while Mayfield was ailing from injury and Beckham’s antics distracted from the mission of winning games. The answer, most likely, is that Jimmy Haslam can’t help himself from yanking the controls whenever he gets another “brilliant” idea. The problem with this is that it creates an environment where nobody can trust one another, because the owner in the glass tower may be one day away from another major knee-jerk decision.
There’s a very telling press conference held on August 18, 2022, featuring Jimmy and Dee Haslam, standing on either side of a shell-shocked Andrew Berry. The press conference perfectly explains the dynamic of the Browns organization, and why it can never get out of its own way.
Observe the way Jimmy Haslam, in particular, behaves during this presser. Notice the bad body language, the cringe-worthy faces, and the overall poor etiquette in front of reporters. He shuffles from side to side, he interrupts reporters before they even finish asking questions, and looks generally perturbed to even be there and answer legitimate questions from journalists. At 10:45, when asked about fan backlash in response to the Watson trade, Haslam says with brash arrogance: “You know, we have unbelievable fans, okay? Do you come out here to practice every day? I mean, the fan support is outstanding, our ticket sales are great, our corporate support is outstanding.”
Haslam is admitting what he has thought for years: the fans will keep showing up at the stadium to pay for overpriced, watered-down beer no matter what they do. No matter how many times they’re slapped across the face and given slop on the gridiron, they will keep buying tickets and jerseys. Sadly, he may be right. But you have a solid indication of why the owner does what he does, and it has nothing to do with what’s best for the football team. That’s his parting line, but it primarily has to do with fueling his own ego.
All billionaire NFL owners have egos. This is not the problem. The problem is making the same mistake over and over again and not realizing that you may be the cause of so much misery. It’s the Tony Soprano conundrum: he can never accept the fact that HE is the cause of things going wrong around him and therefore he never changes. Seth Wickersham of ESPN did an incredible job of chronicling the dysfunction of the Browns since Haslam’s reign of terror began in 2013. Time and time again, the organization has fallen into a cultural rot spurred by Haslam making decisions on a whim, talking out of both sides of his mouth to different Browns officials and coaches, and trying to change paths in the middle of the ride. The Watson reach-around was no different. Unless it’s proven in writing, there is no reason to believe trading three first-round picks for an alleged serial predator was an idea spawned by Paul DePodesta, Andrew Berry, and Kevin Stefanski. No way. That reach-around has Haslam and his crooked family written all over it. And it proves that they still cannot see, or accept, that their egos are the primary cause of the rotten play on the field.
It has NOTHING to do with what plays are called on 3rd down. It has very little to do with what players Berry selects in the draft. Idiot fans who don’t understand point out Bucky Irving or Puka Nacua on the Buccaneers and Rams, as if Berry just missed diamonds in the rough. They don’t understand that neither Irving nor Nacua would work on the Browns, because the culture is always under tremendous confusion and tension from above.
After Stefanski was hired in early 2020, the Browns talked a lot about leadership. They talked about how Stefanski was hired because of his leadership qualities; his communication skills, his sense of calm and command, his experience rising up the ranks of one organization for 14 years. DePodesta has a solid grasp of this concept. This has been shown in the success the Browns have had under Stefanski, most notably in 2020 and 2023, while remaining somewhat competitive in 2021 and 2022. Sadly, the franchise is stuck in neutral, going one step forward and two steps back, because of Hee Haw and his crooked son-in-law, J.W. Johnson. The owner and the used car salesman are so out of touch that they cannot grasp how embarking on a QB search in the middle of a competitive season would reverberate throughout the building in 2021 and cause the rest of the locker room to lose their purpose.
The 2021 season, while still miles better than 3-14 by the way, stalled because the mission had changed in the middle of the ride, and Stefanski and Company became confused and suspicious of what the plan really was. This is no different than the Hue Jackson era, where the front office was saddled with a head coach they vehemently warned ownership about hiring. Once you make moves outside of the structure, the rest is history. Just watch the chaos unfold. The same thing happened with the Browns after the Watson move. I predicted this after the trade happened in 2022 and hardly anybody listened. They went on to justify the trade, reasoning that it was okay because “it makes the Browns Super Bowl contenders.” These are the same morons claiming the Watson trade was “the worst trade in NFL history.”
So maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. Maybe it’s not Kevin Stefanski, Andrew Berry, or even Jimmy Haslam. Maybe it’s the fans who have no backbone and will keep wasting time debating 3rd round draft picks or who calls a play to even notice the real problem here. The reality is nobody is safe from the Haslam Crime Syndicate.
Stefanski probably has the best possible demeanor to withstand the crime syndicate’s reign of terror, and even he’s slowly crumbling under its weight. In 2024, he looked and talked like a dead man walking. His beard has gone nearly full grey, his subtle and wry sense of humor is nearly gone, and his reserved-but-direct tone of voice has been zapped.
Stefanski may be able to recover from this, but the only solution lies with Jimmy Haslam. Will he recognize his faults and step out of the way just to sign checks? Or will he continue to keep a stranglehold over the organization and randomly intervene whenever he feels like it?
The post People Blaming Stefanski Don’t Understand Anything: Browns Are A Perennial Joke Because Of Jimmy Haslam appeared first on .