Stefanski and Berry get their contracts

[syd]

and did Ashley lose some weight ?

[syd]

Social media celebrates after the Browns extend Kevin Stefanski and Andrew Berry

[syd]

The Cleveland Browns Finally Extended A Head Coach: And It’s The Perfect Time For That Decision https://deadspin.com/the-cleveland-browns-finally-extended-a-head-coach/

[AP1]

KS is well on his way to being on the Mt Rushmore of Browns coaches. I know one thing that would slide him to the #2 spot immediately!

[Flugel]

12 hours ago, syd said:

and did Ashley lose some weight ?

Don't worry - I found it...

[syd]

 

[syd]

38 minutes ago, Zombo said:

Damn, Simms is looking like Skeletor.

Eat some food. Grow your hair out. Unbutton that button, you freak.

Zombo

i dunno maybe he has aid's. But he always has positive things to say about our Brownies,

[Orion]

A few thoughts about Stef & Berry:

Nobody is going to like every play call.  A play will fail at a critical time when 'we' might have made a different call.  Nobody is going to like every draft pick.  High round draft picks will turn out to be busts sometimes.  Sometimes 'we' would've picked a different player.  We have to understand that the draft is a bit of a crap-shoot.  And we have to understand that it's not just our team that makes mistakes with play calls and/or draft picks.  It's just that we concentrate on our team.

How's Pittsburgh doing on their quest to replace Big Ben?  How about New England in replacing Brady?  Remember, Tim Tebow got drafted in the 1st round.  Has there ever been a dumber draft selection than that?  We've had a GM state that he doesn't draft WR's high in the draft because they don't handle the ball enough.  I half expected that dope to draft nothing but Centers.  We had a HC call a backwards pass on 1st and goal from the Steeler one yard line IN OVERTIME...and we LOST the game!  We've had a BillHilly as HC.  Our GM's & HC's have been laughing stocks of the football world.

We now have a two-time coach of the year as HC.  This man guided the team to an 11-5 record and a playoff appearance while having to use some of the worst QB's I've ever seen have to start and play full games.  And we've had A LOT of bad QB's over the years!  We've got Pro Bowl players on both sides of the ball.  Where did they come from?

Keeping those two guys under contract and running the two branches of the football team is paramount to the hopeful continued success of the organization.  I'm quite proud to have two very intelligent, articulate and respectable gentlemen running the team and the player acquisition branches of the organization.  I'm PROUD, whereas I used to be ashamed.  Go Browns!

[syd]

 

[ballpeen]

Maybe I missed it.  Any word on length of the extension?  I don't care about the money.  It isn't a part of the salary cap so Jimmy can be paying them $20mil a year for all I care.

[Orion]

15 minutes ago, ballpeen said:

Any word on length of the extension?

Not that I can find.

[Orion]

AND ANOTHER THING:  

People talk about the need for stability, consistency.  Well, ya can't do that just for the sake of stability.  You have to have the right people.  People that are GOOD at being a HC & GM.  We finally have a couple of humans that are doing a pretty good job. (not a PERFECT job, because they're humans)  So NOW is the time to extend those guys and FINALLY get some stability for our organization.  The revolving door of HC's & GM's can finally be nailed shut for a while.  

[syd]

Jimmy and Dee Haslam were right in 2020. Take a good look at where the Cleveland Browns were going into that offseason. It’d been 12 years since the last time they had finished .500 or better, 17 years since their last playoff appearance and 25 years since their last playoff win. They were hiring their fifth head coach and fifth general manager in eight offseasons. During that span, they had 0–16, 1–15, 3–13 and 4–12 records, and a raft of high first-round picks washed out.

There was plenty of reason to doubt the Haslams, who were installed as owners midway through the 2012 season, going into the first offseason of that stretch.

I did, and it turns out I was wrong.

In January 2020, I thought the right thing for Cleveland would be to bring home a couple of locally bred New England Patriots guys—Josh McDaniels and Dave Ziegler—to change the face of the organization. I thought, at the time, that the direction the Haslams chose was really just more of the same, since they were, essentially, doubling down on Paul DePodesta, the baseball executive that they’d hired in ’16.

To that point, DePodesta had been seen as a lightning rod in the organization, and emblematic of the four-year squabble between the traditional football and the analytics people in the organization. He was also one reason why the Haslams shied away from McDaniels. who’d advocated for restructuring in a way that minimized DePodesta.

At the time, it at least looked like going the other way, and hiring Andrew Berry from the Philadelphia Eagles as GM and Kevin Stefanski from the Minnesota Vikings as coach, was pushed by DePodesta as a measure of self-preservation. After all, Stefanski’s candidacy was, at least in part, a result of how he’d interviewed the previous January, impressing DePodesta and, among others, Berry, who was in Cleveland from 2016 to ’18 but would leave for Philly four months later. Berry liked Stefanski so much, in fact, that the two resolved to stay in touch, with an eye on working together in the future.

That the Haslams hired them in tandem the following January, to me at least, felt like more of the same for a lost

 

franchise. It was nothing against Berry or Stefanski—I liked both. It was just that, at least on the surface, this was a team that needed a detonation, not a double-down.

Good for the Haslams ignoring the outside noise.

Turns out, they were right about Berry, whom he’d had in his building for three seasons and had become one of the best GMs in football and is still just 37. And Berry was right about Stefanski, who’d done enough to get two interviews in Cleveland in 2019, a year before he’d land the job, despite not even having had a full year of coordinator experience at that point.

They haven’t gotten everything right, but they’ve stabilized the league’s unstable franchise, and the future is bright in Cleveland. They’ve made the playoffs twice already. Last year, they got there by winning games with four different quarterbacks, their fourth and fifth tackles starting, and a ton of injuries on defense (particularly in the secondary), as well.

So, now, they’ve been rewarded with extensions—Stefanski is actually the first head coach to land one in Cleveland since Bill Belichick in the early ’90s. And rightfully so.

Albert Breer 

[Orion]

1 hour ago, syd said:

Stefanski’s candidacy was, at least in part, a result of how he’d interviewed the previous January, impressing DePodesta and, among others, Berry, who was in Cleveland from 2016 to ’18 but would leave for Philly four months later. Berry liked Stefanski so much, in fact, that the two resolved to stay in touch, with an eye on working together in the future.

...and so Berry said, 'Look, I'm going to Philly, but I'll meet ya back here next year and we'll take over the team then, because Browns fans have to endure 1 more year of bad coaching.'

[Flugel]

9 hours ago, Orion said:

...and so Berry said, 'Look, I'm going to Philly, but I'll meet ya back here next year and we'll take over the team then, because Browns fans have to endure 1 more year of bad coaching.'

That's what I call planning ahead; so is an 11 win season in 2020 and another one in 2023.  We've done a lot worse than this tandem for quite some time.