Cleveland Browns: Often in spite of itself, Sashi Brown's plan worked

For all of the misses and the massive trade that didn’t bear as much fruit as anyone would have hoped, Sashi Brown’s plan for the Cleveland Browns has worked even if he’s not here to enjoy it.

Despite notable failures, help from the current front office and benefiting substantially from overwhelming incompetence from the coaching staff and pure luck, Sashi Brown’s plan for the Cleveland Browns has worked and helped create a massive window of opportunity.

The roads not taken at the quarterback position may well have gotten him fired, but it also helped build an up and coming roster which has not only set the team up in outstanding financial shape and helped ensure that Baker Mayfield would be successful.

When Sashi Brown was hired, he hatched a plan to tear down the roster, sell off everything that wasn’t nailed down for draft picks resetting the cap and taking a team that was already consistently in last in the AFC North and bottomed it out. The negotiation of Mitchell Schwartz was completely botched, but the tear down for draft assets proved effective.

The other criticism launched at Brown was his trade down from the second pick in the draft passing on the option to select Carson Wentz for what would be a series of moves down and acquiring assets for years (it’s still going with a couple seventh-round picks) in the hope that it would help establish the spine of the organization for the future. A trade that went from good to great to pretty decent to downright terrible is now up to pretty bad with a giant “but”.

The Browns passed on the opportunity to pick Joey Bosa, Jalen Ramsey or DeForest Buckner. In a perfect world, the Browns still move down to eighth pick, somehow move back up to get Buckner and they go from there, but it was not to be.

Michael Thomas or Taylor Decker would’ve been fantastic at 15th pick as well. Corey Coleman was ultimately the selection and that simply didn’t work. Despite obvious talent and physical gifts, he has been unable to get out of his own way in terms of work ethic and professionalism.

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Beyond Coleman, the Browns also got players such as DeShone Kizer, Shon Coleman, Cody Kessler, Derrick Kindred, Spencer Drango, Ricardo Louis, Jordan Payton, Chad Thomas, Jabrill Peppers and Denzel Ward. Five of the players are gone and Chad Thomas might as well be with what he’s shown so far while Ricardo Louis out for the year with a neck injury. That’s awful for a potential franchise quarterback.

But, and there is a but, the series of trades as well as an outstanding trade from John Dorsey have effectively given the Browns their secondary. It was absolutely reasonable to expect Sashi Brown to have picked a quarterback with the first pick of the 2018 NFL Draft. The idea that he wouldn’t have is nonsense. They specifically had assets piled up to accomplish that goal and built up the roster to ease in a would be franchise quarterback.

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Whether he would’ve picked Baker Mayfield is up for debate, but he’d have picked a quarterback. However, it’s incredibly unlikely that Sashi would’ve traded Kizer for Damarious Randall. Obviously John Dorsey has a few former executives of the Green Bay Packers who knew Randall and might have helped ensure looking his way. Dorsey got it done and thus far, Randall has been outstanding, locking down the free safety position.

So with Randall at free safety and Ward at one corner spot, as well as Jabrill Peppers and Derrick Kindred manning the strong safety position and occasionally on the field together, the Carson Wentz trade’s legacy is forever changed if Mayfield proves to be the franchise quarterback. Rather than focusing on not getting Wentz, the focus will be on that trade building up a substantial portion of the current secondary, which is playing at a high level.

This is what many could not see while it was happening. So long as the Browns ended up with their own franchise quarterback, it didn’t matter if the Eagles did. The pressure was on the organization to deliver that franchise quarterback, but they might just have it. Now, with that part of the equation potentially in the fold, it’s easier to appreciate what those trades were able to provide.

The other thing Sashi could not account for was spectacular incompetence on the part of Hue Jackson and his coaching staff. The Browns were not expecting to go 0-16 in their second year. If they were, Sashi wouldn’t have been fired. Clearly, there were expectations not met and an internal power struggle that appeared to have come to a head over the Sashi allegedly scuttling a trade for A.J. McCarron for a second- and third-round pick.

Hue Jackson has been nothing short of a football disaster and arguably the worst head coach in NFL history, which is terrible from the standings point of view, but was very good for the Browns building their roster through the draft. Hue delivered both Myles Garrett and Baker Mayfield along with putting them at the top of every round for two drafts, so they could get the best talent possible. Between Sashi and Dorsey, they did.

CLEVELAND, OH – AUGUST 23: Starting quarterback Nick Foles #9 of the Philadelphia Eagles trips and falls to the ground for a safety while under pressure from Myles Garrett #95 of the Cleveland Browns and protection from Stefen Wisniewski #61 during the first half of a preseason game at FirstEnergy Stadium on August 23, 2018 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images) /

The Browns did not expect to be 0-16. Teams planning on 0-16 don’t try to make desperation trades for McCarron or start Josh Gordon fresh out of rehab as soon as humanly possible, trying to throw to him at every possible opportunity.

The front office was prepared in the event that they needed to trade up for their quarterback of choice in the 2018 draft, much like the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills did. But because of the remarkable ineffectiveness of the coaching staff and a litany of injuries, they no longer had to and got to benefit from having every single one of those picks.

Last but certainly not least, a pair of very good trades, regardless of the outcome, ran into incredible luck. When Sashi traded down from Deshaun Watson and Malik Hooker, the Browns got an extra first-round pick. He took on the horrible contract of Brock Osweiler to move up from the fourth round to the second round, which became Nick Chubb.

Then it happened. As part of their parade of injuries that decimated the Texans over the course of the season, Watson went down with a knee injury. A team that looked like it might have been around .500 suddenly fell off of a cliff and the Browns ended up with the fourth pick in the first round and the 35th pick in the second round. Those picks became Ward and Chubb, courtesy of Dorsey.

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Sashi deferred on quarterback for two years. It wasn’t necessarily the plan but simply how it worked out. The team really liked Jared Goff, who went ahead of their pick in 2016. They really liked both Mitchell Trubisky and Patrick Mahomes. The Browns might have dodged a bullet on Trubisky while Mahomes is outstanding, but it’s reasonable to wonder if Hue might have been a poor influence on him, given the mess that he created with Kizer last year.

So while Sashi was deferring on the quarterback position, he put together the spine of what is becoming one of the better defenses in the league. Myles Garrett, Larry Ogunjobi, Joe Schobert, Emmanuel Ogbah, Derrick Kindred, Jabrill Peppers, Briean Boddy-Calhoun, James Burgess and trading for Jamie Collins.

He didn’t do nearly as much on the offensive side of the ball. Drafting David Njoku, Seth DeValve and Rashard Higgins, signing J.C. Tretter and Kevin Zeitler (Zeitler was likely far more Hue’s influence) and grabbing Dan Vitale on the waiver wire, a lot of work was left to be done on offense and it’s still a work in progress along the offensive line and in terms of receiving weapons.

The team was set up to address some of those issues and Dorsey appears to have tried adding Austin Corbett, Nick Chubb and Antonio Callaway through the draft and acquiring Chris Hubbard, Carlos Hyde and Jarvis Landry in free agency or trades. Perhaps, he even found a gem in Desmond Harrison as an undrafted free agent at offensive tackle.

Sashi was prudent in waiting on the quarterback position, but this again is a little bit of luck that they have now ended up with Mayfield. And by virtue of picking Mayfield, the Browns have found themselves in a huge financial advantage and a massive window of opportunity.

Because Mayfield was picked this year as opposed to Wentz or Mahomes, they have extra years of financial control. Wentz would be in his third year here and Mahomes his second, which means that instead of talking about contract extension in 2021 or 2022, the Browns are in great shape at the quarterback position until 2023.

When the Philadelphia Eagles took Wentz, they were in the position that the Browns are now for the most part. They took full advantage of his financial window and won the Super Bowl. Likewise, the Seattle Seahawks stumbled into Russell Wilson and took advantage of his window, winning a Super Bowl. The Baltimore Ravens got a Super Bowl before handing Joe Flacco an organization-crippling contract.

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After this year, the Browns will have four more seasons of cost controlled quarterback play to take advantage of before having to pay out a massive contract. And if Mayfield is great, no one will argue with giving him a contract, just like they’ll be happy to pay Myles Garrett. That doesn’t change the fact the team finds themselves in this position to make a huge run in the next four seasons.

The money not going to the quarterback position or Garrett can enable the Browns to potentially sign a couple of contributors to the roster that can help them get over the proverbial hump, make a big push in the playoffs and potentially a Super Bowl.

The current Los Angeles Rams have gone all in on this with Jared Goff’s contract. They made the playoffs last year and then took to trading for or signing all the talent that wasn’t nailed down in the league. Aaron Donald’s extension, Ndakumong Suh, Marcus Peters, Aqib Talib, Brandin Cooks were all added this past offseason. Allegedly, they even made a play for Khalil Mack when he was on the trade block with the Oakland Raiders.

The Browns may not be the Rams, don’t play in Los Angeles, and frankly don’t need either. They don’t need to follow the exact same process and they may simply not be the destination to do that. It just makes it very clear that the time is now in this “era of unbridled enthusiasm”.

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Sashi Brown made a ton of mistakes and benefited from a number of things out of control including getting help from John Dorsey, but the bottom line is with the smoke clear and actually looking at what the Cleveland Browns now have, the plan worked. Discussing being competitive, making a potential Super Bowl run is no longer an outlandish thought. There is more work to do and need to keep adding to what’s already in place, but it’s all in play for in Cleveland for the next four years.

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Cleveland Browns: Often in spite of itself, Sashi Brown’s plan worked

By Peter Smith | Oct 4, 2018

For all of the misses and the massive trade that didn’t bear as much fruit as anyone would have hoped, Sashi Brown’s plan for the Cleveland Browns has worked even if he’s not here to enjoy it.

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