When Hue Jackson was hired as the Browns head coach in 2016 it was widely hailed as a “huge coup” for Cleveland and team owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam. Jackson was the hot assistant coach that everyone wanted, having turned down a chance to interview for the Giants job and a guaranteed spot as Marvin Lewis’s successor in Cincinnati.
From there, the Browns proceeded to strip the roster down for a rebuild that was so extreme that Jimmy Haslam said that 2018 was Jackson’s “first season,” reflecting that this was in fact the first season in which the Browns could reasonably be expected to compete to win some games. If you were one of those people who was pleasantly surprised by the Haslams’ patience here and thought a Browns coach might finally last longer than the cabin air-filter in your car, well, here’s some bad news, as Jackson has been canned with a 2-5-1 record after the eighth game of his “first” season, or, technically his third. This makes him him the fifth consecutive Browns head-coach to fail to last three seasons, the fourth such coach fired by the Haslams since 2013, and now the fourth consecutive head coach to take over since Eric Mangini was fired in 2010 who has failed to exceed Mangini’s win total of 10. He’s also the sixth Browns head coach to be fired immediately following the second Steelers game of the season, which is another bummer of a data point for those who’d prefer not to be able to predict what their NFL owner is going to do based on how mad the sports radio guys are.
Popular opinion widely supports the move to fire Jackson, as it does almost every time the Browns fire their coach. This time, folks are saying that the Browns finally have a good GM in place with John Dorsey and finally have a quarterback in Baker Mayfield, and that it was Hue who was holding everything back. While there is little to no data to support this opinion, it seems to be something people just know, which, knowing the Cleveland Browns, will probably turn out fine.
