I’m not much in the way of a football expert, but that doesn’t preclude me from noting that the Cleveland Browns haven’t had much success recently in the way of coaches and executives (or anything else, I reckon), turning over each area multiple times in the last few years, alone.
And you know what they say: if it ain’t working, keep doing the same thing, but do it in a crazy different way. To wit:
NEWS: Paul DePodesta named Browns Chief Strategy Officer
READ: https://t.co/TDa4sotyh8 pic.twitter.com/uLOXNRIZy2
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) January 5, 2016
First order of business: change the logo used to blast out that news. My eyes, man. My eyes!
In case you’re unfamiliar with the name or why I’m writing about this on a baseball site, Paul DePodesta was, until now, the New York Mets’ VP of Player Development and Scouting. More notably, he was believed by some in New York to be the next man up if/when GM Sandy Alderson retires.
[adinserter block=”1″]And now he’s headed to Cleveland, where he’ll apparently be a top football operations man, reporting only to the owner and president. Perhaps still best known for his appearance in the ‘Moneyball’ book, DePodesta has had a number of front office gigs in the last two decades, and is a well-respected thinker about how baseball organizations should operate and optimize. In that regard, in someways, he fits any sports organization regardless of the sport.
On the other hand, given the Browns’ flailing ventures of the recent past, the move kinda has this kind of vibe:
“We gotta do something different, guys. We should try to be the ‘Moneyball’ team of the NFL!”
“Great idea! How do we do it?!”
“Well, um, we could hire the ‘Moneyball’ guy!”
“I don’t think Brad Pitt is available.”
“Oh. Well, what about that other guy?”
/scene
Does this mean that we now have to worry about the Cowboys trying to pluck away Theo Epstein or Jed Hoyer or Jason McLeod or Shiraz Rehman? I am 99% joking, but you do wonder whether we could see other professional sports teams try to tap into some of the analytically-driving institutional knowledge that has had more time to marinate in baseball than other sports.