CLEVELAND, Ohio (92.3 The Fan) – Despite former Browns head coach Hue Jackson doing a 180 and backing off claims the Browns incentivized him to tank during the 2016 and 2017 seasons, the NFL is taking the allegations seriously.
The league office has been investing the team based on claims made by Jackson in a series of tweets on a Twitter account largely accepted as being owned and run by him in early February.
SI.com first reported the investigation.
In response to the investigation, which became public Monday evening, the team maintained they are not guilty of any wrongdoing.
“Even though Hue recanted his allegations a short time after they were made, it was important to us and to the integrity of the game to have an independent review of the allegations,” a team spokesperson said in a statement provided to 92.3 The Fan. “We welcomed an investigation and we are confident the results will show, as we’ve previously stated, that these allegations are categorically false. We have fully cooperated with Mary Jo White and look forward to the findings.”
Kimberly Diemert, executive director of The Hue Jackson Foundation, also took to Twitter and claimed they have proof to back up Jackson’s claims of incentivized losing in a series of tweets while also implicating former executive vice president of football operations Sashi Brown, chief strategy officer Paul DePodesta and general manager Andrew Berry in the scheme.
Diemert claimed that Jackson pleaded his case to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and that a “gag order” has since expired allowing Jackson to speak freely.
The Browns denied Jackson’s claims and said they were “totally false.”
Jackson’s allegations came in the wake of a lawsuit filed by former Miami Dolphins head coach and current Steelers assistant Brian Flores, who alleged Dolphins ownership offered to pay him a $1000,000 bonus for each loss during the 2019 NFL season in an effort to secure the top pick in the 2020 NFL Draft.
During an interview with ESPN shortly after making his allegations on Twitter, Jackson, now the head football coach at Grambling State university, backed off significantly and acknowledged that Browns ownership, led by Jimmy Haslam, did not pay him to lose.
“What I was trying to make sure people understood is that we were paid for, you know you’re going to see it as losing, but the way the team was built there was no chance to win and to win at a high level,” Jackson said in a nearly 14-minute interview on February 2. “You’re in a situation to where what you have to do is do the best you can. My record that year was 1-15. There was a four-year plan that was crafted, and I have documentation of that, that any coach would kind of cringe at if he saw it because it talked about things that had nothing to do with winning – aggregate rankings, being the youngest team having so many draft picks – none of those things are what leads to winning.
“Teams that win don’t have a lot of draft picks. Teams that win are not just the youngest team – not that the youngest teams can’t win – so I didn’t understand the process. I didn’t understand what that plan was and I asked for clarity. I asked, ‘What is this?’ because it did not talk about winning and losing until year 3 and 4. So that told you right there that something wasn’t correct, but I still couldn’t understand it until I had the team that I had.”
Jackson has claimed since his firing on October 29, 2018 that he was hired by the Haslams under the false pretense of winning only to see executive vice president Sashi Brown, who was fired by the team on December 7, 2017, and the front office dismantle the roster to position the team to lose.
Jackson went 3-36-1 during his tenure as head coach with the Browns, including a 1-15 season in 2016 and going 0-16 in 2017, netting the Browns the No. 1 pick in the 2017 and 2018 NFL drafts.
The Browns used those selections on All-Pro defensive end Myles Garrett in 2017 and quarterback Baker Mayfield in 2018.