Former Cleveland Browns head coach Hue Jackson has an awful lot to say about his ex-team.
In a recent interview on Michael Silver’s “Pass It Down” podcast, the 55-year-old claimed that ownership and the front office lied to him about their plans for the franchise when he was hired and let him take all the blame despite their decision to tear everything down.
“I think in real time it was an experiment,” he said. “They needed to find out the data to make better decisions… I didn’t have the power as a head coach, more so than people thought, when it came to drafting players, putting players on the team. That was so foreign to anything that people thought was happening. I was getting blamed for everything.
“…When I took the job, the offensive line was top five offensive line. I can maneuver this, maneuver that and I can bring winning to the organization. … Once that started to get dismantled on the offensive side, there was more dismantling on the defensive side and you look up and you don’t have a very good team. You don’t have enough to win. I go back to the start of it — I never knew that’s what you were going to do. I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I’m going to stand for losing. Not built that way. I’m an alpha personality. I know that. I want to win.”
What confounds Jackson the most, though, is how others in the organization at the time are still with the team despite being the ones who constructed the 1-31 Browns while all the blame falls on Jackson.
“To make matters worse, the people who were involved in 1-31 are now running that organization,” he said. “They’re the ones out in front of the organization, so how does that work? How does people who are 1-31 and part of what people are calling one of the greatest teardowns, one of the most historic losing times in Cleveland have new contracts and running the organization and feeling good? That means they must’ve did something right.
“So why is everyone mad at me? Why am I being blamed for everything that happened. You would think that’s the job they wanted down there. They weren’t trying to win. That’s what bothers me.”
Jackson also strongly believes there was a racial component to how things were handled.
“I think they saw me – I hate to say it, I think they see minority coaches as disposable,” he said. “I couldn’t see them doing this to my Caucasian colleagues. I get so disappointed when they say ‘Sean McDermott is who they really wanted.’ Sean McDermott never would have took that job because they would have had to tell him [their plan]. And I truly believe some of them knew exactly what they were going to do and when they got to me, they couldn’t tell me…because they weren’t getting the other candidates that they wanted. I truly believe that.”
Jackson was not trying to run away from all the blame, though. He admitted he had a role in the losing as well, but he does not believe it should have resulted in the end of his coaching career.
“I take my responsibility in what happened,” he said. “I have a role in it, but to say that it’s all Hue Jackson and this is what he did and have it kill my career and hurt my other coaches – that’s who I really feel bad for – they gotta wear the 1-31 and that’s not right.”
But the rest of the Browns organization never took responsibility, in Jackson’s eyes, for the failures during that stretch. He even claims that he was given a contract extension at 1-23 but the Browns never made it public because, according to Jackson, it would have meant admitting failure.
“They were supposed to publicly let everybody know and let everybody know the first two years wasn’t about me. Wasn’t what I did,” he said. “They were also going to do everything to turn around and get this thing moving forward. We hired a new GM in Jon Dorsey and he never publicly said he gave me a contract extension and he never came out and publicly said this is not on Hue Jackson. This is our experiment. This is what we did.
“Never told the players, the fans never knew, others in the organization never knew. Nobody in the outside football world never knew. Why do you give a coach at the time in 1-23 give a contract extension unless you did something?”
Jackson said he confronted the team’s vice president of communications, Peter John-Baptiste, asking when they were going to announce it?
“Oh, they’ll get to it,” Jackson said he was told. “They never were going to get to it because they would have admitted what was going on.”
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