CINCINNATI — Jimmy Haslam’s slow walk into the locker room Sunday, ball cap pulled snug on his forehead, was a bit more stoic and less euphoric than you’d expect from an owner whose team just won on a last-second kick.
When the Cleveland Browns beat their former quarterback Baker Mayfield and the Carolina Panthers on a similar field goal a few years ago, Haslam was elated on the sideline, drenched in sweat and fist pumping wildly as if the Browns had won the AFC, not just their season opener.
A lot has changed in the three years since. There didn’t seem much for Haslam to celebrate this time during his heavy walk through the tunnels of Paycor Stadium, the same tunnels he walked before firing Freddie Kitchens hours after the season ended here in 2019. Here we are again.
The Browns’ strange 20-18 win over the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday not only left them sixth in April’s NFL Draft, but it also muddied a separation between the team and coach Kevin Stefanski that seems to have been building for weeks. Had the Browns lost their last two games, they would have clinched the No. 1 pick in the draft, which now belongs to the Las Vegas Raiders.
The Browns were stuck on three wins and sprinting toward the No. 1 pick in the draft a couple of weeks ago. Then they beat two divisional rivals in the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Bengals to close the season and muck up what seemed to be a high draft pick and a clean break between team and coach.
Stefanski still seems likely to depart the organization as early as Monday — although stranger things have happened around here.
Haslam has acknowledged that when the Browns left the team facility following the second night of the NFL Draft last year, they had no intention of taking Shedeur Sanders. Yet there was Sanders late in the fourth quarter, managing to put the Browns in position to win on a day the defense scored two touchdowns and the offense delivered only two field goals.
Sanders’ mere presence is proof that anything can change with this team following a good night’s sleep. But let’s proceed for now as if Sunday was Stefanski’s last day with the Browns.
There’s something that has been stuck in my head for a few weeks, after it started to become clear he was likely entering his final days. It’s an anecdote one of his college roommates, Pat McManus, told me during Stefanski’s first season in Cleveland when he won 11 games and the league’s Coach of the Year award.
“We had like seven football players living in the house,” McManus said. “There’s always something going on. Kevin would sense, ‘This is a bad situation,’ and duck out. Like, ‘I’m not being a part of this.’ I don’t know if it’s a maturity thing or a sensibility thing that most 20-year-olds don’t have.”
The last two years around here have probably felt like living in a college house with sticky floors and moldy showers. There’s always something going on, whether it was the decay of the Deshaun Watson trade or the lunacy surrounding Stefanski’s relationship with Sanders.
I have no idea whether Stefanski truly wants out of Cleveland, but I know he seemed more light and loose when he met with the media on Friday than I’ve seen him in years. He looked not like a man fearing his fate, but instead a parolee about to be sprung from Rikers. He even joked about his “unique” relationship with David Njoku.
“He thinks I didn’t like him when I first got here, which was not true,” Stefanski said. “I just told him the truth.”
That’s about the most revealing Stefanski has been with the media in six years. There are obvious correlations between what he said about Njoku and how his relationship with Sanders has been portrayed this year. He’s been painted with an unfair brush amid baseless allegations that the Browns were sabotaging Sanders when the reality is nobody wants to hear the truth: He’s just not a very good NFL quarterback right now.
“Coach Kev, he’s been real tough. He’s been tough. And it’s good,” Sanders said after Sunday’s win. “I think I grew and learned a lot from him. … I feel like we grew to understand each other.”
Stefanski certainly isn’t blameless. The Browns have produced one of the league’s worst offenses each of the past two years, and he relinquished play-calling duties during both seasons.
He isn’t a fiery leader or someone who will get in the face of players, which might be what this roster needs right now. They could be losing their best leader, Joel Bitonio, to retirement, and the two highest-paid players on this roster — Watson and Myles Garrett — both said they didn’t want to be in Cleveland until Haslam’s checkbook convinced them otherwise.
It’s hard to build a winning culture that way, although at least Garrett remains the league’s most ferocious pass rusher and set the single-season sacks record on Sunday. Watson has been a sunk cost for years now and is at the root of where it all fell apart. The Browns spent the season with a double-digit number of rookies and could be in a similar situation next year. That could mean nearly half of the 53-man roster will be first- or second-year players. That sounds like a daycare more than an NFL locker room.
The offense was dismal last season, and the Browns attempted to fix it by trading down from second to fifth in the draft and spending their top two picks on defensive players. Of course, they struggled to move the ball again this year. What did you think was going to change?
They were forced to shop for quarterbacks in the scratch-and-dent aisle because Watson’s cap commitment prevented them from doing anything more. They ended up with Kenny Pickett and Joe Flacco, then traded both before Halloween. They took fliers on rookie quarterbacks Sanders and Dillon Gabriel in the middle rounds, and both flopped with little talent around them.
What comes next remains to be seen. They likely need a new head coach while rumors persist general manager Andrew Berry could be moving into a different role as well.
If the Browns move on from Stefanski, they’ll be removing a piece of stability this franchise desperately craved when he arrived here weeks before the pandemic. Six years is a lifetime in the NFL. It’s fair to wonder if he even wants to stick around after so much turmoil.
With the owner trudging through this stadium barely able to celebrate a win, with future cap sheets constrained by $135 million in dead cap hits owed to Watson, with Sanders continuing to struggle in a starting role, and with the entire offensive line needing an overhaul, I thought again about what one of Stefanski’s best friends from college told me.
He always knew when to get out.