"Shitmypanstki"

[nickers]

Kevin Stefanski is "vanilla" and poker-faced about EVERYTHING. He's boring and monotonic.... If there was anyone who closely resembles Ben Stein, it's Kevin Stefanski.

 

Why are the Clowns delaying the inevitable firing of this clown?

[LondonBrown]

Now that Cleveland Browns general manager Andrew Berry is headed for a sixth season on the job, Monday marked at least the 10th time we’ve heard him mention that he attacks every offseason like he’s running an expansion team that’s starting from scratch and looking to upgrade every position via any avenue.

Before we start picking apart Berry’s evaluation methods and personnel choices, let’s fairly pick apart his analogies.

Considering the Browns made the playoffs in his first season, the expansion thing never fully fit. And it never fit less than it did last year, when the Browns were all in on their returning players with the most expensive roster in NFL history and a continued bet on quarterback Deshaun Watson, for whom they’d given up the farm and a record contract in 2022.

Were Berry and the Browns still looking for help at all positions? Sure. But they were also thinking 2024 would be the big year — the one they’d spent and built toward — for Watson and the organization as a whole. They fancied themselves as real AFC contenders, really the exact opposite of an expansion team.

They went 3-14 and didn’t even pretend to try to win over the season’s last month. Watson got injured again and missed the last 10 games, and when Berry held his season-ending news conference Monday to talk about the team’s uncertain future, he started by saying he was “embarrassed” by 2024 and by revealing that Watson recently had a “setback” with his existing Achilles injury.

Details are few on the new injury or the prognosis of it, but the ending is clear. Watson isn’t playing for the Browns again — he almost certainly wasn’t anyway — and despite the guarantees and leftover $170 million or so in salary-cap commitments on his contract, there’s now a path toward an official split in early 2026.

But here and now in early 2025, the Browns are essentially an expansion team again when it comes to the game’s most important position. So we start with Berry and kind of a reboot. Berry’s getting one more chance to get it right at quarterback. The first 48 hours of the offseason have offered assurances that Cleveland is giving Berry and coach Kevin Stefanski another opportunity to fix things.

Sunday, Stefanski fired offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey and offensive line coach Andy Dickerson, making predictable and probably necessary moves that really don’t affect the big picture.
 

Berry and Stefanski signed extensions last spring, deals that were rightly celebrated for what the pair had done in taking the Browns from a longtime laughingstock to a competitive organization. But the 2024 Browns had a bad offseason, an uncompetitive training camp and a September reality check: Watson was never going to be the answer, adding Dorsey to the staff to design plays for Watson added nothing, and around Watson were a bunch of players either at or nearing 30 who were making a lot of money.

The 2024 Browns did not finish the season as the league’s most expensive roster because they had to trade Amari Cooper and Za’Darius Smith, both of whom will still exist on the 2025 salary cap via dead money.

For Berry and Stefanski, there’s presumably high internal pressure and certainly low external trust in the wake of this past season. Reigning Defensive Player of the Year Myles Garrett has publicly threatened to request a trade if the Browns can’t provide him a plan to return to contention immediately, and the only thing worse in Cleveland than being the GM who traded for Watson would be becoming the GM who traded away Garrett.

Monday, Berry was only a little more wordy than he normally is in a news conference setting. And though he still wouldn’t talk details on the structure (and multiple restructures) of Watson’s contract or how the team will approach uncomfortable conversations with Garrett, he strongly hinted that the Browns won’t shift into roster teardown mode or look to trade core players.

“I do expect there to be some turnover on the roster,” Berry said. “But the idea that we would get rid of some of our cornerstone players, I don’t necessarily see that as a viable path.”

On Garrett specifically, Berry said he views the six-time Pro Bowler as having “a direct ticket from Cleveland to Canton” and playing his entire career as a Brown. Garrett, who just completed his eighth season, said after the finale that “there will be something coming,” most likely either a trade request or a demand to be made the NFL’s highest-paid non-quarterback.

The Browns did not want to be pressured into a public staredown with their best player or be almost forced to draft a quarterback, but 3-14 has its consequences — even when the folks in the big offices keep their jobs. The Browns will hold the No. 2 pick in April’s draft, and even if they do the expected and add a veteran quarterback to become their 2025 opening-day starter, they’ll try to operate like this will be the last time for several years that they’ll be drafting early.

Do they have to draft a quarterback in the first round? Probably, but not certainly. In 2025, Berry, Stefanski and the whole operation have to show not just immediate progress, but actual fixes. It makes total sense for Stefanski to return to calling his kind of offense — play action, multiple tight ends and lots of crossers to Jerry Jeudy — but first the team must work to retain most of its veteran offensive and defensive linemen while also delivering a viable quarterback plan.

It all sounds great and fixable, but this Berry-led group in 2024 built quarterback and running back units that were among the league’s worst.

“I think as we go into the offseason, we have to look at everything,” Berry said. “We really do. We want to make sure that we’re eyes wide open in terms of what we’re doing across football operations. That being said, we have good people, we have good coaches, we understand how important the quarterback position is, and that’s obviously going to be a primary goal as we enter the offseason.”
 

Big spending should lead to big goals, and at least 3-14 erased the gradual lowering of the bar that had taken place over Watson’s first two seasons. With the Browns set to resist the kind of rebuild Garrett is not interested in joining, it’s not a stretch to think they at least have to flirt with the playoffs in 2025, or next January’s season-ending news conferences will have different main characters.

Any team can clunk its way to seven or eight wins with the right bounces. We know the Browns had been spending and building with much better than that in mind, and we know the grand all-in move for Watson became a total bust. So in 2025, they apparently plan to mostly run things back with a new quarterback, probably Garrett on a new contract and a new sense of urgency.

Can new faces, competent quarterback play within a new-ish offensive system and a last-shot mentality across both the locker room and front office help save things? Might just hitting on the right quarterback in the draft change the tenor of everything, even if patching things together in other spots doesn’t work out?

As Berry has now been forced to admit, some answers are easier than others. The Browns think they have a team worth mostly saving, and a year from now we’ll find out if that bet saves the jobs of Berry and Stefanski. They’re seemingly getting a pass for the Watson trade’s going historically wrong. And over the next few months, we’ll see whether this entire project is salvageable.

[LondonBrown]

Shared an article on Berry and Stefanski from the athletic 

[Canton Dawg]

I can’t believe that someone isn’t shit canned for the Watson debacle.

I was never a fan of this deal, and I said it would set this team back 5 years if this doesn’t pan out.

And here we are.

[AP1]

@canton-dawg said:

I can’t believe that someone isn’t shit canned for the Watson debacle.

I was never a fan of this deal, and I said it would set this team back 5 years if this doesn’t pan out.

And here we are.

I think Watson was all Haslam.

[Dutch Oven]

@canton-dawg said:

I can’t believe that someone isn’t shit canned for the Watson debacle.

I was never a fan of this deal, and I said it would set this team back 5 years if this doesn’t pan out.

And here we are.

I don’t quite understand how this move set us back five years. In the four years with Baker, we had one winning season and one trip to the playoffs. In the following three seasons we had one winning season and one trip to the playoffs. We’ll sit back and see what they do the next three or four years 

[Canton Dawg]

@ap1 said:

I think Watson was all Haslam.

As stupid as it was, you’re probably right.

[Canton Dawg]

@dutch-oven said:

I don’t quite understand how this move set us back five years. In the four years with Baker, we had one winning season and one trip to the playoffs. In the following three seasons we had one winning season and one trip to the playoffs. We’ll sit back and see what they do the next three or four years 

Well, without googling the W/L record back in those days, I think the Browns were like 1-31 prior to drafting BM.

So any improvements were welcome, which included the firing of Hue Jackson.

Any success we experienced after the DW acquisition had little to do with him. Fact is, he rarely played. We had what like 4 or 5 QB’s under center? I think that success was more of a reflection on how good the team was in general. We had Joe Flacco as our starting QB in the playoffs, but we didn’t have a kicker? ?

Unless AB can surprise us with a bridge QB out of FA, or an even bigger surprise by drafting one I think if the 2025 season better be a winning season or it will be time to clean house. And you know as well as I do, those rebuilds don’t happen quickly.

[nickers]

@canton-dawg said:

Well, without googling the W/L record back in those days, I think the Browns were like 1-31 prior to drafting BM.

So any improvements were welcome, which included the firing of Hue Jackson.

Any success we experienced after the DW acquisition had little to do with him. Fact is, he rarely played. We had what like 4 or 5 QB’s under center? I think that success was more of a reflection on how good the team was in general. We had Joe Flacco as our starting QB in the playoffs, but we didn’t have a kicker? ?

Unless AB can surprise us with a bridge QB out of FA, or an even bigger surprise by drafting one I think if the 2025 season better be a winning season or it will be time to clean house. And you know as well as I do, those rebuilds don’t happen quickly.

I would get both Flacco and Cousins (if its doable $$ wise) Let them duke it out in Camp...Draft Allar or Will Howard (not saying either one are Elite) but have the potential to be good QB's with a team that works around them..

[syd]

and this dumbass thought this needed a thread, wait my bad, I used the word thought as in thinking.

[calfoxwc]

@canton-dawg said:

I can’t believe that someone isn’t shit canned for the Watson debacle.

I was never a fan of this deal, and I said it would set this team back 5 years if this doesn’t pan out.

And here we are.

I read that the haslams stepped in and forced the asinine historically stupid trade......