Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam have made more changes than they had hoped they would when they purchased the team in 2012, and there are more than a few people who feel they have no idea what they’re doing. Apparently the Haslams felt that way about themselves at one point, too.
Jimmy Haslam has hired several different general managers since buying the Browns, and you could argue that none of them are alike. He went from a lifelong football scout in Ray Farmer to an analytics-driven hire in Sashi Brown, and he ended up firing Brown toward the end of the 2017 season to hire John Dorsey, a football guy by anyone’s definition. According to Seth Wickersham’s explosive new piece about the Browns for ESPN, Dee Haslam made some very surprising remarks to people inside the team’s facility after Dorsey was brought on board.
“We just don’t know what we are doing,” sources told Wickersham they heard from Dee, though she denied it through a team spokesperson. “If we’d known how hard it would be, we never would have bought the team.”
Incompetence has become a theme for the Browns over the past decade, but things are finally starting to look promising after they finished 7-8-1 with Baker Mayfield leading the way. There are always challenges for owners in the NFL who want to be hands-on, and the Haslams have certainly seen how difficult it is since they decided to move from being minority owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers to buying their own team.
With a new regime in place, the Browns are hoping to avoid more of the embarrassing flubs we have been hearing about lately. Mayfield seems like he has the potential to help them do just that.
