DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Pure Football Forum Paul DePodesta joining Browns as Chief Strategy Officer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/spor...a-football-guy/

Paul DePodesta: ‘He was always a football guy’

By Dave Sheinin January 5 at 3:34 PM

Before he was a renowned baseball executive, before he served as Billy Beane’s top lieutenant with the Oakland A’s in the late 1990s, before he took the 2004 Los Angeles Dodgers to their first playoff appearance in eight years, before Jonah Hill portrayed him in the film version of “Moneyball,” before he made it to the World Series last fall as the vice president of the New York Mets – before all that, Paul DePodesta was a football man.

In the summer of 1995, fresh out of Harvard, where he had played both football and baseball, DePodesta took a job as an unpaid intern with the long-since-gone Baltimore Stallions of the Canadian Football League – where his duties included tossing T-shirts into the stands during timeouts. By the following spring, he was gone, hired away by the Cleveland Indians for an entry-level front office job.

The stunning news Tuesday that DePodesta, 43, had jumped from the Mets to the Cleveland Browns, and from Major League Baseball to the National Football League, was widely cast as an out-of-nowhere, bizarro-world move on the part of one of the worst franchises in American professional sports.

[Browns lure DePodesta away from Mets, baseball]

And perhaps it was that from the Browns perspective. Although when you have gone 14 years since your last playoff appearance, and cycled through seven coaches and six general managers in the interim, you may be inclined to try just about anything – including hiring a guy whose pro football experience topped out as an unpaid intern 21 years ago, to be your chief strategy officer, reporting directly to owner Jimmy Haslam.

“We are fortunate to bring in Paul, an extremely talented, highly respected sports executive who will add a critical dimension to our front office,” Haslam said in a statement. “His approach and ambition to find the best pathways for organizational success transcend one specific sport.”


But for DePodesta, a native of Alexandria, Va., and a product of Episcopal High, the move is a return to his roots. He had played football since the fifth grade, and he kept playing at Harvard – where he was smart enough to know, as he once recalled, “the sideline was my friend” — even after a shoulder injury forced him to quit baseball.

“As far as I’m concerned, he always was a football guy,” said Harvard football coach Tim Muprhy, for whom DePodesta was a senior back-up wide receiver in 1994. “It just took him 20-plus years to figure it out.”

Actually, DePodesta had it all figured out from the start. As a young Harvard grad in 1995, with a degree in economics, his first career aspiration was to become the next Bill Walsh.

[Ranking the best-available coaching jobs in the NFL … Browns are last]

“What I really wanted to be at the time was a football coach,” DePodesta told author Steve Kettmann in the book “Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets” – about one of DePodesta’s baseball mentors. “I loved the strategy of it and I loved the physical competition that went along with it. I was trying to get that experience in the CFL. My hope was the get a graduate assistant job somewhere in football, get a graduate degree and start coaching somewhere.”

His gig with the CFL’s Stallions didn’t quite fit the bill. He was there long enough to leave an impression, but not long enough to make a career of it.

“I don’t quite want to say he was destined for greatness, but you just knew, whatever team or whatever sport he wound up in, he was going to be a senior executive somewhere,” said Aric Holsinger, who was CFO of the Stallions and remains friends with DePodesta. “He could go wherever he wanted to go and do whatever he wanted to do. It was just a matter of which door was going to open first.”

It was with the Stallions that DePodesta discovered, by accident, his inspiration for the next two decades of his professional career. In an office, he found a stash of MLB media guides, and flipping through the one for the A’s, he happened upon Alderson’s bio.


“He was a Dartmouth grad, a Harvard grad, a marine,” DePodesta said in the Kettmann book. “I remember being so struck by that and thinking, ‘This is my kind of guy!’ … At the time it definitely served as inspiration to me that a career path like that would actually be possible.”

[Manziel reportedly wears wig, fake mustache in Vegas]

From his start with the Indians in 1996, driving minor-league players around in a van during spring training, DePodesta embarked on a rapid rise through the sport – at a time when the statistical revolution that would eventually overtake baseball was still in its infancy. By 1998, at the age of 25, he was hired by the A’s to be Beane’s assistant GM – remaining in Oakland long enough to play a significant role in the Michael Lewis bestseller “Moneyball.” Six years later, the Dodgers named him their GM, making him, at age 31, the third-youngest in MLB history.

Twenty years after leaving football for baseball, DePodesta has gone back home, in a sense. The move is not without its risks. He was widely believed to be Alderson’s eventual successor with the Mets, and he walked away from that to direct a franchise known as one of the most dysfunctional in professional sports.

The list of executives who have directed front offices in multiple sports is frighteningly thin. Others have run the business sides of franchises across multiple sports, as Stan Kasten once did as president of the Hawks, Braves and Thrashers in Atlanta. But to go from being a top personnel man in one major sport to a top personnel man in another may be essentially unprecedented.

In Cleveland, he will have the Johnny Manziel mess to undo, and the No. 2 overall pick in the draft to look forward to. He will serve under an unpredictable and unpopular owner, and will face the wrath – if he fails – of an embittered fan base left jaded and angry by so many years of losing.

In a sense, then, switching from the emerald diamond of baseball to the shredded gridiron of football, with all their incompatible nuances, may be the least of DePodesta’s worries.

Charley Casserly

Casserly began his career as an assistant track coach at Cathedral High School in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1969–72 before moving to a similar post at his alma mater, Springfield (MA) College from 1973–74. He returned to Cathedral High School to serve as the school's athletic director for two years before becoming head football coach at Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, from 1975–76.

Casserly started with the Redskins in 1977 as an unpaid intern under Hall of Fame coach, George Allen.

Jim Schwartz

Jim started as an unpaid intern on Bill Belechick's staff. His frequent assignments included picking people up at the airport.

Eric Mangini started his career in Cleveland as a Ball Boy.

Bill B had a slew of these guys that were nicknamed "slappies" Ozzie Newsome used to be one of his slappies.

Let me ask you what job did you have in your 20's? Do you give yourself any credit to working up to where you are right now?

There are three arguments that don't hold water.

1) We hired a Baseball guy. The baseball guys called this guy a stats guy. He wasn't called a baseball guy till he was hired by a football team.

2) He doesn't have any football experience despite having played for a team because he was 5' 9". There is no height or weight requirement for coaching or the front office or Romeo would have needed a truckload of Slimfast. This is a guy that was smart enough to go to Harvard and exposed to route running and blocking schemes. All he needs to know are the concepts and I wouldn't think a Harvard guy would take very long to absorb them. Last time I checked there are plenty of 5' 9" WR's in the NFL right now. We even have a few with about the same build as he had on our football team, so you might be grasping at a few straws for your argument.

3) Football is a team sport and the stats are too complicated for analytics. This argument can only be made by someone that doesn't understand analytics. The whole point is to find out where the stats lie to us and take advantage of that fact to the expense of the other teams that don't take the time to figure that out. If anything it should work better in football than in baseball.

If you really really want to argue it's merit, a good argument would be "I don't like the idea because I don't understand it".

That is a fair and reasonable argument to make.

I myself know that analytics will definitely work. What I am worried about is that we don't put the right people or the right structure in place. The structure thing worries me much less now that we have the guy that basically invented the process in sports. I also worry if the fans will give it enough time as this isn't a one year project.

You really make my point.

What did you do in your 20s? How does it impact what you do later in life? Does it impact what you do later in life?

DePodesta was in football when he was in college. He has been out of football for the past 20 years. The game has changed a great deal since then.

If you read what I have said, I have said that all teams use analytics to a point. However, you can overdo anything, and I fear that is where we are going.

I also still believe that analytics lends itself more to a sport like Baseball, where you can use a lot of one on one statistical evaluation to try to determine outcomes. Player A hits lefty handers who pitch him middle to in, and middle to low, to throw a righty who breaks the ball away from him for best results. In football, you can use such analysis, but it is mainly in determining trends and tendencies. You can use tendencies to help gameplan, but you also have to use your own innate opinion of your players their strengths, and how you feel they match up against the other team's players. Analytics have a place in the game, but they cannot be the top level tool used for evaluation and decisions on players and strategies.

For example, Banner brought up that teams who lead at the half win 74% of all games. (or a stat similar to that) So, should a team with a weak passing game come out throwing for most of the 1st half, go for it on most 4th downs, and go for 2 after any TD? Well, only if they stand a chance of success. Teams also have to understand who they are, regardless of what the analytics may say, and also consider who their opponent is.

Analytics can play a role, but it should be a supporting role.

I was referring to the gm situation where teams can refuse to let us negotiate with promising candidates in FO positions because we gave ultimate control of the roster to Brown.

Question for you....would the Packers..Patriots...Broncos..Bengals..Texans
Ever make a move like this in their front office?
Oh wait they constant playoff teams..they don't have to make
Front office hires due to desperation.

I guess what I'm saying is the way it was presented, it doesn't look good. Now whether it will work or not remains to be seen. But yet on the surface, you publicly stated that a lawyer with very little football experience DOES have final say over the 53 man roster. Why would you even put that out there?

In turn, you hire his "long time buddy" as an analytics guy from baseball who has no experience using analytics in football.

My point in all of this is I believe it's obvious why so many fans are skeptical. In three years we will be on our third FO and coaching staff. Each and every time we have failed regimes. Each time we have seen a failed reboot.

Now, this bunch upstairs are trying to sell us on the fact they know how to do something unusual and groundbreaking to a degree, when they couldn't even succeed at how everyone else does it.

On a personal note, I'm neither supporting nor convicting the new group so far or what will yet to come. I am more like Purp and Vers, show me. I want to see some evidence rather than buy into the same regurgitated message I've been hearing over and over and over again.

Add me to that list.

No Mac, he really isn't. He is a smart guy who just happened to have a job in baseball. He played both sports at Harvard.

I can go back and find the quote from Farmer, but I won't because others read it. Why don't you prove your comment.

You can't. Farmer drafted JM. I don't want your opinion. I don't want some others opinion. I want a quote from the players involved.

mac's opinion = fact ... in mac's world

Propaganda put out by the Washington post?

So the Washington Post floated our propaganda....LOL....geez Mac, get a grip.


I know this has to tick you off that a few people from Harvard work for the team and are in decision making positions, but you are beyond funny.


Sorry Mac, I think time has passed you by. You need to keep up man.

I bolded that because either people aren't seeing it or wish to dismiss it. Like I said earlier, announcing that some lawyer suddenly has final say of the 53 man roster was a total screw up! Whether he actually has that power or not should not have been contractually documented nor stated until such time as our interview process was concluded.

This structure will be very off putting to many qualified candidates and limit those we can possibly hire as it is. There was no logical reason to have even further shot yourself in the foot.

That would be hard for me to answer. I wasn't assistant GM of a major sports franchise and inventing a system never tried before in sports that changed the game at age 26.



Yeah, I am already thinking about telling my grandkids the stories about the huge change in football between 1995 and 2015. There was a kicker playing back in the 90's that you probably never heard of. 1999 I think it was. Phil Dawson. Despite the huge changes in the game, they actually kicked the ball back then. I wonder what ever happened to him?



Yeah the guy that invented it would probably get it wrong.



You can believe what you want, but math is math and the more polluted the stats, the more analytics is needed.



To answer this, If I'm the head coach, it would help me to know...

1) My odds of success throwing vs passing.
2) My odds of success of going for it on 4th downs.
3) The odds of going for 2 vs playing it safe and kicking the extra point.
4) It would also help if I had all those stats adjusted for the particular opponent that I am playing based on other teams trying the same thing against them.

Man this would be so much easier if I had some analytics!

What makes you think that it's not going to be? Did Haslam change his mind and decide to not hire a coach and GM?

Using mac's logic, we should ignore anything the Post says about the Browns as that is not a sports paper.

If any of the "winning" teams had hired him they'd be lauded for being "ahead of the curve"

We do it, and we are fools.

Who knows, it may work. It may not.

We dont know yet.

I think most people are in this camp.

I am in the camp where I know analytics will work, but the analytical odds also say that somehow the Browns will figure out a way to screw it up.

Quoted for Truth™

I just read the Tom Verducci article about Paul DePodesta. So Haslam was flying around the country during the season investigating systems and what he should do with the team. It sounds like the fates of Pettine and Farmer were decided quite awhile ago.

(I am not sure if this was in the Conor Orr article or the Verducci article. Still an interesting tidbit.)

Their fates may not have been completely decided, but Haslam was dedicated to taking us down this path and changing/fixing the structure of the organization for over a year - that much is clear. Had they kept their act together and been a team, they probably would have been a part of things moving forward, but they buried themselves.

Thank you

I agree. It just seems like one of Farmer or Pettine had to go and Haslam knew it for a longer period of time than I knew.

What this guy has done in his career is valuing stats and traits that were being undervalued both in the draft and in the market.

Reading your post made me start to wonder if maybe analytics was one of the tools that helped give our undrafted guys like Crow, K'Waun, and Gabriel a legit chance?

Do you mean as far as bringing them to the team, or having them play?

If you mean as a tool that brought them to the team, in what analytical measuring system would they have excelled? (Well, Crowell would have, but he had major character issues, and was headed to the practice squad, at best, until he exploded in the final preseason game (in his rookie season) which knocked Dion Lewis off the roster.

I think that the only analytics involved with those 3 was that a scout liked them, and the team signed them to UDFA contracts.

But if that is your intent, doesn't waiting until all the hiring is done before you put it in the contract lend itself to people getting ambushed or having misunderstandings as to what the structure is going to be?

On top of that, if you look at what Shefter was saying a couple days ago about how the Browns were perceived.. in at least one interview he talked about how other teams didn't like working with the Browns because they didn't know who they were supposed to talk to or who was actually in charge of the final decisions.

I can see your point where it could possibly turn off some potential candidate, but on the flip side, I'm not sure there is anything wrong saying Sashi is the point man for the organization: you want a player, or to make an offer, HE is the guy to talk to. That right there starts to create clarity.

This next part of the comment is more a general observation..

So far the only reason critics of these hires have is that they don't understand how it will actually work. No one does, not even the supporters.

-Somehow a guy like Sashi who has worked in and around NFL teams has zero experience working in the NFL? A guy who seems to have a good reputation for being brilliant AND the kind of guy who sets his own ego aside. Yet posters here somehow just KNOW for fact that he's going to be handpicking our roster with ZERO input from anyone else, except maybe to push some blinking buttons and knobs on the Bat Computer and our Draft will be whatever the punchcard it spits out says...

-And we hire a guy like the Moneyball guy who it appears singlehandedly revolutionized a hundred year old sport in baseball, which spilled over in to basketball... and yet posters here just KNOW for a fact that he has nothing to contribute to this organization?

I mean gee, why would we want a guy who has enough brain computing power who could probably predict all the responses on these threads??

But couldn't analytics possibly tell you that Crow would likely have a game like that? Or also that he should be retained and Ben Tate getting shown the door? These guys may have been UDFA's, but they did play previously so there is some data on them.. and isn't part of analytics looking in other, not so obvious places for talent?

Obviously we weren't behind the scenes, but you may be right and it could have been as simple and lucky that we stumbled in to all 3. I don't know that any will ever be Pro Bowlers, but they are solid guys to have on your team. I'm just not sold on luck being the reason we got them. But I'll admit I don't know if it was a good scout or the Bat Computer.

The one biggest thing that analytics will never be able to tell you is how a guy handles the financial aspects of the NFL, and fame.

Once he gets paid, does he want to be a big shot/"star", or does he want to be a really great football player? Is he driven? Will he be willing to learn constantly? Will he bust his butt all year round in order to improve? Will he stay out of trouble, or does he look like a kid who is likely to get in more trouble, the more money he has? This attitude aspect is probably the biggest difference between truly great players, and those who are either filler on their team, or soon cut from their team.

Oh it very likely can, and at a minimum, it could show the probability...

I doubt there is any tool that can definitively tell you how a poor kid reacts to suddenly being very rich.

YTown, please don't take this the wrong way, but do you understand what analytics can do?

Seems like our biggest issue has been when we took a rich kid.

I think you are probably right. There is always going to be a human element that the Bat Computer can't predict. That's where human observation and a person's history comes in to play. Common sense would have said that Manziel would not have given up his partying and lifestyle just like that.

But I also think people are going overboard with this induced panic that these 2 guys are going to be picking the roster. These guys are going to be responsible for way more than gathering and interpreting player data. It's already been posted earlier that DePoedesta is going to be looking at things like insuring dietary needs and things are being met, along with all sorts of other things. I'd imagine that they are also going to look at things like strength and conditioning, making sure regimines are in line with a program of player development. Given all the muscle pulls and issues this past preseason, sounds like that is an area that could use some serious attention.

Plus, we've been told the HC will answer directly to Haslam. Does it really make sense to give the HC that much importance, but give him no control or input on the roster???

I think people forget that the organization is more than just a few coaches and a roster of players. My bet is that most of the things these guys bring to the organization will be behind the scenes, stuff we won't readily see or really even know about.

I do. My point is that the numbers can tell you a great deal, but they will never be able to tell you everything.

In many ways, they cannot tell you the most important things. They are a useful tool, but only as a supporting tool, not as the 1st tool out of the toolbox.

I hope so, because I see a ton of concern in this setup.

I hope you're right, and I am wrong. We haven't even hired a head coach or GM yet, and already I am more worried about this 3rd Haslam restart than any before it. I just see disaster on the horizon.

Yes the nouveau spoiled is so much easier to deal with. Ingrained from birth is much harder to get out of their system.