DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Pure Football Forum The Front Office...continued

Ya know what.. I agree with mac.

We should focus more on keeping the players we drafted, instead of signing guys off the street.

Like Pryor.

Wait.

Interesting...on losing Pryor, Sashi puts the blame totally on Pryor and his agents.

Two years in a row, Sashi has failed to get our top free agents signed...but the front office has no problem throwing crazy money at someone else's free agent...

I don't know how the Browns ever build a winning team using the business model that Sashi and Jimmy they are using. Until they making re-signing our own free agents a higher priority than signing other teams free agents...they will never truly have a team..a group of guys who stay together and develop a bond with a central goal..to win a championship.

jmo..mac

That is a big assumption.

It may be "everyone vs mac"

But he posts enough about the same things over and over that it actually balances out.

I'm certainly not intending any sort of piling on as you typically find me staying out of most controversy. I used to try and fight the good fight, but there's too much "blindness" to contend. I'm honestly trying to get a deeper sense of Mac's position on this one.

6. Is Jackson is driving the bus on the QB decision this year
Although Jackson is expected to have a bigger voice on QB, the buck still stops at Brown’s desk.
“We’d reach that decision collectively,’’ Brown said. “At the end of the day it’s my decision on who we pick, but Hue and I talk constantly. We’ll have a lot more discussions between now and the night of the 27th, 28th and 29th to see what’s available there. If there’s a player on another team, that could be something that we look at as well. We’ll have a lot of those conversations and chop it up between the two of us to get to the right decision for our team."
He wouldn’t concede that Jackson has more input this season than last, when the Browns drafted a quarterback in Cody Kessler who didn’t fit his prototype.
“No, and I wouldn’t say he had too little, too much or anything like that,’’ Brown said. “I just wouldn’t compare it. We’re working well together is the way I’d characterize it.’’

jc...

Obviously some have not a clue what I'm talking about and did not take the time to read and understand the point I'm making.

Does the Sashi Brown front office put a higher priority on signing other teams free agents?...

...or does the Sashi front office put a higher priority on signing our own players when it is time to negotiate a new contract?

jc...

Obviously some have not a clue what I'm talking about and did not take the time to read and understand the point I'm making.

Does the Sashi Brown front office put a higher priority on signing other teams free agents?...

...or does the Sashi front office put a higher priority on signing our own players when it is time to negotiate a new contract?

jc...

Obviously some have not a clue what I'm talking about and did not take the time to read and understand the point I'm making.

Does the Sashi Brown front office put a higher priority on signing other teams free agents?...

...or does the Sashi front office put a higher priority on signing our own players when it is time to negotiate a new contract?

jc...

Obviously some have not a clue what I'm talking about and did not take the time to read and understand the point I'm making.

Does the Sashi Brown front office put a higher priority on signing other teams free agents?...

...or does the Sashi front office put a higher priority on signing our own players when it is time to negotiate a new contract?

Interesting...on losing Pryor, Sashi puts the blame totally on Pryor and his agents.

Two years in a row, Sashi has failed to get our top free agents signed...but the front office has no problem throwing crazy money at someone else's free agent...

I don't know how the Browns ever build a winning team using the business model that Sashi and Jimmy they are using. Until they making re-signing our own free agents a higher priority than signing other teams free agents...they will never truly have a team..a group of guys who stay together and develop a bond with a central goal..to win a championship.

jmo..mac

Good post. The only thing I will add is that the only thing that Sashi could have done different w/Pryor is perhaps wait it out a bit instead of signing Britt, which probably ended negotiations w/Pryor.

Good post. The only thing I will add is that the only thing that Sashi could have done different w/Pryor is perhaps wait it out a bit instead of signing Britt, which probably ended negotiations w/Pryor.

Obviously some have not a clue what I'm talking about and did not take the time to read and understand the point I'm making.

After 8 pages of posts , this really sums it up ! I'm a bottom line kinda gut ..

Fair enough. Time to shut this on down for good.

As long as the Browns front office "makes news", it makes sense to have a Front Office thread, imo.

Some of the comments that come out of the Browns front office, you just have to shake your head at.

Stuff like this from Sashi Brown, the Browns GM in charge of the 53 man roster..."We’re not in position at wide receiver to turn down a guy like Josh if we feel he’s settled himself."

Sashi can say this after failing to re-sign the Browns best WR?...Sashi could use a full length mirror!

Sashi can say this after failing to re-sign the Browns best WR?...Sashi could use a full length mirror! [/color]

--What if Pryor didn't want to be here?

--What about the Browns re-signing Collins and extending Bitonio?

--I think it very clear that Hue Jackson has a big say in what moves the Browns are making.

vers...seriously?...you write that as an excuse for the front not getting the job done?

Spend 40 minutes with DePodesta. He’s crafty. Very friendly, but crafty. I still don’t know what he does with the Browns.

Me: “What translates between baseball and football?”
DePodesta: “I’ve actually been struck by how many similarities there are."

“I think part of that maybe is intentional,” said DePodesta, 44, in shorts and a T-shirt, sitting on a folding chair in a garden at the classic old Arizona Biltmore Hotel. “I’m trying to think of the most succinct way to put it. I really focus on process as much as anything else: process for how we evaluate players, process for how we make decisions, process even for how we hire people internally, process for how we go about integrating our scouting reports with guys watching tape in the office. It is really about how we do the things we do. I think part of the reason they brought me in is because I am completely naive about the National Football League. I have no preconceived notions about how things ought to be done or how they have been done in the past, and I can look at it with a fresh set of eyes.”

“I don’t know,” DePodesta said. “We are trying to develop things that ultimately will give us a competitive advantage and will get us back onto the landscape in terms of those competitive teams that are playing in January every year. So, I am hesitant to give away too much of what we’re trying to do. The other reason I think it’s hard is because it is really collective. We have a lot of people in our office who are very bright and have been around the game for a lot longer than I have, who had a lot of these ideas before I ever showed up.”

“We’ve looked ourselves in the mirror and said, ‘Do we think that we are actually superhuman when it comes to picking players?’ And we pretty easily answered that with a resounding no. So how are we going to increase our chances? We need to have more picks. So, if we have the same number of picks every year as everyone else, we don’t expect do better than anyone else.”

“Sounds like Jimmy Johnson’s philosophy,” I said. “You aware of that?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling.

“Had any conversations with him?” I said.

“I’ll keep that to myself. I’ll say this: I’m a big admirer of what he’s done.”

Yes, Johnson has spoken with the Browns. He just won’t say about what.
But it’s no deep, dark mystery. Just as acquiring all these picks wasn’t deep and dark. The Browns in 2016 traded the second pick in the draft to Philadelphia’s eighth slot in the round, and then again to Tennessee at 15. That netted Cleveland seven picks over multiple drafts in the first four rounds.

“That’s good,” Johnson said from Florida on Friday. “There’s strength in numbers. I always wanted to have more picks in the middle rounds and at the end, because you can build a good team with the role players you get in the third, fourth and fifth rounds. With the Browns now, with all those picks, really, you’re one free-agent class and one draft from being a contender.

“But I’ll tell you, here’s the danger of having so many picks: You think, ‘We’ve got so many picks, let’s move up and take that guy with a little risk.’ You think you’ve got so many picks and you can afford to waste them on guys. I never looked at it that way. You have to look at every pick like it’s the only one you’ve got. Like I’ve told Bill Belichick, ‘You don’t have to use ’em this year. Bank ’em. Trade ’em.’ He knows. One time he told me he had a good team, and he had some extra picks, and he was afraid the guy they’d take might not be good enough to make his team. Fine. You don’t like what’s there? You can always find someone to take your four this year for a three next year. Like I said, bank ’em.”

Said DePodesta: “We don’t get any points or win any games for having the most picks. We need to turn that into talent. It’s part of the reason we are so excited for this April. I think our team will look fundamentally different in May than it does right now.”

I asked DePodesta why they’ve lost key players who they probably should have kept.

“Great question,” he said. “I’d say going back a year when we did have a handful of free agents and we allowed them all to sign elsewhere, that was a moment in time. That is not something that we want to do continuously. Again, that was a situation that we felt like we really do need to rebuild the foundation of this organization and it is almost like redoing a house, you need to rip down all the walls and get it down to the studs. Now, when you do that and you tear out all the walls and the floors and all you have left are the studs, you look at it and go, wow this looks terrible. We never want to go through this again and I think that is our attitude.

“Even as we got into the season last year, there was a monumental shift in our organizational evolution and it was when we traded for [New England linebacker] Jamie Collins. What we were trying to show everyone in our organization hopefully, and all our fans, was that that is now behind us and we are adding to this and building; this is not going to be about tearing it down all the time. This offseason we were able to re-sign Jamie, we were able to re-sign [guard] Joel Bitonio and we added free agents this year. We feel like we’ve got a handful of players that will be part of our core going forward, and our goal is to now build out that core and ultimately, when it comes time, retain it. It did come time right now, with guys like Bitonio and Jamie, we had to retain them and we did. And we will have more players that will be like that.”