Well, there goes any hope of getting Josh Gordon for a fraction of his worth. Lombardi's decision to shop Gordon last year was one of the worst talent evaluations I've ever seen a GM make on his own roster. Go figure, a guy who wrote really dumb articles on NFL.com made for a dumb GM.
Still, this firing is pretty shocking. They just hired a new coaching staff (committing tens of millions of dollars) a couple weeks ago, and this is after they paid the previous one and done coaching staff $49 million to go away. The combine is days away, the draft is pretty close as well. They did stay "in house" with their hire so it's not totally impossible for them to conduct themselves this offseason, but still. Wow. It would be one thing if they had hired an A-list coach who would dictate to the GM, but instead they clearly have a top-down organizational structure with a coach who was picked musical chairs style by the previous regime. An incredibly incompetent one at that. If the new GM were to fire these coaches next year and bring in his own guys, the Browns would have close to $100 million in money committed to making coaches go away.
What's kind of sad is that this situation reminds me of Jack Z and the Mariners. Except instead of wasting mega-millions on coaches, they wasted mega-millions when a desperate GM who shouldn't have even had a job overpaid for Robinson Cano and took a huge shit on future Mariners GMs for selfish and likely futile short-term gain. Nothing against Cano, but that deal was less about adding talent and more about stealing from future Mariners teams to bolster Z's own success.
