The disconnect on Kevin Stefanski's firing from the Cleveland Browns is striking.
One of the league's worst teams is getting rid of their head coach, and yet both ESPN's Adam Schefter and NFL Network's Ian Rapoport are reporting that Stefanski will be one of the top candidates available for other teams in this hiring cycle.
In other words: The NFL knows Stefanski is a good coach.
So what happened in Cleveland?
Well, the Browns happened. More specifically, Browns quarterbacks happened.
Stefanski is a well-respected leader and offensive mind. But what the heck was he supposed to do here?
The Browns mortgaged their future to trade for Deshaun Watson, baggage and all. They then gave him the most guaranteed money a quarterback had ever gotten. And then Watson was a mixture of suspended, injured and simply no good.
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They really didn't have any great options once Watson turned out to be a failure. They still owed him more than a hundred million dollars.
So this offseason, they had to go bargain shopping, getting Joe Flacco and Kenny Pickett as veterans and then drafting Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders in the middle rounds.
On a team with limited offensive skill, none of those guys was going to help the Browns be successful, even if Stefanski called the best plays on the planet.
In the end, Stefanski's six-year tenure always looked like it was teetering precariously this season. And although the Browns have done some odd things through the years, they made a decision that everyone saw coming on Monday morning.
Stefanski will now move on, almost certainly to a place with more stability and more hope at the most important position in sports.
And now the Browns will try to pitch their organization to a new hire, one who will see exactly what went wrong here, one who will wonder how they're going to win games without a franchise QB.
Sure looks like there's plenty more Browns-ing to come.
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