Cleveland Browns: 5 takeaways from bombshell ESPN article

Who looked bad

It takes about 30 seconds of reading Wickersham’s first few paragraphs to know this story won’t paint a flattering picture of Browns’ ownership.

The story starts with Dee Haslam repeating lines previously said to an auditorium full of employees. The gist of it all was that the owners were still new to this and they’re going to make mistakes.

The words rung hollow to Browns’ staffers, who heard the utterances too many times in the not- so-far off past.

Sources told Wickersham that Dee had said, “If we had known how hard it would be, we would have never bought the team.”

Dee Haslam denied this was ever said through a Browns spokesman.

The story then puts Jimmy in its cross hairs, criticizing his style.

To sum it all up:

1. He creates friction by talking to everyone. On its face, it seems kind of cool that Haslam would take an everyman approach. Giving personal time to not just the head coach, but to low level assistants.

His open ended questions made it seem like he was trying to get everyone to narc on each other. That’s how Wickersham portrayed it, at least.

2. The impulsiveness…Part of Wickersham’s story dives into Haslam’s tour of other professional teams…a move that eventually got him to embrace a heavy dose of analytics.

One of those executives told Haslam not to go to games for two years, though, because the Browns were going to lose big.

Welp, they lost big all right. Too big. Despite the warning that things would be bad, Haslam blew it up, firing Sashi Brown, despite giving the Harvard educated lawyer his word that he wouldn’t.

Bad decisions have been problematic for the Haslams before, but now Dorsey’s in place to act as a buffer to protect.

With that said, he’s here today and can be gone tomorrow. Ask Joe Banner. Ask Sashi Brown.

Hopefully ownership recognizes Dorsey’s impact in the rebuild of the Browns and Dorsey is able to whether the storm when things don’t go his way. After all, nobody’s perfect.