Josh McDaniels is not the savior for this franchise and for good reason

Losing Mike McCarthy and Ron Rivera as candidates hurts the chances The Browns will land the right guy for the job on this go around.

Mike McCarthy is off the board, so to speak. For many people, the line of succession for Freddie Kitchens went Ron Rivera (Redskins), Mike McCarthy (Cowboys) and Josh McDaniels. As of right now, only McDaniels remains in play. That’s not to say that McDaniels is everyone’s pick, nor is to say that there aren’t any other candidates being interviewed.

With McDaniels, you have a guy who was seen as the heir-apparent to Bill Belichick. At 67 year’s old, the greatest coach of all time is far from done with football, meaning that McDaniels needs to ask himself if he wants to stick around and see if he gets the job with the Patriots in a few years, or if he wants to break away now and do his thing.

The issue with hiring a Belichick guy is obvious; most of them fail in the NFL as head coaches. Save for a few ex-colleagues off of Belichick’s staff from his Browns days, all of Belichick’s coordinators that went on to have major head coaching jobs failed. Josh McDaniels has already failed, and hard when he went to Denver. Needless to say, The Browns fans aren’t exactly salivating over McDaniels. Which begs the question, why after failing with Romeo Crenel, would the Browns trust another “Belichick guy”?

The only “Belichick guy” that’s succeeding is Mike Vrabel, and he’s never had any time with Belichick as a fellow coach. Yes, Bill O’Brien did coach under Belichick, but he was an average coach at best for Penn State, and it seems every year the Houston media is talking about the team’s need to fire him.

For McDaniels, the truth is even more obvious as he has a reputation for being untrustworthy. He was found to be videotaping the 49’ers during a walkthrough with his time in Denver, he didn’t report said videotaping issue to the league, and after he was fired and returned to the New England, he would take the head coaching job with the Colts, only to later reneged on the deal, opting to return to the Patriots. He’s not a very trustworthy man, and his word doesn’t hold a lot of credibility. The Browns just had one of those types in Hue Jackson, why would the fans want another coach that talks out of both sides of his mouth?

He might have grown as a person, but the whole Indianaolopsis job situation was less than two years ago. Clearly he’s still got character issues that stem back to his time in Denver, where he was referred to as immature by those who covered him during his stint as Bronco’s head coach.

Maybe a guy with character issues isn’t the best guy to have guide a team plagued by character issues.