Former coach says team lied about rebuild

Former Browns coach Hue Jackson said owner Jimmy Haslam gave him a contract extension midway through a winless 2017 season and that he was lied to from the start about the team’s rebuilding plans.

During a wide-ranging radio interview March 29 with WKNRAM 850, Jackson said the Browns’ efforts to improve while he was with them were flawed by philosophical differences.

Jackson said he was never told by either Haslam or then-general manager Sashi Brown that the Browns were in a roster teardown or else he wouldn’t have accepted the job. He was Cincinnati’s offensive coordinator before being hired in Cleveland, where he went 0-16 in his second season and 3-36-1 over two-plus seasons before being fired.

“There is no doubt I was lied to by ownership and the executive team,” Jackson said, adding there was a divide between the coaching staff and management.

“They were going to be football plus analytics, but they intentionally made it football versus analytics,” he said. “They were going to take two years and they were going to find a way to use us as an experiment to make sure that they got the data that they needed for it to get better — at the expense of whoever — and that’s not right.

“That’s not the way it should be.”

A team spokesman said the Browns would not comment on Jackson’s claims.

Jackson said he signed a contract extension midway through the 2017 season — he was 1-23 at the time with Cleveland — and wanted to make it public, but the team refused.

“I think we can all understand and think why it was not made public,” he said. “Because it would’ve really set the tempo for what exactly was going on there.”

The 55-year-old said he’s writing a book about his time with the Browns. The team went 1-15 in Jackson’s first season, winless the second — joining the 2008 Lions as the only teams to go 0-16 — and he was dismissed after a 2-5-1 start in 2018.

Jackson