Browns fans rolling with Kitchens
Big things expected from coach who introduced himself on Twitter with a video and a curse word.
CLEVELAND — Three years ago,
ESPN ranked the six new NFL coaching hires.
Hue Jackson was first. Doug Pederson was last.
Three years later, Jackson has no job and Pederson has a Super Bowl ring in Philadelphia. As if any of you needed more proof that sports writers are half-wits.
The Browns officially announced the hiring of Freddie Kitchens on Saturday, and his first public act was to lean into the camera in a Twitter video and say, “Dawg Pound, you remember when I said I’ve never been offered a head coaching job? That’s changed. I’m your new head coach, Freddie Kitchens. Let’s roll.”
He said it in a Dawg Pound sweatshirt and a Brownie the Elf cap, and with a bleeped-out curse word the Browns included at the start of the video to emphasize the relatability of the new boss.
If the “have a beer with ‘em” test matters in presidential poli- tics, and it has, then why shouldn’t it matter when hiring a football coach? Did you want to roll with Hue Jackson? Rob Chudzinski? Pat Shurmur? Eric Mangini?
It’s time for the Browns to win. First, maybe, it’s time to embrace a coach with whom fans want to roll. No, no, no. Fans want to roll with.
Players win, and Kitchens has some good ones. He won’t be in control of getting any new ones. John Dorsey will pick the roster, and Kitchens will roll with it. Baker Mayfield and Myles Garrett will control much of Kitchens’ fate, and eight Browns head coaches, plus two interims, of the past 20 years would have begged for Mayfield.
In the Bill Belichick-Tom Brady era, we’ve been trained to assume winning is all about coach and quarterback. But I’ll take a great quarterback and an average coach over the other way around. There are some serious coaches in the NFL playoffs. But Frank Reich looks awfully smart in Indianapolis because Andrew Luck got healthy and the GM built him an offensive line. And Jason Garrett is there, too, and if he can get Dallas that far, then coaching isn’t everything.
More than 7,000 readers have voted in our cleveland. com poll about hiring Kitchens — 60 percent like it, 32 percent want to wait and see and only eight percent dislike it. So a third of you are rolling with caution, but you’re still rolling.
When I asked for passionate feedback either way on Twitter, about 80 percent of it was pro-Kitchens.
I sure hope the Browns and their search committee didn’t pick Kitchens because they wanted to crack a cold one with him. However they found him, he’s here now. But you can certainly get behind the hire because he’d be as comfortable in the Dawg Pound as he was talking to it in a Twitter video.
How fun is it right now to criticize the Browns? Media and fans have made a sport of that over the last two decades, almost all of it deserved. Right now, as Mayfield grabs the wheel and starts turning things around, what’s the use of doing anything other than hopping on and holding on?
Listen, this is from an unbiased media member, albeit an unbiased member who already has the Browns locked in for 12-4 in 2019. Honestly, I’m tempted to maybe drop that to 11 wins and a tie since this guy was never even a coordinator for a whole year before.
But what would Freddie Kitchens say to that kind of prudence?
This is your team, Cleveland, and this is your coach. We’ve all been wrong so many times before, and so smug when the Browns got it wrong, too, that we may as well try something new. There will be time for legitimate and needed criticism, and you know we’ll report the heck out of everything that goes right and wrong.
For now, it’s 12-4, full speed ahead. Let’s roll.