Browns Fire Head of Football Ops Sashi Brown After Less Than Two Years

The Browns are overhauling their front office yet again.

The Browns have fired executive vice president of football operations Sashi Brown, The MMQB’s Albert Breer confirmed. ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Dianna Russini were first to report the news.

The Browns have been examining potential replacements for Brown “over the past few weeks,” NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reports. One guy they like is John Dorsey, who was GM of the Chiefs from 2013 to 2016. 

Hue Jackson will return as coach next year, owner Jimmy Haslam confirmed. 

Brown was promoted from executive vice president-general counsel in January 2016 after spending three years with Cleveland as a salary cap specialist. He then brought in Paul DePodesta, famous for his involvement with the “Moneyball” A’s, as the team’s chief strategy officer. 

The Browns have won exactly one game since Brown was hired. They went 1–15 last season and are 0–12 thus far this year. The Browns have hardly been a powerhouse since they returned to Cleveland in 1999 but they had won at least two games in every season before last.

Cleveland’s first move under Brown was to hire Jackson, then the Bengals’ offensive coordinator, as head coach. The second major move was to trade down twice in the first round of the 2016 draft and stockpile picks. The Browns moved down from No. 2 to No. 8 in a trade with the Eagles and then flipped the eighth pick for the Titans’ choice at No. 15. They also acquired two third-round picks and a fourth that year, along with a 2017 first-round pick and second-rounders in 2017 and 2018. The 2017 pick (the Eagles’ at No. 12) was flipped to the Texans, who drafted an apparent franchise quarterback in Deshaun Watson, the sort of player for whom the Browns have been searching for decades. 

The hoarding of draft picks was clearly done with an toward the future, not unlike former 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie. Like Hinkie, though, Brown won’t get to oversee the end of his process.