NFL Open Thread

It is the end of an error in Cleveland, and we can now celebrate the dumbest tank job in the history of dumb tank jobs:

A shrewd snakeoil salesman always knows when the jig is up.

Paul DePodesta could see that the 2025 Browns were boring deep into the earth’s mantle toward a new low, even for them. He had burned through a decade of benefit-of-the-doubt from Stockholm Syndrome-suffering Browns fans and the often-fawning media. He could hear the hecklers, as well as the whispers about the man behind the curtain. DePodesta knew that once the Browns burned through both Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders — the team’s desperate double-reverse flea-flicker Hail Mary effort to replace the quarter-billion-dollar imaginary-friend quarterback he traded their future for — he would no longer be able to sell his swindle.

And there, sitting on his LinkedIn page like a rube fresh off a turnip truck or a lonely, diamond-studded dowager, were the Colorado Rockies: a perennial doormat of a baseball franchise coming off a 119-loss season.

So DePodesta, the Duke and Dauphin of Moneyball, tied some bedsheets together and slipped out the back window of Browns headquarters before anyone could nab him.

“The Browns were good at planning for the future to win while DePodesta was here,” wrote Jason Lloyd in The Athletic. “They just rarely got around to the actual winning. It was like booking and planning elaborate Caribbean vacations but never taking them.”

No, Jason, that’s not quite correct. What DePodesta did was like investing money needed for food and roof repairs into cryptocurrency, then telling the family over a crackers-and-ketchup dinner that they were too stupid to understand his daring long-range vision.

DePodesta, the Browns’ former Chief Strategic Officer, was at least magnanimous enough to accept a tiny sliver of blame for the Deshaun Watson fiasco. Sort of. When cornered by the Rockies media about Watson in his introductory press conference, DePodesta said:

Here’s what I would say, and I truly believe this. I believe that most of the decisions, especially the big ones like that, are organizational decisions, right? I’m not a believer in the ‘King Scout’ situation where there is one guy who makes every call. The jobs are too complex, the decisions are too hard. They impact too many different things. So I always think these sort of collective decisions, it can be hard to get unanimous (opinions) on those types of things. Everyone who was a part of that? We all own that. We just do, that’s part of the deal.

What an absolute cheesedick. DePodesta sounds exactly like the “consultant” who comes to you, the assistant manager, and says: Replace all our desks with standing work stations and the coffee machine with inspirational posters. You can sign off on those decisions. I was never here.

I will never stop being amused by the earnest discussions about which sequence of years of deliberate non-competitiveness made their organization the best in North American pro sports, the Cleveland Browns or the Philadelphia 76ers. (If you don’t deliberately lose as many games as possible for years at a time, how can you acquire a truly indispensable superstar like Ben Simmons?) Still, it’s hard to top intentionally going 1-31, passing on DeShaun Watson to take an F- prospect in the second round, drafting a solid if not transcendent QB #1 overall, trade the solid QB for a 5th round pick, and then invest an enormous amount of trade and salary capital in the QB you passed on after he had proven to be a serial sexual harasser because of some numbers inflated by a lot of garbage-time stat padding on a 4-12 team. Amazing stuff. Admittedly, it’s not entirely on DePodesta — Haslam was obviously a major factor in the world historically catastrophic Watson trade — but a share of responsibility is enough to damn him in any court.

Perhaps he will be better back in his native sport, and it would be hard for the Rockies to get worse. On the other hand, I would have said that about the Browns.

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