Tracking the Hue Jackson rumors
January 12, 2016Buster Olney: Indians have second-best starting rotation in baseball
January 12, 2016Lindsay: Well, did it work for those people?
Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might … But it might work for us. – Arrested Development
Happy Tuesday WFNY!
Did everyone enjoy that National Championship game last night? It sounds like it was a great game. I saw none of it. Mostly because Iâm a weirdo.
I just canât watch Championships in sports where my teams had a chance. When the Orlando Magic beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals, I could only stomach watching parts of a couple games of the NBA Finals between the Magic and Los Angeles Lakers. In my mind, it should have been the Cavaliers there.
Watching a one-loss Alabama team win a National Championship when the one-loss Ohio State Buckeyes werenât given a chance to compete in the playoffs was tough for me. Particularly when Ohio Stateâs only loss was to one of the other teams in the playoffs. In my mind, this means Ohio Stateâs loss wasnât as bad as Alabamaâs loss. Yep, so many sour grapes here. Sour grapes make the best whine. Etc, etc, etc.
Any way I look at it, there was just nothing fun about that Championship game. Iâm disappointed Ohio State lost to Michigan State, but Iâm equally disappointed that losing to a top-five team was the thing that kept Ohio State out of the playoffs. So I chose not to watch. But it sounds like it was a great game and thatâs good for the sport of college football.
Now that college football is over, weâre down to just seven more NFL games and then football is over again for another season. Talk about bittersweet. I love the NFL playoffs1, and Iâm excited to watch the games this weekend. But the sooner the games are over, the sooner football is over, and that makes me sad.
But, I suppose the silver lining is that football never really goes away. Free agency starts shortly after the Super Bowl, then thereâs the NFL Draft, and then summer OTAs and minicamps, and then the cycle starts back up with Training Camp. But first, the coaching carousel needs to settle down, and thatâs where the Cleveland Browns find themselves at the moment.
*****
I finally have a preference for the Browns coaching gig
Prior to Monday, I had no opinion on any of the Browns candidates. Well, thatâs not entirely true. I donât like Doug Marrone. I despise what went down in Buffalo with Marrone and I donât want to see the Browns put their faith and trust in a guy who quit his team without even telling his players.
Other than that, though, I knew next to nothing about the Browns candidates. So Monday, I decided to fire up the olâ Google machine and find as many profiles and interviews with the candidates as I could find. Once I was done, I had a clear favorite. And itâs the last guy I wanted to be my favorite.
The Bill Belichick tree scares me. The Browns have been down that road before with Romeo Crennel and Eric Mangini. Josh McDaniels doesnât give anyone warm and fuzzy feelings as a head coach. Jim Schwartz showed some promise in taking the Lions to the playoffs, but his teams were massive disappointments in the two seasons following that postseason appearance. Bill OâBrien has shown some promise, but itâs too early to say anything definitive about him.
The point is, the Belichick tree has yet to bear fruit on the NFL level. But teams keep going to the well. And now the Browns have interviewed Patriotsâ defensive coordinator Matt Patricia for the job. Great. Here we go again.
But the funny thing is, the more I learn about Patricia, the more I love what I see and hear. Despite my better judgment, Patricia is my favorite Browns candidate and I low-key am praying the Browns hire him.
Why, you ask? So glad you asked (and if you didnât just pretend you did, OK?). First things first, I like insanely smart people. I love people who can look at the way things are done, analyze the data, and come up with a more efficient way of doing it. Patricia played college football at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he got a degree in aeronautical engineering. Upon graduating, Patricia has had an interesting career path.
Almost every step along his journey heâs been given options. And almost every time, he bucked the norm and made decisions that werenât safe, instead betting on himself and keeping his eye on his goals for where he ultimately wanted to end up.
All along the way, Patricia was able to use his engineering background to approach new methods of collecting, tracking, and sorting data, whether it was logging film and classifying it by plays and formations or finding trends and habits. For all of his intelligence, though, Patricia is still a former college football player. He knows how to relate to players and understands the dynamics of how to get through to even the best players.
Some coaches are great tacticians and Xs and Os guys. They might be phenomenal coordinators because they know how to scheme and gameplan. But they might lack the thing that makes a head coach a great coach. A head coach needs to be strong on the schematics side for sure, but a head coach is an administrator. A head coach needs to know how and when to delegate responsibility, they need to be motivators, they need to be able to relate to and reach their players and get through to them, they need to thrive in efficiencies.
I think Matt Patricia has potential to excel in all of these areas. Listen to any interview with him and you get the sense that he is not only incredibly smart and articulate, but he has a charm to him that you can see being an inspirational figure to play for. And his ability to recognize ways for a team to be more efficient at processing data and using the data to attack each weekâs gameplan is huge.
I donât want the Browns to hire another leaf on the Belichick tree. But thatâs also unfair to Patricia. Just because Romeo Crennel wasnât suited to be a head coach, that doesnât mean Patricia isnât. Perhaps people have failed when hiring Belichick disciples because theyâve all been looking at and hiring the wrong people.
We as fans only have so much data, so I could be way off on Patricia. All I know is based on the limited information I have, the one guy I got excited about as I read more about and familiarized myself with the candidates’Â backgrounds was Matt Patricia, and thatâs now the guy Iâm personally hoping gets the job. Weâll see.
*****
Thatâs all I have for you this morning. For those few of you wondering, weâll be resuming New Music of the Week on Tuesdays in a couple weeks here once we start getting some albums that Iâm really excited about. In the meantime, I hope you guys all enjoy the rest of your week!
- And to clarify, I have no problem enjoying the NFL playoffs because thereâs no concern about the Browns feeling like they should have been there. [↩]
32 Comments
Time to farm that tree Browns style!
http://david.farmnet.com.au/files/2008/07/jdfarm1.jpg
Yet, only the Browns even interviewed Patricia. It is strange, but he’s my top choice as well.
https://50shadesofanimation.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/36983-tumblr_inline_mrlzskbnvl1qz4rgp.gif?w=500&h=308
Let’s at least get the oranger color right.
A wicked smaht friend of mine (PhD, and all) is finishing a detailed analytics website on coaching tree data. Should be really cool when it’s ready. I look forward to seeing what his years of data shows.
I like Matt Patricia too. He reminds me of a cross between Belichick and Pete Carroll… the brain of Belichick and the personality of Carroll. Maybe I’ve been eating too many of RGB’s apples today though.
Toot-toot! Here comes Jimmuh Hasgrum!
http://foodcyclist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/devon-point-farm-12-of-45.jpg
Wouldn’t you be suspicious that there is only one red apple? What if Snow White straight up rejected the red apple and went for the Yellow Delicious instead? I guess that story would be pretty boring.
Ooooh, the New Orange, even.
Nice.
Beware of taking anything from Belichick. đ
National Championship Game: ‘Bama or Clemson? Who cares? Not me.
And that’s a pretty lame trophy they hand out. Looks like a design award or something. Football teams deserve real trophies, featuring guys in leather helmets about to steamroll somebody. And slap a couple eagles on the base and some stars and torches and stuff.
Belichick Tree: Don’t forget Charlie Weis, who took Notre Dame for a long, expensive ride.
“You want this… don’t you”
http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/6-25-2015/szIpFE.gif
I’m sure the locals will be bleating $EC, $EC, $EC this afternoon on the local sportstalk…even though none of them are Crim$on Tide fans.
The ugliest thing about that trophy is seeing it in any non-Buckeyes hands. Oh well. In addition to looking bad, it tastes sour. We didn’t want it, anyway.
Yeah, but if I mention Weis, then I probably also have to mention Saban and Ferentz and then it doesn’t fit my narrative as well. Or something like that.
But Saban and Ferentz are really on the Parcells tree (from whence Belichick was plucked), aren’t they?
Or am I misremembering?
I hate to play the what if game, but if OSU had not lost to the Spartans, who knows what would have happened in the playoffs.
Think of it. In the early ’90s, the Browns had on their coaching staff the current best coach in the NFL (in NFL history?) and the current best coach in college football (history?) and we still didn’t win a thing.
Thanks again, Art, you scum-sucking weasel.
Oh, I think we know.
With FIRE too!!!
i will be okay with patricia , but still hoping for hue jackson first.
#TeamRational
Polish those participation trophies…
Wisconsin bans chants such as âair ballâ at high school games.
http://highschoolsports.mlive.com/news/article/-5397239116028720088/wisconsin-bans-chants-such-as-air-ball-at-high-school-games-mhsaa-unlikely-to-follow/#incart_river_index
http://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2016/01/11/wisconsin-high-school-basketball-air-ball-scoreboard-chants-banned
Well, they both were coaches under Belichick when Belichick was coaching the Browns. I can’t remember if they also served on Parcells’ staff as well, though.
I’m not totally against Hue. He did a pretty solid job with the Raiders in his one year there, and he did an awesome job with the Bengals as their offensive coordinator. He seems to have some good qualities I’d want in a head coach, too. So I’m kinda like you, only my names are flipped. Ok with Hue, hoping for Patricia.
Yeah, now that I think about it, they may not have been. I have no idea. And that’s part of the problem with coaching trees. They’re not like family trees, where you can find just one father/one mother. There’s a lot of genetic mixing.
fair enough … i would think that patricia would be more on-board / in-tune with the analytics thing. hue must at least be okay with it as well.
LMFAO !!
I try not to think of it.
Hey, that guy looks like he’s building Bill Cowher a new house in Strongsville!!!1!!!
Yeah, and in baseball, we had a FO who would literally change how baseball is run. And, again, no championships. Dems da breaks.
Well, Buckeyes would have had to play a big, bad Bama team from the SEC in the first round. Then, they would have had to play a speed team without a long football history from the coastal region.
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