Browns’ new head coach Kevin Stefanski chose message of alignment over bravado in his introductory press conference
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CLEVELAND, Ohio — A year ago, Freddie Kitchens sat at a table at FirstEnergy Stadium and declared, “If you don’t wear orange and brown, you don’t matter.” Three years prior, Hue Jackson talked about winning the Super Bowl.
Kevin Stefanski’s introductory press conference shunned the usual pep-talk elements of press conferences past. This is an organization never shy about going big with these things, but you’ll forgive everyone if they’re just a little bit tired of this whole song-and-dance and wanted to keep it a little more muted this time around.
Stefanski, instead of big promises and big plans, relayed the message of the organization. He laid out how he fit, not simply as the face of the franchise but as part of something bigger than the head coach.
“I want to be the point guard for this organization,” he said. “I want to bring the ball up and I want to share the basketball and let someone else get an easy bucket.”
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Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta explained what he and ownership saw in Stefanski, in part, this way: “Someone who could really be, for lack of a better term, the CEO of the football organization, especially in terms of his leadership and his ability to bring everybody together, both on the field and off the field. I think that’s what we have in Kevin.”
The Browns set out on this search looking for what has eluded them since they returned, but especially since Jimmy Haslam took ownership in 2012: alignment. DePodesta would lead the search. The coach would get hired. A general manager who fits with the coach will come next.
Where it leads from there, we’ll see, but Stefanski didn’t present himself as a savior or as some kind of reincarnation of Paul Brown. He sounded like a piece of something bigger (albeit a prominent piece who went from station to station in the locker room conducting one-on-one interviews). Make no mistake, he is the head coach, but he didn’t sound like he was here to be the biggest show in town.
“Everybody knows the Harry Truman quote,” Stefanski said, “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when no one gets the credit.”
Stefanski, Haslam and DePodesta were quick to dismiss reports of required meetings or, at least, the characterization of those meetings, but the Browns are seeking harmony between the football and analytics side of their operation and Stefanski is the man chosen to find it.
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“I’m looking for any edge we can get on game day, and certainly analytics, I know, is another buzzword out there,” Stefanski said. “But we’re looking to make informed decisions. So as a play caller or whether it may be in player evaluation, information is power.”
Which sounds different from previous coaches who avoided the a-word like the plague.
“It just provides more information,” Stefanski said. “We have so much of this information. We have years of it, so let’s use it to our advantage.”
The Browns took an analytics-heavy approach to roster building in 2016, when they aggressively acquired future draft capital and stored away cap space. They haven’t consistently married analytics and coaching yet. Stefanski appears to represent the open-minded person at the top who understands it’s bigger than him, even if he is the CEO of it all.
“All eight of the (coaching) candidates that we interviewed felt very comfortable with how we were going to sort of operate and even how they wanted to operate,” DePodesta said. “We were able to demystify it to some degree for them and I think they realized that, ‘Oh this is just football.’”
And the new coach appeared to understand his role as the catalyst of alignment and harmony.
“As we sit down and start bringing in some candidates and interviewing general manager candidates,” Stefanski said, “it sounds simple, but let’s all be on the same page. Let’s all know that this thing is about a shared vision. It is not about what Kevin Stefanski wants for the Cleveland Browns. We have a vision of what this is going to look like moving forward
and it is a collective vision.”
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