It’s a very common notion, particularly amongst the gadfly media catering to the browbeaten, to inextricably link new Browns GM Andrew Berry with former GM Sashi Brown. Berry rose through the ranks under Brown, the team’s head personnel man from 2016-2017 and shares the academic, analytics-based background, so it’s an easy connection to make.
But as Albert Breer smartly notes in the latest installment of MMQB on Sports Illustrated, it’s simply not reality. Instead of following in his old boss’s misguided footsteps, Berry is marching down the path plotted by his 2019 team, the Philadelphia Eagles.
It’s something many in the Browns-centric media have been trying to convince a (rightfully) hardened and skeptical fan base for months. The recent moves in the front office confirm that Berry is walking away from Brown’s model, and it’s something Breer highlights in his column,
The new structure is, in fact, one reason why so many of the guys Berry worked with previously had to go—former assistant GM Eliot Wolf and VP of player personnel Alonzo Highsmith would have had to take de facto demotions to make it work. As the Eagles have it, the scouting department is set up in two silos. One is headed up by a VP of player personnel (Andy Weidl), the other by a VP of football operations (Berry’s old role). The former basically leads scouting, the latter everything else (analytics, etc.) In that structure, there was no room for an assistant GM like Wolf, and Highsmith likely would’ve had to be re-assigned to allow for Berry to have his own guy as scouting head (remember, Highsmith was hired over the top of Berry by GM John Dorsey)
Brown’s Browns had a definite bureaucratic kitchen slant to them, with a lot of cooks putting their own flavors into every single dish. It produced a lot of mismanaged, foul-tasting concoctions that would have set Gordon Ramsay into a profane tizzy. That’s not Berry’s way, something that was very evident from how he handled the scouting combine, free agency and the draft.
It’s not a guarantee that Berry’s path will succeed. But emulating a Super Bowl champion franchise is much smarter than leaning on the ways of a system that produced an 0-16 campaign and several regrettable personnel choices.
