The Browns nearly could have drastically changed the Lions franchise, but they flubbed their own instead

The Lions are in their golden years and it almost never happened

Mike Payton — Detroit Lions Beat Writer
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Ken Blaze-USA Today

The Detroit Lions are in their golden years right now. You might be a weird person who says something about the 1950s even though you probably weren’t alive for it, and that’s fine. Be weird, I guess. But for most of us, this is the best Lions team we’ve ever seen, and it’s just crazy how many times this almost didn’t happen.

Just this week, we learned that another team whose heyday might have actually been in the 50s had a real shot to change the Lions franchise a ton, but instead made the decision that, frankly, both these teams were laughed at for a long time.

The Browns had the chance to hire Dan Campbell in 2019, but they felt his methods were too old school

NFL writer Tyler Dunne, who has a great long-form site called Go Long that I highly recommend, was on the Schopp and Bulldog show on WGR 550 in Buffalo this week. During a discussion about how wrong the NFL media world was on Dan Campbell, Dunne talked about how the Browns had him in for an interview in 2019 and how they just didn’t get him.

“It’s not just media,” Dunne said. “I was chatting with somebody who was seated in that Cleveland Browns front office when they were looking for a head coach, when they might have hired Freddie Kitchens, and when Dan Campbell had his interview. I mean, (Browns owner) Jimmy Haslem really couldn’t get past the fact that this was a coach who wanted to run the ball and play good defense. I mean, they were so obsessed with analytics, they just looked at him like a dinosaur. So it wasn’t just media, it was people making the decisions, you know, they looked down at him.”

That really tracks. In 2016, the Browns became the team that was all about analytics when they hired Paul DePodesta as their Chief Strategy Officer. If you’re not familiar with DePodesta, he’s the guy that Jonah Hill played in Moneyball.

Cleveland’s entire strategy became about quantitative models and algorithms. Because of that, the Browns made every hire they could to stick with that model. They’re still doing it today. In fact, their analytics department was named the best in the league last year.

The Lions have an analytics department as well, but they didn’t really use it to find their next head coach. What they did do was make some front-office hires, like Chris Spielman, to help ownership take a more football-driven approach than they’ve taken before. That was always one of the big things with the Lions: there seemed to be a lack of football knowledge among ownership.

With that change came Campbell, and with Campbell came an extreme overhaul of a franchise that was arguably the worst in NFL history and is now in the best shape it’s ever been in. Again, it’s just crazy that this almost never happened.

The Browns went with Freddie Kitchens and then fired him after one season to hire Kevin Stefanski. At this point, he also could be on the outs with Cleveland, too. The Lions hired Campbell two seasons later, and here we are now.

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