A strong commitment to analytics led the Browns to lure longtime baseball executive Paul DePodesta of Moneyball fame away from the New York Mets and place him in a heavy hitter’s role within their Harvard-flavored front office.
The Browns named DePodesta their chief strategy officer on Tuesday, less than 48 hours after they announced owner Jimmy Haslam had fired coach Mike Pettine and General Manager Ray Farmer. DePodesta will help oversee all areas of the franchise’s football side, including the player personnel, player development, high performance and analytics departments.
DePodesta, 43, a noted analytics — the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics — expert with a degree in economics from Harvard, will report directly to Haslam as will new executive vice president of football operations Sashi Brown, a Harvard Law School graduate promoted Sunday from executive vice president/general counsel and given final say on the 53-man roster.
DePodesta will join Haslam, wife Dee, Brown and consultant Jed Hughes as the Browns interview candidates for head coach and general manager. Their first order of business is to hire a coach, who’ll control the game-day roster and report to Haslam. The coach will assist the search committee in hiring a GM, who’ll focus on talent acquisition and report to Brown.
“We are fortunate to bring in Paul, an extremely talented, highly respected sports executive who will add a critical dimension to our front office,” Haslam said in a news release. “His approach and ambition to find the best pathways for organizational success transcend one specific sport. ... We remain fully focused on the critical task of identifying the right head coach and a top talent evaluator who will provide the football expertise needed to be successful.”
Switching sports
After spending 20 years in Major League Baseball and the past five as the Mets’ vice president of player development and amateur scouting, DePodesta landed his first job in the NFL, but not his first in Cleveland.
In 1996, DePodesta began his MLB career as an intern in player development with the Indians. He became a major-league advance scout for the 1997-1998 seasons and later was named special assistant to general manager John Hart.
He then served as the assistant general manager to Billy Beane with the Oakland Athletics from 1999-2003. Despite budget constraints, they reversed the fortunes of the team by employing sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball used to evaluate players, as captured in the 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and later in the 2011 movie Moneyball. In the film, actor Jonah Hill plays a character (Peter Brand) based on DePodesta.
DePodesta, who played football and baseball at Harvard, aspired to work in the NFL long ago, but after stops in the Canadian Football League and the American Hockey League, the door opened in MLB. Now he has come full circle.
“Cleveland and football have always held a special place in my heart,” DePodesta, who served as GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2004-05, said in a prepared statement. “It was 20 years ago this month, after pursuing my first love of football and looking at every possible job in the NFL, that I got the biggest break I could imagine — a job offer from the American League Champion Cleveland Indians. As excited as I was then, I am even more excited now to return to Cleveland and to try to help the Browns.
“My focus is to bring whatever experience and perspective I can to collaborate with the team, with the intent of helping us make more informed and successful decisions. Admittedly, there will be an awful lot for me to learn, but I want nothing more than to help bring consistent, championship caliber football back to Cleveland and Browns fans and I look forward to starting right away.”
Joe Banner’s reaction
Former Browns CEO and ESPN analyst Joe Banner, a known proponent of analytics who believes its use in the NFL should increase, applauded the hire but also warned he thinks it’ll limit the team’s pool of head-coaching candidates and a dive too deep into data-driven decision making could cause trouble further down the road.
“You better get a head coach that really believes in this, or you’re going to have real serious conflicts,” Banner said on ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike. “ ... The analytics will tell [you to] trade away players as they get older for future draft picks and accumulate as many draft picks as you can. ... It’s going to take a unique coach in the NFL. There isn’t one of the 32 right now that’s going to walk in and say, ‘Hey, I believe in that.’ ”
Banner said analytics would tell the Browns to trade nine-time Pro Bowl left tackle Joe Thomas, 31. They nearly dealt Thomas in October to the Denver Broncos but didn’t.
“Presumably, next year, if that same Joe Thomas trade comes up, they’re making the trade,” Banner said. “You’ve got to have a head coach that believes in all that. I traded [running back] Trent Richardson. Do you think [ex-Browns coach Rob Chudzinski] was happy about that?”
Later on SportsCenter, Banner joked Chudzinski “almost killed me” for trading Richardson.
“I had an offer to trade Josh Gordon just a couple weeks later,” Banner added. “Do you think I would still be alive if I’d made that?”
Nate Ulrich can be reached at nulrich@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Browns blog at www.ohio.com/browns.