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| I don't care if he is 81 years old, he is one of the best minds of the country, and he's the one Consultant who could make football sense out of the "analytics" wreckage left by Sashi Brown. I'm talking about Dr. Frank Ryan, a PhD mathematician from Rice University who also happens to be the last quarterback to win a World Championship for the Cleveland Browns. |
First welcome to Cleveland, Mr. John Dorsey! We're very happy to have a personnel expert with the stature of Mr. Dorsey come to our humble town. He has a had a very impressive career with the Packers, Seahawks and Chiefs, three teams that did very well. I feel very about having a guy like this make the call on a "franchise quarterback" in the upcoming draft.
I recommend that the Cleveland Browns should hire Dr. Frank Ryan as a consultant. He is the one guy who can assess whether the "analytics" that Sashi Brown brought to the team have any merits, or whether the whole thing should be pitched into the fire. Frank Ryan, on the one hand is a PhD mathematician and one of the most creative minds on the planet. On the other hand, he was the quarterback that led the Cleveland Browns to the NFL Championship in 1964. He is the one guy who can sort through what Sashi was trying to do and figure out what went wrong and what should be salvaged. In particular, the Browns still have analytics expert Paul DePodesta in the front office. Should he be kept or sent packing? I'm undecided, but I would trust Frank Ryan to determine whether analytics has value and how it should be best utilized. He could put it in terms that football people would be comfortable with.
Some of Sashi's ideas were brainless, in my opinion, but in some cases he may have had some good ideas. He and Paul DePodesta figured out that to build for the future, you need to get more and higher draft choices than the other teams are getting. You also need to spend more money on a winning team, so the losing teams need to avoid overpaying for veterans who are not capable of taking the team to a Super Bowl three years in the future. Save the salary cap for the future when it might make a difference for the Super Bowl. Frank Ryan would be able to advise John Dorsey which of these moves are sensible and which are not.
Where Sashi went wrong, in my opinion, is to actually weaken the team to the point of being the worst in the NFL. He got rid of veterans like Josh McCown, Joe Haden, Gary Barnidge, Karlos Dansby and Paul Kruger outright. He didn't try to re-sign guys who were interested in playing here, like Terrelle Pryor, Travis Benjamin, Mitchell Schwartz and Paul Kruger. These veterans might not have taken us to a Super Bowl, but we would not be the worst in the NFL. Haden is a case in point, since he actually IS still on the payroll to the tune of 7 million dollars. From all that we know, the Browns coaching staff did not want to cut him. That was all Sashi Brown.
There is a science associated with personnel moves. Should you trade a draft pick for a veteran? When is it better to trade up? Or trade down? Should you draft skill positions in early rounds? Or late rounds? How do you set a value on a starting cornerback? Math geeks and experts on valuation theory really can help answer questions like that in general, though you still need scouting and player evaluation skills.
Sashi may have been basically right that you should trade down if you are a team building for the future, and trade up if you are a playoff team needing one key player to get you over the hump. But you need a football guy to know when to violate those general rules. For example, I believe that late first round is usually not a good time to look for a franchise quarterback. But when the Packers were up at 24th overall in the 2005 draft, John Dorsey advocated drafting Aaron Rodgers, and wow, was he right. Analytics is another tool for the tool kit, but it doesn't replace the entire tool kit. Frank Ryan could help the Browns re-establish perspective, I do believe.
There is a science associated with personnel moves. Should you trade a draft pick for a veteran? When is it better to trade up? Or trade down? Should you draft skill positions in early rounds? Or late rounds? How do you set a value on a starting cornerback? Math geeks and experts on valuation theory really can help answer questions like that in general, though you still need scouting and player evaluation skills.
Sashi may have been basically right that you should trade down if you are a team building for the future, and trade up if you are a playoff team needing one key player to get you over the hump. But you need a football guy to know when to violate those general rules. For example, I believe that late first round is usually not a good time to look for a franchise quarterback. But when the Packers were up at 24th overall in the 2005 draft, John Dorsey advocated drafting Aaron Rodgers, and wow, was he right. Analytics is another tool for the tool kit, but it doesn't replace the entire tool kit. Frank Ryan could help the Browns re-establish perspective, I do believe.
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