Former Browns coach Hue Jackson said the Brian Flores lawsuit 'woke up all the things he was feeling' after being fired in 2018. (USA Today)
Hue Jackson jumps to Brian Flores’ defense and revives claims the Browns set him up to lose
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Editor's note: Tony Grossi is a Cleveland Browns analyst for TheLandOnDemand.com and 850 ESPN Cleveland.
Hue Jackson accused the Browns in March of setting him up to lose and charged that owner Jimmy Haslam rewarded him for going along with the program.
Jackson made the comments in an appearance on the Really Big Show on 850 ESPN Cleveland because he wanted other minority coaches “to know the pitfalls that are out there.”
The comments didn’t gain much traction nationally at the time. But now Jackson is reviving the claims in support of former Dolphins coach Brian Flores, who filed a class-action lawsuit charging racist hiring practices against the NFL, the Dolphins and two other teams on Tuesday.
Appearing on ESPN Sportscenter on Wednesday, Jackson said, “When I see something happen to another one of my brothers, I’ve gone on record of telling the National Football League that I did not want to see anything else happen to any minority men this way, including Brian Flores. So this to me was another slap in the face when I heard this. It woke up all the things I was feeling.”
In his suit, Flores alleged that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered him a $100,000 bonus for each loss in 2019 to improve the team’s position in the 2020 draft.
In a series of tweets made by Jackson and Kimberly Diemert, executive director of the Hue Jackson Foundation, Jackson implied he was paid by the Browns to lose games, and that the executive team headed by Paul DePodesta and Sashi Brown also received bonuses for not winning.
Money for nothing
Jackson said in the Sportscenter interview that he wasn’t offered $100,000 for losses, but there were bonuses for meeting certain incentives such as aggregate rankings, having the youngest roster and owning multiple draft picks.
He said he turned down the bonus money.
But his “payment” came in the form of a contract option picked up after the Browns had gone 1-15 in 2016 and were 0-8 at the midway point of 2017.
In the interview in March on 850 ESPN Cleveland, Jackson said:
“The first vote of confidence I got was after the 1-15 season. Jimmy Haslam told me I did an outstanding job. He told me, ‘I’m sure this was the hardest year of your life.’ And I was shocked. You win one game and you did a great job? That makes no sense to me.
“The next year, after being 1-23, no one knows this, I get a contract extension. And I made it very clear that there’s three things that needed to come with that. [One,] that needed to be made public. That was never made public. I think we can all understand why it was not made public. Because it would have really set the tempo for exactly what was going on there.
"And No. 2, I wanted to have my name cleared from all of this that had been going on. I didn’t take the job under the pretense we were going to tear down the team and use analytics as the lead to do everything we were doing. That made no sense to me. And I wanted to make sure we started getting players that would give us a chance to win. I know what good teams look like. I know what it takes to win. But if you’re not in control of that, you do not get to make those decisions.”
Through a Cleveland Browns spokesperson, the Browns responded on Wednesday:
“The recent comments by Hue Jackson and his representatives relating to his tenure as our head coach are completely fabricated. Any accusation that any member of our organization was incentivized to deliberately lose games is categorically false.”
Jackson said Haslam never followed up with his agreement to make the contract option public.
Brown was fired as Browns executive vice president following the 2017 season and replaced by John Dorsey as general manager. DePodesta was retained as chief strategy officer and Berry moved along to the Eagles in 2019. Berry returned as the team’s general manager in 2020.
Jackson was fired in the middle of the 2018 season after compiling a record of 3-36-1 overall.
Career destroyed
“I’ll take responsibility for my role in it, but why isn’t anybody else taking responsibility in it?” Jackson said in the ESPN Cleveland interview in March. “There’s people leading the organization today in Cleveland that was just as big a part of that as I was, and those guys are getting paid for doing that. So obviously they were paid for losing. Yet I’m vilified for losing. This is a joke to me.”
Jackson claimed Brown and DePodesta made personnel moves without Jackson’s input because they were experimenting with analytics to build the team.
“They were going to be football plus analytics, but they intentionally made it football v. analytics,” Jackson said. “They weren’t looking out for coaches. They were going to take two years and they were going to find a way to use us as an experiment to make sure that they could get the data they needed for it to be better. At the expense of whoever. And that’s not right.”
Jackson said he was fired because of his record, but he took offense when Haslam said publicly that “internal discord” was also a reason.
“That was like a nuclear bomb that destroyed my name, my reputation and my career, and Jimmy Haslam was the one that dropped that bomb,” Jackson said in March.
On Sportscenter, Jackson said he reported his concerns to the league office.
“I’ve always wanted them to investigate it,” he said. “I truly believe that fraud stands no place in the National Football League. When I brought it to their attention, that’s what I thought they’d do. They did not investigate it. I was pushed over into arbitration and had those conversations with an outside party and obviously I didn’t win anything.”
Jackson indicated he would join his name to Flores’ lawsuit.
“If that’s what needs to happen,” he said. “I’m not afraid to stand behind Brian when it comes to anything because I know what our men go through. I think it’s unfair. I think it’s wrong.”
