Browns

Hue Jackson Says Firing Was Surprising, Thinks He Could Have Turned Offense Around

November 1, 2018

Former Browns HC Hue Jackson tells Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in a wide-ranging interview that he was surprised by the decision to fire him on Monday, but wasn’t completly caught off guard by the move.

“I was surprised. I’m not going to say just totally blindsided because there was just so much noise out there about what was going on with our football team that I thought was not true,” Jackson said. “But any time there’s all these undercurrents going, there’s something in there. I was surprised when both Jimmy and John walked in my office and let me know that they’d be relieving me as being the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.

“That’s a hard pill to swallow when you’ve given it your all, and you’ve worked extremely hard and you do everything you can to try to put the place in the best position to move forward. But again, it’s their decision. I have to respect it and move on.”

Jackson admitted that the offensive production wasn’t good enough, but said he thinks he could have turned it around

“What I didn’t and couldn’t predict was that our offensive production would turn out the way it did – especially considering us leading the league in turnovers on defense (the offense has converted the 22 takeaways into only 34 points),” Jackson said. “We all knew that trending down with a rookie future franchise QB on board was not an option. I do believe that having the opportunity finish it out (myself) would’ve been best.

“We had a lot of football left, were 2-5-1 with a rookie QB, left tackle, already played Pittsburgh twice, beat Baltimore, and could have easily been 3-4-1 if the first down isn’t taken back (in Oakland). The fact that we played four overtime games says that we were a better football team. In my mind, if we fix the offense – it’s a totally different story. So I do believe the move was premature. But I think a part of the problem again went back to the first two years.”

Regarding what went wrong with the first front office, Jackson explained that he felt they didn’t agree with the coaching staff on who their premium players were.

“One of the main reasons I took the job was because I believed the team had one of the best offensive lines in football already as a nucleus,” Jackson said. “As soon as I got there, we started moving the offensive line out. So that was my first red flag, but I knew I had to give it time to see what this new process was about. They assured me it was about winning now.

“I had a simple rule: if you’re going to take players off the team, you need to be replacing them with the comparable or better players. We weren’t doing that at all. We what really alarmed me was the first draft and what we did and how we went about evaluating and selecting our players.

“The problem was that the analytics and football were not on the same page on who the premium players were and what their value to a football team would be. This was more a people problem of collaboration than just an analytics problem. We were getting worse as a team – and the NFL is set up for bad teams to get better not worse.”

It will be interesting to see what’s next for Jackson. There has already been some speculation about a possible return to the Bengals.Jackson, 53, began his NFL coaching career back in 2001 as the Redskins RBs coach. He worked for the Bengals, Falcons and Ravens before he was hired by the Raiders as their offensive coordinator in 2010.

Jackson was later promoted to head coach but lasted one season at the helm. After four years with the Bengals, Jackson was hired as the Browns head coach in 2016.

During his time as the Browns’ head coach, Jackson led them to a record of 3-36-1 (8.8 percent) and no playoff appearances.