The Browns lost to the Bengals Sunday. Another loss for the Orange and Brown was less surprising than the dog finishing your toddler’s unattended sandwich at a cookout.

Jimmy Haslam has been publicly supportive of both general manager Andrew Berry and head coach Kevin Stefanski all the way into the month of December. They both received contract extensions in June of 2024.

If either were to be shown the door, there’d be quite a bit of money owed to them while new blood was also being paid as their replacements. The Haslams have certainly shown a willingness to open the checkbook in a way that Browns fans are unaccustomed to since the franchise returned to the league in 1999.

The Deshaun Watson deal has gone worse than letting a blind guy cut your hair when he’s drunk, but it definitely is evidence that the Haslams are keen on and anxious to spend in order to be competitive on the NFL stage.

And while the money paid to coaching and front office personnel doesn’t count against the salary cap, it’s no reason to have an unnecessarily quick trigger in replacing folks. Jimmy Haslam has intimated that this very lesson, of the consequences associated with high turnover in leadership positions within the organization, is one that he’s learned from failures earlier on in his ownership of the Browns.

AB should have a bit of mess on his shoes for some of the maladministration that’s gone on upstairs over the past five seasons, but it’s also likely that at least a portion of that blame is due elsewhere (as discussed here).

So what we’re specifically interested in today is if Stefanki’s job is on the line. We’ll look more at that right now in Part 2.

—@PoisonPill4