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A couple of week after Mike Pettine was hired as the Cleveland Browns coach, the owner fired the team president (Joe Banner) and the general manager (Mike Lombardi).
Pettine claimed the news was “bittersweet.”
You know what, I doubt he’s losing any sleep over it.
The moves clear the way for him to have more power, and I’m not going to lie, the first time I heard the news, my gut reaction was he might have been involved in the coup.
I can’t prove it, but the guy is so Machavellian, I wouldn’t put it past him.
Before, there were too many cooks in the kitchen.
Joe Banner had final say over personnel, which was ridiculous. He’s a brilliant business mind, but not a football guy.
And the whispers around the NFL were that top coaches didn’t want the Cleveland job because of Banner’s power.
Remember last year, Chip Kelly was about to become Cleveland Browns coach, but backed out at the last minute, only to take the Philadelphia Eagles job shortly thereafter.
Kelly has final say on personnel in Philadelphia.
What was surprising was that the Browns didn’t keep Lombardi.
They fired Lombardi and Banner at the same time.
Why not keep Lombardi, who is a solid personnel guy, as the GM?
That is why this whole thing is fishy.
All of a sudden, out of the blue, Banner and Lombardi are fired, and Ray Farmer is promoted to GM, and it’s the Pettine-Farmer show.
Pettine is a so manipulative, it’s hard to dismiss the angle that he was working things behind the scenes.
This is one of the biggest media leakers I’ve ever seen in all my years of covering the Jets. He clearly did that to help himself get a head coaching job to curry favor with reporters. It was a troubling display.
This is a guy who got Rex’s friend Jeff Weeks bounced from the defensive coaching staff, winning a behind-the-scenes power play.
There is no way around it – the guy is slick.
I can’t prove this, but knowing how he operates, I wouldn’t be shocked.
Right now, the situation is so much better for Pettine.
Before he had two long-time NFL executives ahead of him on the personnel decision-making totem pole.
Now he has a guy (Farmer) who has never been a GM (Lombardi) or cap guy (Banner) before, so Pettine will have so much more say in picking the players than he would have before.
“I can already tell that we’re going to have a tremendous relationship,” Pettine told the Akron Beacon-Journal. “From the moment that I met him, I think we — it was very natural — our conversations, our philosophy about football, the draft, free agency, how to build a team. He and I are going to be — and he’s used the term — in lockstep from here on out … We’ve clicked, and I’m looking forward to a long, successful relationship.”
I’m sure he is.
February 14, 2014
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