The stories that emerge years after a Cleveland Browns coaching search are legendary. They are the types of Easter eggs people within the building can’t wait to crack open and share when they get out, and the morsels that reporters and readers love to consume.
There’s the time Jimmy Haslam asked prospective candidates what he should do while he was interviewing them. There was the time a coaching candidate was brought in to interview in consecutive years because the Browns are good at firing coaches after one year. When the coach returned the second time, it wasn’t so much to interview for the job again, but instead to interrogate those asking the questions why he should even consider taking their position after being passed over the year before. (To the surprise of no one, he didn’t get the job the second time, either.)
Haslam once called a coach he had just fired weeks earlier to ask him for advice on who to hire.
There will come a day, a few years from now, when this building has been swept out and mopped again, when all the role players involved in this coaching search will also be eager to share what really happened over the last three weeks. The leaks seem to be starting early this time, at least concerning Jim Schwartz.
Todd Monken is the Browns’ new head coach in a move no one saw coming. I’m not going to bash the hire. In fact, I was told by one NFL coach that he thought Monken is probably the best “football coach,” at least at this moment, among the three finalists.
But the Browns continue to make themselves an easy punchline with how they operate. The viral bit last week about essays and questionnaires was perhaps a bit overblown, but there are kernels of truth in there, too. I asked a few sports executives who have hired head coaches what they thought about giving prospective candidates a personality test or answering surveys as part of the interview process.
“Data is good,” one executive who has hired head coaches said. “But it seems to me that’s needed if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Leadership is hard to capture with data.”
The Haslam family desperately wants to win. They just have no idea how to get there. Sometimes it appears they don’t know what they want.
Does anyone want to be the #DawgPound head coach?!#NFL pic.twitter.com/O3Pn2yVg6d
— Rich Eisen Show (@RichEisenShow) January 23, 2026
So here we go again. The Browns fired a coach, Kevin Stefanski, who immediately became one of the hottest names on the market while they struggled to fill their undesirable opening. How do all the fans who clamored for Stefanski to be fired feel now? How would they have felt a month ago knowing Monken would be the replacement?
What seems clear at this point is that Haslam seems to be Jimmying again, and that rarely works out well. Say what you want about the Browns’ unorthodox approach to a coaching search, but it led them to Sean McDermott in 2016. Haslam just ignored the data and hired Hue Jackson instead.
Stefanski was on their radar using Paul DePodesta’s analytics approach in 2019, but Haslam sided with general manager John Dorsey and chose Freddie Kitchens instead. They corrected that mistake a year later.
Now, analytics-driven general manager Andrew Berry had an inexperienced 35-year-old candidate in Nate Scheelhaase, who checked all the boxes as the young, offensive-minded coach that is so popular in the league today. Yet Monken is the one who will be introduced next week.
Regardless of what is said from the podium, this feels like another Haslam hire because they’re all Haslam hires. He has not earned the benefit of the doubt to believe otherwise.
The owner hires the head coach. Every time. Every sport. A general manager or team president can make a recommendation, but ultimately it’s the owner’s call.
The only organization that seems to be honest about this is the Baltimore Ravens. When owner Steve Bisciotti was asked about quarterback Lamar Jackson’s role in the Ravens’ recently completed coaching search, he didn’t parse words.
“A lot of say, but he has no power,” Bisciotti said. “I have the power.”
That’s how it works with every owner in every sport.
How this ends with Schwartz remains to be seen. I heard throughout this process that the Browns were pushing Schwartz on all of their prospective candidates. Of all the strange twists that led to Monken’s hiring, that is perhaps the most baffling. Maybe this is semantics, but a team being fond of a coordinator and encouraging the head coach to consider retaining that coordinator is normal. It happened in Atlanta with Stefanski and Jeff Ulbrich.
Mandating a coach keep a coordinator, particularly one with Schwartz’s surly reputation, seems counterintuitive — particularly to a young, first-time coach such as Scheelhaase. Could a power struggle ensue? Perhaps the same would be true of Monken and Schwartz, although at least Monken has been around a bit longer and likely has a sturdier spine at this point.
Given Schwartz’s behavior over the past few days, I don’t see how he comes back. Haslam can throw more money at him to soothe any hurt feelings because that’s how the Browns typically problem-solve, but none of this is fair to Monken, who turns 60 in a few days and has waited his entire life for this opportunity. Now, one of the first questions asked of him next week will be about Schwartz.
This isn’t doomed to fail just because the Browns thought of it. Monken is gruff and has no problem telling players exactly what he thinks. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. How we got here is just another example of an odd process with an unexpected outcome.
Another coach, another freshly mopped floor. Another clean start.
When will the Browns figure out what they want?