Brian Billick says Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill run the Browns – NBC Sports Philadelphia
While many fans and analysts were shocked by what the Eagles gave up for the No. 2-overall pick in the 2016 draft and the right to take Carson Wentz, my initial reaction was quite a bit different. I didn't think the Browns got nearly enough back in the trade, not to warrant passing up on the potential franchise quarterback they themselves desperately needed.
This is what happens when you put a baseball man in charge of a football team, I thought.
As it turns out, I'm not the only person who feels that way. Former Super Bowl champion head coach Brian Billick has been trolling the Browns all week, starting by Tweeting they might not win a game all year — not at all improbable if they can't find a way to beat the Eagles on Sunday — and culminating with a shot at Major-League-Baseball-whiz-turned-NFL-front-office-guru Paul DePodesta of Moneyball fame.
Yeah, Billick went there, joking on 94WIP on Friday morning that the actors who portrayed Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane and a young DePodesta are the same people running the Browns since the latter was named the club's "chief strategy officer" during the offseason.
They’re clearly a team that has a long way to go. They’ve got Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill running the front office because they think they’re going to Moneyball their way to this. OK, that’s fine. We’ll see. But they’re a long way from this happening and I don’t mean it disrespectfully, I don’t see a game — right now, not withstanding injury — that I would bet on them winning. And I will put a small wager on the fact, that even at home, I think they’ll likely be an underdog in every game this season.
Hill's, I mean DePodesta's version of Moneyballing the NFL consisted of continuously trading down in this year's draft and stockpiling future picks. After trading places with the Eagles, the Browns moved back in the first round yet again. In fact, they wound up dealing all three of the choices they received from the Eagles in 2016.
In theory, it's not a completely horrible blueprint. Draft picks are like lottery tickets, and the more a team has, the greater their odds of finding talented players.
There are a couple of problems though. One, by trading down from No. 2 to No. 15 in the first round, the Browns passed on the opportunity to take a potentially franchise-altering talent at the top of the draft. Two, and this is the big one, all of the picks in the world might not mean a thing with no quarterback, which is exactly what was sitting right there for the taking in the form of Wentz. Who knows when that opportunity will present itself again. Even if the Browns do go 0-16, there isn't guaranteed to be a prospect as complete as Wentz.
Of course, DePodesta also made it clear that in their evaluators' estimations, Wentz will never be a top-20 quarterback in the NFL. If the Browns simply didn't like the kid, I guess you can't fault them for that — although that's probably all the more reason to think he'll be successful too.
Yet even with that being the case, it wasn't a good trade. The meat of the swap was third- and fourth-round picks this year, a first-rounder next year and a second in 2018 to go from No. 2 to No. 8. For the sake of comparison, the Rams gave the Titans a first, two seconds and three thirds to jump from 15 to 1 for Jared Goff in the same draft. Or perhaps a more relevant example is when Washington went from 6 to 2 for Robert Griffin III in 2012, sending two firsts and a second to St. Louis.
Other organizations have fared better in these situations. Let's just leave it at that.
There's definitely more than a hint of irony with the Eagles' Week 1 opponent. There's a very real chance Wentz will struggle, opening the door for an upset. That won't change the fact that the Browns' attempt to implement a form of Moneyball in the NFL is being met with plenty of skepticism, which doesn't come as a surprise seeing as a baseball GM is running their front office and passed on a potential franchise quarterback at the top of the draft after nearly two decades of swinging and missing later.
All that stockpiling picks for the future has taken a three-win team and left them with the aforementioned Griffin at quarterback and the team around him looking like it might not be so much as marginally improved. No wonder Billick is trolling.
