The Cleveland hire, and what a public record is worth

Cold open

Mays: Welcome to The Athletic Football Show. I’m Robert Mays. It is Tuesday, February third. Six days ago the Cleveland Browns handed their entire football operation to a man who has never been employed by a football team, and five days ago that man released Deshaun Watson. We did a show on the release on Friday and I’m not going to redo it this morning. What I wanted today is the part I think our business has been walking around, which is that this is a story about my industry at least as much as it’s a story about Cleveland’s football team. Derrik Klassen got into this the same way Nick Mansour did and then spent eight years getting where he is, and I asked him to sit in that for an hour. Dave Helman is here too. Let’s get to that conversation right now.

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Sixteen days in January

Mays: So let me put the frame on it, and Derrik, push on this, because I think two arguments got welded together on Wednesday and they are separate arguments. One is football, which is whether somebody who has never sat in a staff meeting can run one and call plays in October, and I don’t know the answer to that. The other one is about us. There are a few hundred people in this country who publish evaluations of football players for a living, and the arrangement all of us operate under is that what we publish is an argument. It isn’t a decision. Nothing happens after it and nobody audits it. And an owner in Ohio read one of ours and treated it like a body of work. I don’t have a settled position on that. I’ve been chewing on it for six days.

Helman: Can I go first with the dumb version, since I think I am the dumb version. My cousin sent me a screenshot of this guy’s YouTube page Wednesday night with no message attached to it. That’s what most people know right now. A screenshot.

Klassen: The date I keep going back to is the twelfth, not the twenty-eighth. On January twelfth he was in there for a mid-level evaluation job. I have applied for that job. Twice, at two different places, and I did not get either one. And I want to be precise about what that interview is, because people are describing it like it was loose. It isn’t loose. There’s a panel, somebody’s running questions off a sheet, they hand you tape and a deadline, and the whole design of it is to work out whether you fit the slot you applied for. Nothing in it invites you to talk about anything else. That’s the part I can’t make sense of yet.

Helman: He interviewed to be one of the people who grade college players for them. Now he employs those people. I’m sorry. I’m going to find that funny for a long time.

Mays: Is it funny to you in a way that’s separate from whether it’s correct, and I ask because, hold on, let me get to the actual question. The Greysons ran a normal search. They retained a firm, they interviewed Todd Monken, they interviewed Chris Shula, and by every account Monken was the front-runner deep into the month. So this is not a family that skipped anything. They did the whole thing and then did something else at the end of it, and nobody has been able to point at the piece that broke. So here’s the question, Derrik, and it’s two questions. Do you think the videos are the reason, or is it what he said in that room, and can anybody outside the room ever tell those two apart?

Klassen: No. Not from out here. Everybody arguing about it this week is arguing about which one they’d rather it was.

Helman: And then five days later they put a hundred and seventeen point six million dollars of dead money on one player. Nobody has ever done that on one guy. That’s what my cousin was texting about, by the way. Not the résumé.

Klassen: That’s a different conversation and I don’t think I’m the guy for it.

What a public record proves

Mays: I want to do the record seriously for a minute, because I don’t think anybody has. Everything he ever put up is still up. He didn’t take anything down when he got the job, and it means that unlike every other hire in this league there is a document you can open. Derrik, you’re the person on this show who can read that as a professional rather than as a fan of the story. I asked you to go do it and you did it. What’s it worth?

Klassen: I read four of them this weekend. The boards he put up in March 2022 and March 2023, most of 2024, and a run of the individual write-ups from that first spring. And I read the paragraphs rather than the rankings, because the rankings are what people fight about and they tell you the least. A ranking is where he ended up. The paragraph is how he got there. What I’d say, and I read fast so hold it loosely, is that the reasoning holds up better than the hit rate does, and the hit rate is already good. He missed on people. Everybody missed on those same people. The thing I’m looking for is whether somebody misses in a consistent direction, because a consistent miss is a fixable one, and his are consistent. He was early on movement skills in interior linemen three years running. It cost him twice before it paid.

Klassen: Here’s the part nobody wants from me, though. A board is an output. You can check an output all day long. What you can’t check is whether he writes the same paragraph with a general manager across the table who wants the other player, or whether he holds it in April with a clock running and eight people looking at him. That’s most of the job. Nothing he published tells you that. Nothing I’ve published tells you that about me.

Helman: So there’s more paper on this guy than on anybody who’s ever walked into that job, and it’s all paper on one part of it.

Klassen: Yeah. That’s about right.

Mays: And this is where I think our business is embarrassing itself a little, and I’ll put myself in it. The complaint I keep hearing from people I like is that there’s no record here. He has the most complete public record of anybody who has ever taken one of these jobs. What people mean is that it isn’t in the format they read. It isn’t a résumé, there’s no tree, there’s nobody they can call who worked with him in Kansas City. And I understand wanting somebody to call. That’s how this industry has always worked. It’s just not the same thing as him being unknowable, and people keep saying the two of those like they’re one complaint.

Helman: He hasn’t stood in front of a room and told grown men what to do, though. Not once. That’s the thing my dad said and I didn’t have an answer for him.

Klassen: That’s fair and I’d put it about the same way. He has done one part of this job in public and the other four parts not at all.

The long way

Mays: Derrik, I want to ask you the thing I asked you to come on and be asked, and you can tell me on air that it isn’t my business. You came out of the same place he did. Football Outsiders, then Zone Coverage, then the scouting side at Bleacher Report, and that’s eight years to get from writing on the internet to somebody paying you to evaluate players. He did it in sixteen days. What did the eight years buy you? And I don’t want the modest answer, I’ve heard you give the modest answer.

Klassen: They bought me the jobs. That’s the literal answer. I got paid per post for a long stretch of it. Not a salary, per post, and it was not much per post, and I was doing other work the whole time and writing at night and on weekends. I did somewhere north of four hundred prospect reports before anybody put me on a payroll for it. I’m not going to tell that like it was noble, because I liked it. I would have done it for nothing and for a while I was doing it for nothing. What I’d say about the mechanism is that every one of those steps was somebody deciding they liked how I wrote and knowing somebody who knew me.

Klassen: Nobody ever checked whether I got the players right.

Klassen: It didn’t come up. Not in one interview, at any of the three. I had the file. I had it printed. Nobody asked me for it.

Helman: I mean, that’s every business, though. That’s how I got hired at every place I’ve worked, and I’d include this one.

Mays: I want to stay in it rather than move off it, because Dave’s right that it’s every business and I don’t think that makes it smaller. So let me ask you the harder version. Do you think those eight years made you better at evaluating players, or do you think they made you somebody a person could hire without having to explain the hire to anybody?

Klassen: Both, and not in the ratio I’d want. I was twenty-three and wrong about quarterbacks in ways I can show you on paper, and there are things I got from being around people who had been doing it for thirty years that I would not have gotten off a laptop by myself. That’s real, I’m not going to pretend it away. But most of what I picked up in eight years is how these places work. Who signs off on what. What a report is supposed to look like by the time it goes upstairs. How to lose an argument in a room and still be in the room. And nobody asked him for any of that, and I don’t know whether that’s because they didn’t need it or because they didn’t know to.

Mays: Do you think he’d have been better than you at your job at twenty-three?

Klassen: Yes. I’ve read the 2022 board. That’s not a hard call.

Helman: This is the least fun I have ever had listening to you talk about a draft board.

Klassen: Yeah. I don’t have anywhere to put it yet.

Sunday

Helman: All right, can I ask the thing everybody who doesn’t do this for a living is asking me. Does any of this have anything to do with whether he can coach on Sunday? I’ve had five days of people arguing about career paths and nobody has said a word about what his offense is going to look like. He’s got to hire a staff, starting now. Is there a football version of this conversation, or is that in six months?

Klassen: Almost none of it, no. Evaluating players and coaching them are two jobs that happen to sit next to each other. He’s proven on one of them at a level I can measure. On the other one nobody has anything, and that includes the people who sound certain. We’re guessing. I’d watch the staff he hires over the next three weeks, because that’s the first thing anybody can check.

Mays: The thing I’d add, and this is what I’d want people to carry into the next eight months, is that the parts of this job we can see from the outside are the parts that matter least. We see the play sheet, we see the fourth downs, we see the Wednesday press conference, and that’s maybe a tenth of it. The rest is whether he can hire people who are better than he is at things he has never done, whether a forty-four-year-old position coach will run through a wall for him in week eleven when they’re three and seven, whether he can fire somebody in March. Nobody’s public record answers any of that. Not his, and not a coordinator’s, and we hire coordinators every January on the assumption that it does. I’ve watched forty of the normal ones fail and I know what those look like on the way down. I don’t know what this one looks like on the way down.

Helman: He’s twenty-eight, too. I keep forgetting that part and then somebody reminds me.

Klassen: The age is the one item on the list I have nothing on. I’ve never seen it predict anything in either direction.

Mays: My light going off is a, it’s almost like I’m getting the wrap up sign. All right. That is all we’ve got for today. Derrik, thank you. Dave, thank you. We’re back tomorrow, we’ve got the game on Sunday and we’ll be on it all week. Until then, appreciate it. Talk to you guys soon.