“We are not telling you he’s ready.”

GREYSON: Thank you all for coming. I’m going to read some of this. I don’t do this well and I’d rather get it right than sound good.

We closed on this team three weeks ago. We interviewed six people for the head coaching job. They were serious people and I would have been comfortable with more than one of them.

Today we’re naming Nick Mansour head coach and general manager of the Cleveland Browns. He’s twenty-eight years old. He has not coached a football team. He has not worked in a football building. Both of those things are true and I’d rather say them myself than have them said to me.

I want to be careful about the next part. We are not telling you he’s ready. I don’t know if he’s ready. I don’t believe anybody could know that, including him. What we’re telling you is that we did the work, this is where it came out, and my family is responsible for it. If it’s wrong, it’s ours.

He’ll take your questions after me. I’ll take a few first.

Mary Kay Cabot · cleveland.comGrant, he has coached zero football games. Zero at any level, in any league, at any age group. You started this search with men who have coordinated in Super Bowls. How does a search that starts there end here?

GREYSON: It started there and those conversations were good. Then we had a conversation with somebody we’d brought in for a different job, and it changed what we thought the job was.

I’m aware that sounds like a small reason for a large decision.

Tony Grossi · ESPN ClevelandDid you interview him for this job, or did he talk you into it? Because I’ve been covering this team since 1984 and I have never — this is not a thing that happens.

GREYSON: Neither one, exactly. We brought him in on the twelfth for a job in the scouting department. Not this. A job three levels below this.

He was in that building six hours. He wasn’t selling anything. He’d done a piece of work nobody asked him for and we couldn’t put it down. I called my sister that night. We brought him back twice.

Albert Breer · Sports IllustratedWhat convinced you? Specifically. Not the impression he made — the thing you could point at.

GREYSON: I can tell you exactly, because we did it before we ever spoke to him and we wrote it down.

He’s published a draft board every year since 2019 and every one of them is dated and public. So we took the top hundred from ’21, ’22 and ’23 and we scored them against what those players have done since. Snaps. Whether they got a second contract. Whether the team that drafted them kept them. Then we scored our own department’s boards from the same three years the same way, and two other public boards from people who do this professionally.

His were better. Not by a rounding error, and not on one class. He was better on interior defensive line and on offensive line in particular. And he was better in the fourth round than he was in the first, which is the part I didn’t expect. In the first round everyone is looking at the same thirty players. In the fourth round you’re on your own.

That’s what moved us. It’s a spreadsheet. I’d hand it to you but it has our own people’s names down the side of it.

Daryl Ruiter · 92.3 The FanContract length. Whether there’s an option year. And who he reports to on football decisions.

GREYSON: Five years. No option year, on purpose. I’m not giving you the money.

He reports to me. On football he decides. If we ever override him on a football decision, that means something has gone badly wrong on our end. I don’t plan on it.

National reporter · NFL NetworkIs this a publicity stunt?

GREYSON: No. I don’t have any way to prove that to you today.

If we lose, it will look like one. I don’t think there’s an argument I could make from up here that would survive four wins, so I’m not going to make one. We think it’s the best football decision available to us. That’s all I’ve got.

Zac Jackson · The AthleticSet the individual aside for a second. What does a hire like this tell us about what your family believes about how a football team gets built?

GREYSON: I don’t think it tells you very much, and I’d be suspicious of me if I said otherwise.

We aren’t demonstrating anything. We looked at one man’s work against several other people’s work and his was better, and everything else about him is a reason to say no that we decided not to take. If that adds up to a philosophy, somebody else can say what it is.

(Greyson gathered his page. A reporter asked from the left side of the room whether ownership had made a decision on the Brook Park stadium project. He said, “Not today,” and walked to the back wall.)

MANSOUR: Hi. I’m not going to read anything, I’d just be repeating him and he did it better than I would. Thanks for coming out in this. Ask me whatever you want.

Mary Kay Cabot · cleveland.comYou’ve never coached a game. You’ve never run a position group. On Monday morning you are responsible for fifty-three grown men, most of whom have been paid to play this sport longer than you’ve been watching it seriously. Why should any of them listen to you?

MANSOUR: They shouldn’t yet. I haven’t done anything.

And I don’t want to answer that by listing some other kind of experience that’s supposed to count instead, because it doesn’t. I’ve never managed a locker room. I’ve never managed six people. That is a real hole and it’s the one you’d worry about if you were them.

What I can do on Monday is know the football better than I’m supposed to and tell people the truth about what I see, including when the truth is that I got something wrong. That’s not nothing. It’s also not fifteen years of doing this.

Daryl Ruiter · 92.3 The FanTwo things. Who has final say on the fifty-three. And is there anybody in this organization who can tell you no.

MANSOUR: I do. It’s my card. If a guy’s on this team it’s because I put him on it, and when somebody gets cut in August that’s me and I’m not going to describe it any other way.

On the second one, everybody. I mean that literally and it’s not a nice thing I’m saying, it’s how I want it set up. If a scout thinks I’m wrong about a player I want him to say it in the meeting, in front of people, in February. Not in a hallway in May. I’m going to be wrong about players. Everybody who has ever done this has been wrong about players.

Can I add one thing to that, because you asked it precisely and I don’t want to give you half of it. Grant and I talked about the ownership piece specifically. If they want to override me they can, they own the team. I asked them to do it to my face and to make me argue about it. That hasn’t come up.

Tony Grossi · ESPN ClevelandYou interviewed for a scouting job on the twelfth. Sixteen days later you have both chairs. So is this a football hire, or did this family find a young man who is never going to tell them no?

MANSOUR: That’s fair and I can’t prove the answer to you today. Here’s the one thing I know.

In that meeting I told them what I thought the last six drafts were worth, and it wasn’t a flattering number, and I said it about picks the people sitting across from me had signed off on. I wasn’t being brave. I didn’t know I was interviewing for anything except the job they’d asked me in for, so I just said it, and then I sat there for a second afterward thinking I’d probably talked myself out of it.

If what they wanted was somebody agreeable, they picked wrong. I know how it looks.

Zac Jackson · The AthleticYou have both jobs. Historically, when one person holds both, the head coach eventually starts protecting the roster the general manager built. What’s the mechanism when your evaluation of a player and your depth chart disagree?

MANSOUR: That’s the thing I’m most worried about and I don’t have a clever structure for it.

What I told them in the interview is that I’d rather that conflict live inside one person than between two, because inside one person it gets settled in a day instead of over a season. That’s the argument for it. It’s not a guarantee.

The only real protection I’ve come up with is writing things down. When I put a grade on a player in April I want it on paper with a date on it and a name on it, and in November, when I’m playing a guy because he’s mine instead of because he’s good, I want somebody in that scouting department whose actual job is to walk in and put the April page on my desk. I’ve got two people in mind for that.

Albert Breer · Sports IllustratedWho’s going to work for you? There are position coaches with fifteen years in this league who are going to look at your résumé and pass.

MANSOUR: Some of them will, and they should. I’ve called around thirty people since Sunday and a few of them were polite in a way that told me the answer before they got to it. That’s a rational thing to do with your career and I didn’t take it personally.

What I’m looking for isn’t people who are convinced by me. I want people who have done this a long time and who will argue with me in the meeting instead of in the parking lot. If somebody comes here and is careful around me it won’t work and I’d rather they stay where they are.

National reporter · NFL NetworkAre you calling plays? And who’s calling the defense?

MANSOUR: I’m calling the offense. That was the arrangement from the first conversation and if it goes badly it goes badly with my name on it.

On defense, I don’t have a coordinator yet. I’m in the middle of that and I’m not going to talk about who I’m talking to. But I’ll tell you how it’s going to work, because I don’t want a guy hearing about it in July and thinking he got squeezed.

I’m going to be heavily involved in what the defense is. Not the Sunday calls. The teaching. How a call gets taught, so that a second-year linebacker can carry twelve of them instead of five and still play fast. What we’re asking a safety to do on a given snap, and whether that safety could tell you what it is in one sentence. Whether the whole thing looks like a lot from the other sideline and like one idea from ours. That part I care about enormously and I’m going to be in those meetings every day.

Then on Sunday the coordinator calls it. I won’t be in his ear. I’ll be busy — I’ve got an offense to call and I’m not good enough at this yet to do two things at once, and honestly I don’t think anybody is. Whoever takes that job is going to hear all of this from me before he takes it. He’ll know exactly what he’s agreeing to and he can tell me it’s a bad deal.

National reporter · ESPNYou’re twenty-eight. You would be the youngest head coach in the modern history of this league by a wide margin, and there are players on this roster older than you are. Does that concern you?

MANSOUR: Not the way I think you mean it. If I were twenty-eight and hadn’t watched anything, that would be a problem. I’ve watched a great deal.

The version of it that is a real problem is that I’ve never been inside a season in December when it’s going badly, and I don’t know what I’m like then. I have no data on myself. Nobody does.

Michael Burton is thirty-four. He’s been in, I think, five different buildings in December when it was going badly. I’d be an idiot not to ask him what those looked like from the inside, and I plan to.

Cleveland televisionEverything you have ever said about football is still on the internet, including the parts you got wrong. Are you taking any of it down?

MANSOUR: No. Why would I?

Most of the value of that stuff is that it’s dated. If you can’t check what somebody thought in 2022 then nothing he says in 2026 costs him anything.

There is a nine-minute video of me from a few years ago explaining, at length, with graphics, why a receiver was going to be a top-fifteen pick. He went in the fourth round and he’s better than I said he was. Somebody has already cut that together and put music under it. It’s funny. I watched it.

The other thing you should know is I recorded all of it in an apartment with a moving blanket stapled to the wall, so the tone is not what you’d call executive.

Mary Kay Cabot · cleveland.comYou inherit a roster with Deshaun Watson on it, a quarterback room with two second-year players in it, and Denzel Ward on a two-year, sixty-two-million-dollar extension signed by a general manager who was fired three days later. Where do you even start?

MANSOUR: By talking to people. I have not met a single player on this team. Not one, not on the phone.

So I’m not going to stand up here on the first afternoon and characterize any of them, because they’d read what I said about them before they ever met me, and that’s a poor way to introduce yourself.

On Denzel — the contract is signed and I wasn’t here. He’s an excellent football player and he’s from here, and those are two separate good things. I’d like to sit down with him this week. Everything else in your question I’m going to have answers on and I don’t have them today.

National reporter · Associated PressThere are assistant coaches who have been in this league twenty-five years waiting for a job like this one and will never get one. What do you say to them?

MANSOUR: Nothing that’s going to help, and I don’t think they’re wrong to be furious.

I didn’t take it from anybody. I don’t get to decide who gets hired. I got to decide whether to say yes and I said yes in about four seconds, which I’d guess any of them would have too.

If a guy who’s been at this twenty-five years wants to tell me I’m not qualified for this, he’s describing something accurate. I’d still rather have him in a room with me than not, and a few of them have already been generous with me this week when they had no reason to be.

National reporter · The AthleticYou marched in the Michigan State band. Trombone.

MANSOUR: Four years. And bass guitar in the basketball band, which is the better job, because you’re indoors and they feed you.

It’s not a football credential and I’ve never said it was. You do get to run out of a tunnel about forty times without anybody hitting you, which I’d recommend to anyone.

(A camera at the back of the room cut out. He stopped and asked the operator whether he needed a minute. The operator said no.)

Daryl Ruiter · 92.3 The FanFollow-up on the fifty-three. Are you keeping the scouting department that produced the boards Mr. Greyson just told us you beat?

MANSOUR: Yes, and I’m going to hire more of them.

I should say something about what he just told you, because it can be heard the wrong way. I beat those boards with unlimited time, no travel, no medicals, no signing-bonus math, and no consequence for being wrong. Those are not the same job. Some of the best work in that department never made it out of the department, and I read a fair amount of it in the last two weeks.

The plan is more scouts, not fewer. That was the first thing I asked them for.

Cleveland televisionWhat do you want to say to Browns fans today?

MANSOUR: I don’t have anything for them yet.

Everybody who has stood at this podium has given that speech. I’ve watched some of them on YouTube this week, which I don’t recommend. I don’t think the speech has ever been the problem here. So I’m going to skip it.

I’ll be here early tomorrow. That’s all I’ve got today.

Cleveland.comHave you told your parents?

MANSOUR: Sunday night. My dad asked how many games there are. I said seventeen, and he said that seems like a lot, which I thought was a reasonable response.

My mom asked if I had to move. I said yes. She was quiet for a second and then she was thrilled about it. Neither of them really knows what this is. That’s been sort of nice this week.

(A team communications staffer said that was the last question. Mansour asked whether he could take two more. He took two more, both about the coaching staff, and gave the same answer to each: nothing to announce, and he expected to have most of it filled by the second week of February. The availability ran fifty-one minutes.)