Good stuff from
Peter King's Monday morning column on the Kitchens hire:
The Kitchens Hire
One by one in the early days of the new year, coaching candidates were grilled by the Browns’ braintrust (owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam, GM John Dorsey, strategist Paul DePodesta, EVP J.W. Johnson, personnel people Eliot Wolf, Alonzo Highsmith, Andrew Berry), the interviews lasting six to eight hours apiece. Interim coach Gregg Williams first, then ex-Colts and -Lions coach Jim Caldwell, Minnesota offensive coordinator Kevin Stefanski, Saints assistant head coach Dan Campbell, Pats linebackers coach Brian Flores, Colts defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus … and last, interim offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens.
The Browns were looking for a leader of men, a respected man who knew their team, and not the best available offensive mind, which was the flavor of the month. They were looking for the best coach, in terms of presence, building a team, and scheming a modern offense and defense. That is why I respect what Cleveland did in hiring Freddie Kitchens, who, despite his success as offensive coordinator in the second half of the season with
Baker Mayfield, had to be better than six other men who spent at least six hours apiece with the interviewers over the course of eight days. This is a coach no one currently in the organization knew—and I am not exaggerating—when he was hired to coach the Browns’ running backs last winter. I don’t know if Kitchens will succeed or fail. But I do know this:
The Browns worked to identify strong candidates, ignored the most obvious one (Mike McCarthy, despite his closeness with Dorsey) on the market, and did not know at the start of the process three weeks ago who they would hire.
If you think the fix was in for Kitchens, consider that the buzz around the team, before the Kitchens interview, was that Stefanski of the Vikings was the favorite. They loved Stefanski’s interview and thought he’d be a good match for Mayfield. Then Kitchens had a blunt and boffo interview, and Stefanski and Kitchens were the two leaders in the clubhouse, and they came back for second interviews, and Kitchens won it.
Shouldn’t that be the way teams hire coaches? Denver GM John Elway
told me last week, effectively, that the fix was in on Vance Joseph. Elway had “pre-drawn” (his wording) the case for Joseph entering the 2017 coach search after Gary Kubiak, and Elway said he’d never do that again. In this case, if the Browns had a list of 100 names on their head-coach list at the start of the 2018 season, Kitchens would not have been on it. Ditto GM Chris Ballard in Indianapolis last year; he didn’t have Frank Reich anywhere near his list at the end of the 2017 season, and Reich ended up with the job, and he led the Colts from 1-5 to a playoff victory in 2018.
I asked Kitchens last week for the short version of what he said to the Browns’ committee when he met with them Jan. 7.
“The Cliff’s Notes version … okay,” Kitchens said Friday from Cleveland, the southern twang still prominent in his voice 21 years after he left the University of Alabama, where he played quarterback.
“I am going to get to know the players. I am going to ask the players their opinions, and I am going to listen to their input. I am going to convince them that we’re all in this together, and I can’t do it without them. They are going to trust me and respect me. Once they know you trust them and respect them, you can have tough conversations. It’s nothing personal. It’s just real. It doesn’t mean you’re a players’ coach. If I’m a players’ coach, I never would have been able to work for coach [Bill] Parcells [in Dallas in 2006]. I’ll make every decision based on the team and on the player. This is truly, probably, the ultimate people business. Coaches like to make it about themselves, but coaches aren’t playing the game.
It’s a players’ game. A coach might survive two or three years without the buy-in of the players, but without that, it’s over and they’ll have to move on to the next team.”
Pause. “That’s about it,” Kitchens said. “When I had the chance to run the offense this year [after Hue Jackson was fired in midseason], I felt the players respected me and trusted me. I haven’t invented the wheel. Trust me. It’s football, and a lot of people are great at teaching and coaching football. But this team, this offense, I felt we had respect for each other and I felt like we were getting results.”
Kitchens was amazed at the people the Browns called to fact-find about him. Adrian Peterson and David Johnson (coached by Kitchens in Arizona in 2017), Patrick Peterson and Larry Fitzgerald(who witnessed him for several years), Carson Palmer (coached by Kitchens from 2013-16), Kurt Warner, Bill Parcells (Kitchens was on his last Dallas staff in 2006) … and A.Q. Shipley.
A.Q. Shipley?
“I see this number come up that I don’t recognize, and I almost didn’t answer,” said Shipley, a center for the Cardinals since 2015. “Then I pick up, and this guy says,
This is so-and-so from the Cleveland Browns, and I was hoping I could ask you a couple of things about Freddie Kitchens. I thought, ‘Wow. They must be serious about Freddie, calling me.’ But I love Freddie. And I told them that.
When I got to Arizona, Freddie was the QB coach at the time, and for the first time I’d seen this in football, the quarterback coach, the offensive coordinator, the quarterback—Carson Palmer—and the center—me—would meet during the week. Communication between the center and the quarterback is so important for protections and other stuff, and Freddie understood it would be a good idea to communicate multiple times every week, between Wednesday morning and Saturday night. It was a great idea. They also asked me how I thought Freddie would be up in front of the full team. I told ‘em he’ll be great with players. I think they must have already known that, from how Freddie did with Baker Mayfield late in the year.”
“What are you calling me for?” Parcells told the Browns. “You been around this guy for the last nine months. You know him.”
When Kitchens heard Cleveland would interview six coaches before him, and that he’d be last, he loved both of those things. When he heard all the people they’d called about him, he loved that too.
“I really was wanting them to have a thorough search,” Kitchens said. “One reason and one reason only: I wanted the organization, and I mean everyone in the room, to think, ‘He’s our guy.’ I didn’t want them to have any doubt. I didn’t want them thinking they wished they’d interviewed other guys. So if I got the job, I got the job because I was the best man. I got it for the right reasons. That’s what impressed me about this process. I didn’t know John Dorsey when I got here a year ago. He didn’t hire one of his friends. He didn’t hire someone to win the press conferences. He hired who he thought was the best coach for his team. He saw something in me I was always hoping someone would see—13 years coaching in the NFL, seven years coaching in college, just doing my job, trying to make players better. Nothing else. If nobody ever saw that, I’d have been fine, because I always liked my job.”
Curious: Mayfield was a top 10 NFL quarterback the second half of the season under Kitchens. What did Mayfield think of him getting the job?
Coachspeak. In-house. Time to be the head coach.
“You’ll have to ask him,” Kitchens said. “But I am pretty sure he’s not disappointed.”