"He said, 'I appreciate you taking the fall for somebody else, 'cause I know it's not your phone,' " Thomas recalls. "And I'm just like dying there. I mean, I get so pissed off at guys when things like that happen. It was the most embarrassing moment of my career. But Hue holds everybody to a really high standard, and he never lets any detail slip, and I think that's what makes him an awesome head coach."

So Thomas got fined, and Jackson moved on to the next challenge, be it teaching Griffin his offense, attempting to resurrect the career of ultra-talented wideout Josh Gordon (who returned to the team in late July after having been away for more than a year, and who will be eligible to commence his latest comeback from a drug-related suspension in Week 5) or identifying which holdovers are expendable (as was the case with pass rusher Barkevious Mingo, the sixth overall pick of the 2013 NFL Draft, who, on Aug. 25, was shipped to the Patriots for a fifth-round pick in 2017).

There have been less daunting challenges faced by second-time head coaches, but Jackson is not complaining. While it remains semi-fashionable for outsiders -- and plenty of people in his profession -- to marginalize the Browns' latest leadership team as a bunch of naïve numbers geeks with Harvard diplomas and heads in the clouds, Jackson has been invigorated by the people who surround him, beginning with the man and woman at the top of the organizational flow chart.

"The Haslams are great owners," Jackson says. "There is not anything that Jimmy and Dee would not do for me or for this organization if we thought we needed it. Matter of fact, I've told them they do too much. I'm being very honest when I say that: We're over the top -- and I hate to say it that way -- when it comes to doing everything for our players. And I've made that statement [to the Haslams]: 'I think we do too much.'

"I'm not gonna say they're pampered. I just think ... there's a word that normally gets used in the National Football League, and it's not a good one: entitlement. I don't want our players to feel like they're entitled to anything other than what you earn. I'm not about giving anybody anything, because nobody gave me anything. I feel like I had to claw, fight and scratch to get to where I am. And I think the great players, and great teams, that's what they do. They're not caught up in, 'Well it's supposed to be this way. You owe me this.' No, nobody owes you anything. What we owe you is an opportunity."

Since embracing the opportunity to coach the Browns on that emotional Wednesday last January, Jackson has been energized by the endeavor. Changing a culture can be tiring, but when it feels as though everyone is pulling together, the climb toward respectability and relevance doesn't seem so steep. And if Jackson ever needs a motivational kick-start, he thinks back to that moment in mid-February when his phone rang and a woman's voice on the other line informed him that Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown -- a Browns special advisor -- wished to speak to him.

"I'll never forget when that phone call came; it was one of the most amazing things that happened in my life," Jackson says, his voice choking up. "I said, 'Jim Brown?' I said it about three times, 'cause it didn't seem real. Jim Brown, calling me? The Jim Brown! I mean, I'm almost shaking. You're talking about Jim Brown, the greatest player to ever lace up cleats in the National Football League, and he's wanting to talk to me? A guy who's been around the Crips and Bloods and in the prison system, who took young men and showed them how to do things better and be better people, and he wants to talk to Hue Jackson, a guy from South Central? And Jim Brown talked to me and was excited, and said he wanted me to be successful and that he would do anything that I needed to assist me in helping the organization be what he saw it could be. And trust me, I've used him every way I know how."

At the same time, Jackson is using the sometimes out-of-the-box thinking provided by Sashi Brown and DePodesta as a resource, even as some football traditionalists bristle at the analytics label.

"The core of what we're doing is just football," Sashi Brown insists. "We're not asking Hue to come out here with a calculator to figure out what play we're gonna run on third down. We're not selecting players based on some algorithm. We are watching tape, practicing, hitting the bag. We're a football organization first.