CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Hue Jackson, at long last, is finally the victim he always made himself out to be.

He's the victim of a franchise with hope that couldn't stomach his ineptitude any longer; a victim of owners who finally stared their obvious mistake in the eyes and acted; the victim of a city tired of the excuse-making of a failed leader who always fell short, whatever the standard was.

In the long, dysfunctional history of the Browns, what Jackson perpetrated on this city for 40 games, 36 losses and 33 months was an abomination.

A few months ago I sat in Jackson's office and he vowed the Browns would win. I told him I'd write it when it happened. He promised I'd be writing it.

Instead, we're here.

Hue Jackson has been fired. No coach has ever deserved it more.

Note this now, because soon enough Jackson will find a friendly writer and his take on what went wrong in Cleveland will come out. With Jackson, it always does.

He'll take direct shots at the front office, the media and parts of the roster. He'll take veiled shots at ownership and maybe even the fans. He'll claim no coach could have done any better than 3-36-1 with what he was handed, just like he declared no coach could have avoided 1-31.

Here's the pre-emptive response:

Anyone could have done better.

For the 2016 season, the Haslams adopted a plan to try something different, to tear down and rebuild, and from the start Jackson was more interested in saving himself than doing what was best for this team. There were mistakes along the way, there always are, but Jackson couldn't tolerate the missteps of others -- Sashi Brown, DeShone Kizer, Cody Kessler -- while piling his own gaffes on top of each other.

Jackson, surely, will take this attack as personal. He was always concerned with the idea of lines being crossed, wanting to differentiate the coach from the person and bristling whenever he believed his character was questioned.

When it comes to Jackson the person, it's not personal. Why would anyone have anything against Jackson on that level?

But in a city like Cleveland, with fans as loyal and as beaten down as Browns fans, of course it's personal when it comes to his job. Jackson wasn't just a leader of the locker room, he was the leader of a nation of Browns backers hoping and praying this would be different than the coaching failures of the past, of two years of Eric Mangini and two years of Pat Shurmur and a year of Rob Chudzinski and two years of Mike Pettine.

It was different. It was worse than all of them.

Jackson didn't have a winning roster for his first two seasons. But he didn't have a 1-31 team. As I said before, he took a losing team and made it historically awful. He took a difficult job and made it impossible.

Now, with a competitive team, he was doing the same -- underachieving again.

There are problems in Cleveland. Ownership is a problem. The receivers are a problem. The offensive tackles are a problem. The game plan from the coordinators are problems.

Every single problem Jackson faced for 2 1/2 seasons, he took and made worse.

Without an answer at quarterback, he overhyped his options and then benched them.

After wiping out basically his entire coaching staff, he hired veteran coordinators in Todd Haley and Gregg Williams and then couldn't work with them.

Facing a long and taxing rebuild, he panicked last season when he didn't need to, nearly gave away draft assets in a desperate QB move for AJ McCarron and then led the Haslams to dump Brown, the GM he couldn't work with.

Brown, who has plenty of detractors, at least always took a long-term view that he believed was the best chance for the Browns to win. Jackson never worried about more than what could get Hue Jackson through the day, no matter the cost to the team.

With the Browns taking the longview, Jackson had built-in job security that he never realized he had. No one, including the Haslams, held 1-31 against him. In the face of failure, there was a greater goal in mind.

But Jackson couldn't avoid making everything worse. It wasn't just 1-31. It was how Jackson handled 1-31.

Every news conference was a chance for Jackson to stake an unnecessary claim or pledge an unneeded promise. He chose bold words, and never backed them with actions.

It's why the man wound up in a lake. That will be a lasting memory from this dark time in Cleveland football history.

But Jackson's greatest legacy will be his everyday failings, the time after time he sat before a microphone and spouted platitudes no one bought.

Browns fans had to watch their team lose on Sunday. And then they had to watch Jackson explain it and excuse himself on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

I thought letting Jackson finish this season was fine, as long as he wasn't hurting Baker Mayfield. Fears that he was thwarting the development of the rookie QB played into this call.

The future of the Browns is brighter today because Jackson isn't part of it. But before looking ahead, we owe it to ourselves to bury the past.

For 40 games, Browns fans had to call Hue Jackson their coach.

For 40 games, Jackson did little but lose and worry about Hue Jackson.

For too long, Cleveland was the victim of a coach who earned every bit of that 3-36-1 record. Let him wear that record as a tattoo of his time here.

Cleveland will try to forget.