DawgsByNature.com

The new Browns front office agreed to buy football’s most decrepit, neglected fixer upper and have started the demolition necessary to eventually build one of the most valuable homes in the NFL.

Sashi Brown, Paul DePodesta and the rest of Cleveland’s unique front office have handled free agency in, well, a unique way. And while many have mocked their decisions as classic Browns’ idiocy … they’ve been brilliant.

If the executives who, on an annual basis, throw caution and their checkbooks to the wind and hand mega contracts to players on the first days of free agency are calling you “clueless” for not following their antics … you’re probably doing at least something right.

By the way, this isn’t the first time DePodesta has been called “clueless” by other executives in his sport. No big deal to him.

The Browns have been bad for a long time now — since 2008, they’ve managed more than five wins in a season just one time.

They’ve been half-assing their “rebuilding” process for like a decade, and it’s time to entirely blow it all up and do it right, even if that almost assures they’ll be bad for a few more years.

Alex Mack, Travis Benjamin, Mitchell Schwartz, Tashaun Gipson and Johnson Bademosi … the Browns top free-agents who moved on to other teams last week and sparked the widespread “OMG, LOL, what are the Browns doing letting these guys go?” criticism are all good players — but far from franchise-changers.

Simply put — a rebuilding process should not start by spending extra to re-sign average / above-average veterans, particularly if they’re leveraging your offer to negotiate pricier deals elsewhere.

They’d ultimately be too expensive — to either have on the roster or cut — and, in a way, superfluous when the rebuilding process is yielding positive results in two or three seasons and money is needed to extend young stars and add important pieces in free agency.

A new order

For an example of how to properly execute a rebuilding process in today’s NFL, look no further than … the Raiders and Jaguars.

I think many NFL teams are envious of the Raiders and Jaguars.

(That reads pretty weird, doesn’t it?)

I don’t mean envious of what they’ve recently accomplished. Because neither team has made the playoffs — or, hell, had a winning season — in a long time.

But the closeted envy likely resides in these facts:

Each franchise has a young, talented quarterback, budding superstars on offense and defense and went into the 2016 offseason with a Mark Zuckerberg amount of cash to spend in free agency.

Seems like the “Jaguars-Raiders model” is almost precisely what the Browns are following.