Under team owner Jimmy Haslam, there have always been turf wars inside the Cleveland Browns. Some were quiet and conniving. Others were loud and ham-handed. Some took place with the office door closed. Others were broadcast on HBO for the world to see. For the balance of Haslam’s reign, time has always created a common thread among warring parties.

Eventually, nearly everyone would lose — on the field and off. And in hindsight, the roadmap to failure couldn’t have been more obvious if it had been drawn on the back of a pink slip.

For the Browns, this has turned the Haslam era into a layer cake of failed regimes. From the beginnings of Joe Banner, Mike Lombardi and Rob Chudzinski, right into the most recent endings of Hue Jackson, Freddie Kitchens and John Dorsey. Smashed in between, NFL coaching and executive careers were often left to be rebooted or fundamentally changed forever. Whether it was Jackson, Alec Scheiner, Ray Farmer, Mike Pettine, Todd Haley or a litany of others in the margins of a perpetual fallout zone.

We can talk about the failures forever, clucking our tongues at the factionalism that has been the most consistent part of the Cleveland Browns. Or we can address the two fundamental questions that matter when looking forward:

Has Browns ownership learned anything during this brutal process of warring and attrition?

And …

If it has, can it actually apply the lessons it has purchased with millions of severance dollars and incalculable embarrassment?

The answer to this — whether Browns fans like it or not — is Kevin Stefanski.

Browns were a disorganized organization

Note that I didn’t say Stefanski was the right answer, or even a good answer. But make no mistake, the new Browns coach is the beginning of a different answer.

For the first time since Haslam took over this franchise, he’s trying to engineer a structure where the head coach, general manager and chief strategist are not only on the same page, but are carrying the same book and speaking the same kind of football language. That’s the end goal in ultimately pursuing a trio of Stefanski, DePodesta and (if it actually comes to fruition) general manager Andrew Berry. To take three Ivy League minds who each embrace analytics and put them into a rowing crew together. All pulling in the same direction. All unified together and, if need be, challenging and debating Haslam as a unit rather than individual shards of opinion.

That is what this hire is about: Locking the braintrust together rather than incentivizing rivalry.

As one source framed it during the coaching search: “Jimmy has seen enough to know it hasn’t worked for him doing it the other way. John [Dorsey] and Paul [DePodesta] didn’t see eye-to-eye on things, but the bigger problem is they didn’t truly believe in each other. I think that’s what Jimmy is looking for — getting everyone on the same page [in the fundamentals], but also having confidence in each other as individuals to execute.”

It certainly wasn’t that way with the structure of the last regime. And there will be no shortage of gory details and illustrations to drive that point home — particularly with yet another wave of fired personnel set into the wind. But one story sums up all of Haslam’s past failures the best. It was recounted by sources with direct knowledge of the details.

Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam (Photo by Nick Cammett/Diamond Images/Getty Images) More

Dialing back to the early days of Dorsey’s arrival as general manager, then-coach Hue Jackson had started a dialogue with Dorsey about the viability of DePodesta’s role in the organization. Jackson felt that he and Dorsey were aligned when it came to how they wanted to build a team, what the structure should look like and, most important, who should be involved in showcasing that vision to Haslam.

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