CLEVELAND, Ohio -- John Dorsey was granted draft picks, salary cap space and power. He was allowed to hire his own coach, draft his own quarterback and trade for his own superstar receiver. He was placed in a position to win by the successes and failures of those in the job before him, and allowed to benefit from 1-31 without having to live through it.

Dorsey had it all as the Cleveland Browns general manager. And he blew it. That’s on him, and no one else.

Previous general managers had ownership picking coaches and drafting quarterbacks. Previous general managers dealt with a power structure that invited power struggles. Previous general managers waded through mediocrity and inherited uncertainty. The Browns bottomed out before Dorsey, who was born with extra draft picks and thought he was Paul Brown. Dorsey came in questioning if there were enough real football players on the roster. Meanwhile, those desperate for a leader clung to the hope that this real football man would save the Browns.

They put his name on jerseys, sold out the plain gray Browns sweatshirts he wore everyday, and created a cult of personality around a GM like has rarely been seen. Dee and Jimmy Haslam invested in him, and that wasn’t wrong. That’s why this time, another round of clearing house doesn’t fall on ownership.

We still doing this or nah? pic.twitter.com/r5Aw1r2oUx — Doug Lesmerises (@DougLesmerises) December 30, 2019

It falls on one guy, who built a team exactly how he wanted to build it. That team went 6-10. And now Dorsey is gone.

The reflex will be to blame the Haslams again, as they have often been fairly blamed before. Chaos has often been the order of the day in Cleveland. So after dispatching Sashi Brown and later Hue Jackson, the Haslams leaned on a GM who had won before, and they put him in charge. Processes are what win -- repeatable ways of doing business that can be replicated over time. For too long, the processes with the Browns were broken. But now, the GM would oversee football operations and ownership would get out of the way. When Freddie Kitchens was announced as the new head coach, it was notable that only Dorsey shared the stage. The Haslams watched from the crowd.

This was Dorsey’s show.

Because Dorsey was different. Unlike previous GMs like Brown, Ray Farmer and Phil Savage, Dorsey had done this before. Unlike former team president Mike Holmgren, Dorsey wasn’t on the back end of a career and enticed out of retirement. He fit the profile of what some want the Browns to hire now as a head coach: a veteran of the job who has won before.

He also wasn’t the same as the coach he would soon hire. Kitchens was a risk from the get-go, but again, the process seemed sound. When Jackson was fired midseason in 2018, the Browns got a jump on the rest of the league in finding a coach for 2019. When Gregg Williams took over as head coach and Kitchens was offensive coordinator, Dorsey had a full half-season evaluation on both. So when he picked Kitchens after a legitimate process, interviewing seven candidates that were internal and external, offensive and defensive, experienced and first-time head coaches, you figured Dorsey must have known something.

He certainly had more information than anyone else. When some former assistants expressed sour grapes about Kitchens and questioned his influence on the offense in 2018, it was reasonable to assume that the general manager, after an eight-game, up-close analysis of a man at work, knew all of Kitchens’ strengths and weaknesses and potential peaks and pitfalls.

Kitchens was something of a mystery to us. But not to Dorsey.

In the end, Kitchens was who he was. He made plenty of mistakes, but as players on Monday now claimed to want a coach with a stronger hand, how could Kitchens have provided that? Was a first-time head coach with eight games as a coordinator going to rip Odell Beckham for missing OTAs, or bench superstars for sideline outbursts, or sub in Garrett Gilbert for Baker Mayfield after too many interceptions? Kitchens is responsible for the offensive shortcomings, but Dorsey hired an affable newcomer to lead a team of highly opinionated, highly paid stars, and that mix not working is the fault of the person who signed the players, hired the coach and put this all together.

The new GM and coach will inherit some talent, but Dorsey got what every “football guy” craves more than anything -- the chance to shape a team.

With picks and cap space, Dorsey in his 2 years and 23 days on the job added Mayfield, Tyrod Taylor, Beckham, Jarvis Landry, Antonio Callaway, Nick Chubb, Kareem Hunt, Demetrius Harris, Greg Robinson, Chris Hubbard, Austin Corbett, Wyatt Teller, Olivier Vernon, Sheldon Richardson, Chad Thomas, Denzel Ward, Terrance Mitchell, Greedy Williams, T.J. Carrie, Genard Avery, Mack Wilson, Sione Takitaki, Damarious Randall, Eric Murray, Jermaine Whitehead, Morgan Burnett, Sheldrick Redwine, Austin Seibert and Jamie Gillan. Of the team’s 11 highest salaries, Dorsey brought in eight of them.

You could see this as Dorsey being forced to shape the team because there wasn’t much there before. That’s not the deal. With extra picks at No. 4 and No. 35 in 2018 through no work of his own and the most cap space in the 2018 offseason, Dorsey had the privilege of building a winning roster, not the burden. Dorsey wasn’t afraid of the idea that he knew more than anyone. When Ward had two interceptions in a Week 5 win in 2018, seeming to justify Dorsey taking him at No. 4 overall in the 2018 draft, I asked Dorsey in passing if he’d picked the right guy in Ward.

“All of you didn’t think so,” Dorsey said in a brief I-told-you-so.

No one else here had ever won in the NFL before. Not Mayfield, Beckham, Landry, Myles Garrett, Ward or Richardson. Not the Haslams as primary owners, or Kitchens as a head coach. Dorsey went to the playoffs three times in four years in Kansas City, which earned him credibility and trust inside a losing franchise. It sure seems now like that must have had much more to do with Andy Reid as coach than Dorsey as GM.

The Browns went 1-31 in 2016 and 2017 with an eye on the future. This was the future -- and Dorsey leaves Cleveland after going 13-18-1. At least 0-16 in 2017 had a purpose. But 6-10 in 2019, that was only pain.

Dorsey inherited a blueprint of hope and leaves a collection of questions. There is talent, but it just lost 10 games. Maybe a new coach and GM can change that, or maybe they’ll want to put their own spin on this roster and rework it again. At some point, someone has to stick in Cleveland, and Dorsey had the tools to do that. There’s another blow here to the Haslams, who to my mind tried to learn from past mistakes. A lot of us were in on this rebuild. I detailed the 25 moves that were made to make it happen, and picked the Browns to go 12-4.

I was as wrong as anyone about this team, and maybe I should be fired for that, too. But at least I’m an OK podcast host.

But we’ve begged the Haslams to step aside and stop interfering. It feels like that happened with Dorsey. Yes, Paul DePodesta retains a role in the organization. But the report with former GM Sashi Brown was that he wanted to hire Sean McDermott, and Jimmy Haslam chose Hue Jackson. The report with Dorsey was that the analytics team wanted Kevin Stefanski, and Dorsey chose Kitchens. If there was disagreement, at least the GM, the guy supposed to run the football side, was winning.

Again, that was a rare privilege. Dorsey wasted it.

I was one of the few who favored giving Kitchens another year, because he hadn’t done this before and the lessons of this year should have led to an improved 2020 from him. Plus, you could have changed staff and responsibilities based on the lessons of 2019. It’s hard to argue with the decision to fire him, though, especially with the way the season finished.

But Dorsey? He had done this before. There’s no learning curve here. So the blame on Kitchens for this season at least is understandable -- he apparently wasn’t prepared. The blame on the Haslams for this season is unfair, as they changed based off the past.

But Dorsey? He had no excuses. He was a football man but not a team builder, a talent evaluator but not coach assessor, a risk taker but not a franchise leader.

He was hailed as a football savior, and he turned out to be just a scout in a sweatshirt. Now he’s out, because a lot of us were wrong about the Browns, but he was the one who was supposed to know better. He certainly thought he did.

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