If you thought that the Cleveland Browns were a circus to watch on the gridiron, the front office has proven to have its own three rings, according to a highly entertaining in-depth story published in ESPN The Magazine today.
The piece has a colorful array of stories, including one about former head coach Hue Jackson telling general manager John Dorsey to “get the fuck out of my office” after getting fired. Or the myriad hirings, firings, and organizational reboots halfway through an existing reboot that have defined the Haslam Era. But king among the litany of ridiculous details is a story about how the front office ended up projecting porn on the vaunted office walls for 20 minutes.
Videos by VICE
It all apparently started with a well-intentioned marketing ploy with the absolute wrong hashtag:
Marketing executives wanted employees to see how fans were engaging with the Browns on social media, so they projected the Browns feed onto a giant wall at the facility. It was like broadcasting talk radio over the entire building, and one day in particular, it was worse than that. One of the marketing staffers entered a search for #dp — for Dawg Pound. The problem was, that hashtag carried a few different meanings, one of which triggered an array of porn to be broadcast onto a wall for the entire office to see for more than 20 minutes, until a tech employee killed the feed.
Projecting the porn in the first place is hilarious enough—not one single person thought “#dp” might bring up some problematic results?—but why did it take 20 minutes and a tech employee to take it down? Does anyone in the organization know how a computer works? Or a projector? Or, like, electricity?
The hope here, for Browns fans, is that this is the coda to their time as a dysfunctional organization. And that hope is personified in Baker Mayfield. But the scary thing is Jimmy Haslam is still running the show, and as the profile makes explicit, his most reliable contribution to the team has been to hastily pull the plug on something way too early on in the process.
Except for the porn, anyway.
