Written by Thomas Moore

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The Cleveland Browns made it official on Monday, firing coach Pat Shurmur after two seasons and general manager Tom Heckert after just three years.

Cue up the calliope music, the carousel is spinning once again in Berea.

As we learned with Mike Brown, Eric Mangini and Manny Acta, firing the coach is the easy part. Finding a replacement that is actually an improvement has proven to be far more difficult.

The Browns have been on a downward spiral with their head coaches, going from Romeo Crennel (.375 winning percentage) to Mangini (.313) to Shurmur (.281).

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the mental health of a fan base that is exhausted by constant change, that trend needs to be reversed, and owner Jimmy Haslam and CEO Joe Banner have to get it right when they hire the next coach and general manager (or what will pass as a general manager in the new front office structure).

First off, the next Browns coach will be here – barring a complete catastrophe – for the entire length of his contract. Just as it was easy for former team president Mike Holmgren to fire Mangini because he did not hire him, it was easy for Haslam and Banner to fire Shurmur and Heckert.

But that won’t be the case now; Haslam and Banner are on the hook for these next hires and will cling to them up until the very last minute as they won’t want to admit it if they make a mistake.

“We don’t believe that there’s any job in the league that’s going to be available that can tell a better story about why you want to come to this particular team, this particular city and take a job,” Banner said. “So we go into this extremely confident that we can go after the top people available, at least the top people in our opinion, and that we have a very good chance at being successful and convincing them that this is the right situation. Most of these top coaches are focused on finding a place where they think they can win, and we think we can make a very good case why this is the best opportunity in the league right now.”

So, basically, whoever the Browns hire will be the right choice because it will be Banner’s choice.

More importantly, they have to get these hires correct for the simple reason that the constant turnover on the sidelines and in the front office has to stop.

Consider that the Browns had eight full-time coaches in the franchise’s first 50 years. This upcoming hire will be the team’s sixth full-time coach in the past 13 years.

The picture becomes even more depressing when you look at the other teams in the AFC North. Since 1999:

• The Steelers have had two full-time coaches
• The Ravens have had two full-time coaches
• The Bengals have had three full-time coaches

Dig a little deeper and it gets even worse. When the Browns take the field next year against Pittsburgh and Baltimore, Mike Tomlin and John Harbaugh will be facing the fourth Browns coach in their tenure; for Cincinnati’s Marvin Lewis it will be the fifth Browns coach.

It’s a complete joke and it has to stop if the Browns ever have any hope of competing within the division, let alone in the NFL.

Haslam and Banner laid out the plan during Monday’s meeting with the media.

“Joe and I are going to begin very quickly to look for a new head coach first and then a GM, player-personnel-type second,” Haslam said. “There will be a million rumors out there – you all have done this before – about this person or that person. We’re not going to comment on any people specifically for either of the two searches.

“Candidly, there are only two people who know who the candidates are, and you’re looking at both of them. Although we only made the decision with Pat and Tom in the last week or two, I think any responsible person does succession planning, and, candidly, we’ve been doing succession planning for the last two or three months.

“We think this is a great organization despite the changes that have occurred in the past. We’re well aware that this has been a carousel, and, candidly, as I’ve said before it’s (our) job to find the right coach and the right GM and bring stability long term for the organization. That’s our role. We take it very responsibly, very seriously.

“We’ve researched a lot of people, and we’ll be talking to some of those people over the next few weeks. Our goal is to get the best person, and if we happen to find that person within a week, that’s great. And if it takes a month, that’s great also. I mean that for the best person for each of the two jobs.”

The Browns have gone down the road of hiring the head coach before a general manager with predictable results (of course, they’ve tried just about every known combination in the past 13 years), but Banner believes this time it will be different.

“We made the determination that the greater impact on our future was going to be the head coach, that we need to make sure we find two people that fit together well and complement each other well and that we wanted the skill set of the head coach to kind of drive what we’d be looking for in the position that we would hire after that,” Banner explained. “Time will tell if that’s right and if we can find the right two people that are both high quality and fit together as well as we hope. This was maybe the first decision we made in terms of kind of moving forward here was, ‘What’s the right order? Are we doing them together, one first, one second?’ So it’s a totally valid line of questioning, but the decision we in the end made was to find the head coach first.”

As for who the next coach will be, the rumors swirl from the lazy (Jon Gruden, Bill Cowher), to the college ranks (Chip Kelly, Nick Saban and Bill O’Brien), to the recently fired (Ken Whisenhunt and Andy Reid). The only name that reportedly is for sure is Atlanta offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter who, according to Foxsports.com’s Alex Marvez, will interview with the Browns.

“The interviews will start as quickly as we can get permission and get together and everybody’s schedules fit so hopefully immediately,” Banner said. “We’re going to into the thing open minded. We’ve studied the league, we’ve studied the history of the guys that come from a defensive background, an offensive background. It’s really about the person as opposed to some program he could just fit in and know the name.”

So what of Shurmur and Heckert?

This isn’t an endorsement of Shurmur, but when you hire a first-time head coach you have to expect there will be growing pains. Learning to manage a game, run a practice, deal with the media and everything else that goes into being a head coach takes time and, once Holmgren was out of the picture, Shurmur was out of time (and coaches who win just nine games in two seasons rarely get to stay around).

Shurmur took over a team that was in the beginning stages of a much-needed rebuild after years of wasted drafts under former coaches Butch Davis and Mangini and former general manager Phil Savage. He probably did the best he could under the circumstances.

His biggest mistake was his stubbornness over running the West Coast offense. While there are certain elements of the offense that work, Shurmur was unwilling (or unable) to adapt the offense to fit the players on the roster.

With two years of tape on quarterback Brandon Weeden at Oklahoma State, there was enough data to know what Weeden’s strengths and weaknesses are. But Shurmur never seemed willing to play to those strengths or a change to offense when things were not working (think of all the passes Weeden had knocked down on the short crossing routes).

Shurmur is not the first, and he probably won’t be the last, NFL to coach to try to force players into his system rather than tailor the system to fit the players. And, like everyone before him, he paid the price for his inability to adapt.

Probably the best thing that can be said about Shurmur is something that running back Stephen Jackson said when the Browns hired Shurmur away from the Rams.

“He was a good coordinator for the Rams and, on Sundays, he got the most out of his players and always had us in a position to win the game.,” Jackson said.

That was true in Cleveland – especially this year – as more often than not the Browns found a way to stay in most of their games until the end. Of course, being in a position to win and actually winning are two different things, as Shurmur found out.

“I am extremely proud of the players on this team, who I felt made tremendous strides and helped to make the Cleveland Browns relevant again,” Shurmur said in a team-issued release. “I want to thank them, as well as my entire coaching staff for making the past two years enjoyable. My coaches are outstanding teachers and even better men. They helped me lead these players through a unique time of transition. This group of players will achieve success soon, and there will be a part of me that will feel very good when that happens.”

As for Heckert, while there has been considerable talk over the past few months that he would be let go as well, this one is still a bit harder to take.

Heckert took over a roster that was an absolute mess thanks to Savage and Mangini and, in three years turned it into one that has a strong nucleus at several positions – including running back, wide receiver, offensive line and defensive line.

“Obviously we’re still a very, very young team, but I think we’re very talented,” Heckert told The Plain Dealer. “The offensive and defensive lines are very good, and everyone knows how I feel about the quarterback and the running back. The young receivers, Greg Little, Josh Gordon and Travis Benjamin are all going to be really good. We feel like there’s a lot of good young talent on both sides of the ball.

“It’s very disappointing. You’re in this thing to win and we think we’re on the verge of it. We spent a lot of time dealing with these players and developing relationships with these guys. I went out with a few of the players last night. We had a small gathering and it made me feel really good. We had a good time. It’s a great team, it really is. This is one of the best locker rooms I’ve been around in my 20 years. There’s no animosity or controversy. They were really fun to be around.”

Even Banner admitted that the roster has improved under Heckert, which makes us wonder if Banner couldn’t have figured out a way to make it work if he had really wanted to.

“I think we have a foundation here to move forward,” Banner said. “I think the team is better than it was. I think it’s got a ways to go. I hope with the right hires here, we’ll be able to accelerate the process of getting to where we want to be. We want to do it in a way that’s sustainable. We could if we just made whatever sacrifices we need to be the best possible team we could be next year, we probably could make the playoffs. In fact, I’d be massively disappointed if we didn’t. If you factor in the long term sustainable success we have, that may or may not be what happens next year in order to achieve that goal.”

Hopefully, if we’re right about the roster being improved (and we are) then having a head coach that is more competent will start to show up in the standings.

Because, more than anything, we are almost as tired of thinking and writing about coaching changes as we are of watching Cleveland’s sports teams repeatedly come up on the short end of the scoreboard. In a little less than three years of writing about Cleveland sports, this is the fourth time we’ve written an article about a coaching change).

One thing we’ve never understood is the need, when a coach gets fired, for some fans to claim “I told you so” about the outgoing coach – as if saying a coach will be fired at some point is some kind of great insight.

We’ve been following the Browns since the mid-’70s and every coach the team has employed has been fired (or quit because they were about to be fired). It’s not that hard to sit back and say someone will fail before they have even coached a game; any fans who fall into that camp need to get over themselves.

It is also silly to assume that Haslam will get this right simply because he has been a successful businessman. Every owner of a professional sports team has been successful in business or else they would not have the money to buy a team in the first place. There simply is no correlation between the two.

No one – not Haslam, not Banner, not the players or the fans – know how this next hire is going to turn out. We can all hope for a better day, but we won’t know it is here until it arrives.

Maybe this really is the first day of a better tomorrow for the Browns. Heckert and Shurmur are two of the last connections to the Lerner family ownership. Exorcising that final link to Art Modell and the move of the original Browns could be what the team needs to finally move on and establish an identity. Only time will tell.

“The two of us feel a tremendous responsibility to get (it) right,” Haslam said. “Our backgrounds are very different, but we’ve both been involved a lot in hiring people for key decisions. We’re certainly not overconfident and we smiled at ourselves last night that now we’ve got to go to work and get this right, but I think the two of us working well can make that happen. We’re going to work very hard to get the right person in here, first as head coach and the player personnel position.”

And after 48 years of waiting to celebrate another championship, what’s a few more years?

(Photos by The Plain Dealer, The Associated Press and ClevelandBrowns.com)