Boo Hoo Hue Jackson, appearing on ESPN WKNR 850’s The Really Big Show this week, lived up to both his rep and the show’s name so splendiferously that he should be declared a National Sports Talk Show Treasure.

He was pure gold—if gold is the BS (it doesn’t mean Boy Scouts) of cow patties. The former coach of the Cleveland Browns, making a return appearance with Tony Rizzo and Aaron Goldhammer to hawk an unfinished book, made a lengthy, sniveling case that Browns ownership and leadership lied to him and otherwise abused him before firing him during the 2018 season for a 3-36-1 record. He promised documentation to support the claim will be in the book. It had better be. Otherwise, I will know that I am right to believe that ol’ Boo Hoo Hue is the biggest and very finest loser/whiner this side of Donald Trump, who continues to claim that his 2020 presidential victory was stolen.

Same thing happened to all those Jackson victories over 2½ seasons. Stolen . . . right? Except, Boo Hoo’s teams were outscored 1,072 to 667, a margin of 405 points.

Actually, the election results and Boo Hoo Hue’s record bear a striking resemblance. Trump lost to duly elected President Joe Biden, 81,268,924 to 74,216,154, the equivalent of what happened to Boo Hoo Hue. (The Electoral College count, which a Trump- inspired mob attempted to thwart by invading the Capitol, was: Biden 306, Trump 232, with 270 needed to win.) Like Trump, Jackson is apparently not so good with numbers. He seemed to be attempting to convince Rizz and Hammer that, despite his poor numbers, he is the greatest thing to have happened to pigskin since the barbeque pit.

Whereas the Browns put Boo Hoo Hue out to pasture, the “author” believes his truth will pop off his book’s pages so that any fool can recognize it and get off of Boo Hoo’s back. He complained that fans and others, including sports talk show hosts and maybe even a former sports columnist, like me, will see the light to which we are blind. I am prepared to buy and read Boo Hoo Hue’s book—he would not share its title—with fine-toothed-comb knowledge gained from researching and writing a late-in-life graduate school master’s thesis titled: “A Species of Lie: Memoir and the Elusiveness of Truth.”

In addition to my “academic credentials,” I can attest from writing the recently published Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart to the difficulty of finding the truth and corralling it on the page. Memories differ and/or fade. My recollection may not be the same as those who lived the story with me. This is why a memoirist must research his story skeptically, even if it seems so obvious to him. Jackson’s “truth,” I suspect, is not the same as that of Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, whom Boo Hoo Hue has outright accused of lying to him. Even if Jackson provides the documentation he promises, it may not prove he is the coach he claims.

There are numerous lists of the “Worst Head Coaches in NFL History” and most of them rank coaches based on their winning percentages. I reviewed a couple of them: Rajan Nanavati’s “The 12 Worst Head Coaches in NFL History” on medium.com from February 2020, and Eli Laskey’s more expansive “Bad Call: The Worst Head Coaches in NFL History” from a year earlier on tiebreaker.com. The lists were based on Jackson’s record at Cleveland and one season at Oakland (8-8), an 11-44-1 total. They, however, arrived at different winning percentages: Nanavati’s .196 and Laskey’s .205. Based on the most accepted formula of giving a team .5 (or one half of a victory) for a tie, which omnicalculator.com supports, .205 would be correct. Pro Football Reference also supports the half point for a tie. Boo Hoo Hue would no doubt consider the .196 figure another example of piling on, and he would be justified to do so.

On neither list, however, did Jackson have the absolutely worst winning percentage. He couldn’t even win the Worst Coach title. He was second. Marty Mornhinweg (5-27 in two Detroit seasons) topped Nanavati’s list of 12 with a .156 winning percentage, and a name I would not have thought of led Laskey’s list. Before he became the NFL commissioner from 1946 to 1959, Bert Bell proved himself quite a poor head coach, going 10-46-2, at Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He won more than two games only once. Perhaps Jackson should consider becoming a candidate for commission when Roger Goodell retires. He would be a first. There never has been a Black NFL commissioner.

The NFL barely allows Blacks to coach. Despite the fact that NFL rosters are dominated by Blacks, it has been difficult for Black coaches to succeed and when they fail, there are, it seems, fewer second chances, including a return to coordinator positions to rebuild on what they had done well. Former Browns coach Romeo Crennel has been among the exceptions, but, in my opinion, Boo Hoo Hue was never the hot stuff he sold.

“As black coaches, you get the most difficult opportunities,” Jackson said. “This [Cleveland job] was a difficult opportunity. And, you get the shortest leash. You’re looked at more critical[ly]” compared with “Caucasian coaches.”

Distilled to its essence, Jackson’s complaint is that the Browns, particularly owner Jimmy Haslam, piled on by firing him not only for his record—certainly termination worthy—but also by failing to warn him that he would be overseeing a teardown/rebuild of which he was not in charge and then blaming him for the resulting friction between coach and front office heightened by an analytics emphasis in player selection (pre-John Dorsey, another football guy who lost his job). He also accuses Haslam of promising to make public an extension he gave Jackson during his winless (0-16) second season—when he should have been fired. I would kept that under my hat, too.

“There’s no doubt I was lied to by ownership and the executive team,” Jackson said on The Really Big Show. “This is bigger than just coaching. For me, this is going to be part of my legacy.” And there you have the raison d’être for Hue’s boo-hoo-hooing.

If Jackson thinks he is improving his chances for restoration of a legacy that never quite was in the first place, playing little the Boo Hoo Hue card may prove counterproductive. He won’t win much support in Northeast Ohio by trying to recast his failures when most Browns fans and followers would rather concentrate on a newer, brighter here and now.