With the Cleveland triumvirate of General Manager Andrew Berry, Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta, and Coach Kevin Stefanski rightfully receiving kudos for the quality of the Browns 2020 turnaround and subsequent free-agency and draft build up from there, it’s easy to lose sight of the stumblebum transformation that had to proceed this.

The Haslams, Jimmy and Dee, have finally accomplished what Art Modell, the only owner more villainous than them, never could. They got the hell out of the way.

When before the turnaround season brownsnation.com ranked Browns owners through the years, only Modell, who in 1995 moved the team to Baltimore, finished lower than the Haslams. If whale poop had been on the list, Modell still would have been rock bottom. A 1995 photograph accompanied Drake Jesse’s story. It showed a Browns fan holding a sign that expressed her own ranking of unscrupulous, damnable, and evil men. In order they were: Charlie Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dr. Kevorkian, and Art Modell. (Not sure what it says about Northeast Ohio that two residents made the list.)

Jesse was not the only person who placed the Haslams right down there with Modell. Following the fiasco of Coach Freddie “It’s Too Hot in the . . .” Kitchens’ one-and-done season, Akron Beacon Journal columnist Marla Ridenhour wrote a column so wonderfully scathing that USA Today, whose network of newspapers includes the Beacon Journal, also published it, the journalistic equivalent of a one-two punch.

“In the seven years since they took over the franchise in October 2012,” Ridenour opined, “the Haslams have proved to be as incapable of making a decision on their own as vilified former owner Art Modell.”

Forget faint, call this damning with no praise.

“Like Modell,” Ridenour, on a roll, continued, “they listen to many other voices and are easily swayed. . . . One day it’s General Manager John Dorsey who has their ear (should this be plural?), the next it’s Chief Strategy Officer John DePodesta.”

The Haslams had the gall to blame dysfunction in their front office on conflict that Jimmy, especially, found intolerable. Those who were at the bottom of it, however, were not only the people they had hired but also the faces the Haslams saw in their mirrors.

Almost from the moment they bought the team from the Lerner family that had brought football back to Cleveland, the Haslams began firing everyone in sight. (Sorry to lump Dee in with Jimmy here but, hey, she is co-owner and Elliot Kennel suggested in a story in Dawg Pound Daily that Dee is the “real boss of the Cleveland Browns.”)

They have had as many front-office iterations as coaching staffs: The inherited Mike Holmgren/Tom Heckert followed by Joe Banner/Mike Lombardi, Ray Farmer, Sashi Brown, John Dorsey, and now Berry. And coaches? The inherited Pat Shurmur, hired Rob Chudzinski, Mike Pettine, Hue Jackson, interim coach Gregg Williams, Kitchens, and now Stefanski—since midway through 2012. This would seem to suggest that:

• Just because people have the wherewithal to buy a team does not qualify them to own one.
• Just because a person has been successful in one business (Pilot Flying J convenience stores/truck stops)—even given a legal bump or two—doesn’t necessarily qualify him to own an NFL team.
• And just because someone has been a minority owner and, theoretically understudied with the stable, legendary franchise (Pittsburgh) doesn’t assure he has learned enough to own his own successful franchise (in the same division).

Dee Haslam has put together her own resume that can impress, but she will require more time, more success, and more control to join women whom nfl.com recognized recently for their long impact—Patricia Rooney, Norma Hunt, Martha Firestone Ford, and Virginia Halas McCaskey. (As the CEO of the Haslam Sports Group, which includes the Browns and Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew, Dee Haslam may be on her way to catching or surpassing the aforementioned women, if veteran Browns writers Jeff Schudel and Tony Grossi are onto something. They have hunches that the Cleveland Baseball Club could be the next acquisition for the Haslam Sports Group; DePodesta has a rich MLB background.) At the very least, I do like to think that Dee Haslam has helped to tamp down the male egos and testosterone and that has allowed the owners to finallyput in place the right combination of leaders for a steady Browns rise.

If you believe that a light bulb suddenly went on over Jimmy Haslam’s head and the conflict about which he has complained suddenly disappeared, then please feel free to expect the football fairy to drop a pass to the next Super Bowl in the Browns’ lap. The Haslams got tired of being the laughingstocks of the NFL and did something about it. They finally put together a management team that could get along and win. Think Art Modell’s best general manager Ernie Accorsi. He played a significant role in bringing in Bernie Kosar, an equally adept maneuverer, to the team Kosar grew up loving.

The result was best of the Old Browns this side of the Paul Brown-Otto Graham-Jim Brown pre-Super Bowl era. The busts of those three gentlemen can be found in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. Kosar couldn’t quite get his team past the great John Elway and his Denver Broncos, but for a quarterback with a big arm and bigger brain, his was an accomplished career only slightly diminished by lack of a Super Bowl.

In the NFL there are reasonable expectations—consistency, winning, regularly-to- always in the hunt for the Super Bowl—and then Bill Belichick-Tom Brady-New England Patriot unreasonable expectations. Once upon a time, and it seems a dream ago, Belichick served his time in Cleveland with Modell, learning his craft and growing into the even better, crankier, cutoff-sweatshirt-wearing coach who should be ushered directly from the New England sideline to Canton, no waiting period required.

All of the Browns—owners, front office, coaches, players—have a ways to go to be allowed to genuflect before Mr. Grumpy. At least now, the Haslams, former sad sacks of the NFL, have seen themselves for what they were doing wrong. They’ve corrected course and, if they hold steady, through failures and all, Paul Brown and Bill Belichick might even welcome them to Canton and let us critics one day take a knee before turnaround artists whom we once condemned.