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Former Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson said Wednesday on ESPN’s SportsCenter that the team had a “four-year plan” that incentivized losing during the first two years which led to his 1-31 record during the 2016 and 2017 seasons.
Jackson said that bonus money was available if certain measurables were met such as aggregate rankings, being the youngest team and having so many draft picks.
“Teams that win are just not the youngest team, not that the youngest teams can’t win, so I didn’t understand the process,” Jackson told ESPN. “I didn’t understand what the plan was, I asked for clarity because it did not talk about winning and losing until Year 3 and 4. So that told you right there that something wasn’t correct but I still couldn’t understand it until I had the team that I had.”
Jackson said he told Browns owner Jimmy Haslam that he wasn’t interested in bonus money and instead wanted that money used to improve the team.
“And I remember very candidly saying to Jimmy, ‘I’m not interested in bonus money,’ because I’ve never known that to be a bonus. I was interested in taking whatever that money was and putting it toward getting more players on our football team because I didn’t think we were very talented at all,” Jackson told ESPN. “I know what good football teams look like, play like, what they act like and we didn’t have a lot of talented players on the team at that time.”
Jackson added later in the interview that, “I do know that no head coach is going to survive if you lose a lot of games.”
Jackson appeared on SportsCenter after he and the head of his foundation implied on social media that he had been paid to lose games during the 2016 and 2017 seasons.
Jackson and Kimberly Diemert, the executive director of the Hue Jackson Foundation, which works to prevent human trafficking, were tweeting in response to Brian Flores’ lawsuit against the NFL and three teams — the Miami Dolphins, Denver Broncos and New York Giants — alleging discrimination regarding…
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Source : espn
