Three Lessons Cleveland Needs To Learn From Super Bowl LX Bound New England Patriots

The New England Patriots are set to play for their seventh Lombardi Trophy title on Sunday, with Super Bowl LX marking their 12th appearance.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns are still waiting for their first AFC Championship appearance since the late 1980s.

With New England completing an incredible turnaround in an almost unfathomably short period of time, it’s time to identify three lessons the Browns should learn from “the Patriot Way” of doing things in the NFL:

Go get your guy

The Patriots wasted no time hiring Mike Vrabel as the team’s head coach a little over a year ago, after parting ways with Jerod Mayo, whose tenure lasted only one season.

New England’s decline has been well documented after Tom Brady moved to Tampa Bay for the 2020 season. Bill Belichick’s team quickly spiraled out of control, and the club chose Mayo as his successor, following a plan that had been drawn out beforehand. Such plan might never have been executed if the Patriots would’ve known beforehand that Vrabel would be available, as he was let go by Tennessee three days before New England officially put Mayo in charge.

Meanwhile, Cleveland’s prolonged process in hiring Todd Monken points to a totally different dynamic, one where the team likely had to settle after multiple candidates turned down the Browns during the interview process. Remember, Monken was an outlier of sorts among all external candidates, in that he didn’t fit the profile of the young up-and-coming coach that all the other candidates contacted by Cleveland fit.

While it’s been reported that Monken was “their guy” from the start, one has to wonder if the Browns had a faint idea of what they wanted when Kevin Stefanski was dismissed.

Keep swinging for the fences in the NFL Draft

The rookie wage scale and ever-growing salary cap of today’s NFL mean that missing on a first round quarterback is less costly than ever. Make no mistake, it’s still a huge deal that can set your team back a couple of years, but gone are the days of the JaMarcus Russell and Sam Bradford level fiascos.

The Patriots tried and missed with Mac Jones in the first round of the 2021 NFL Draft, only to go back to the well in 2024 for Drake Maye. But even before Brady left, the team invested in quarterbacks with second and third round picks recently.

Now consider the Browns, who have drafted zero quarterbacks in the first round since picking up Baker Mayfield first overall in 2018. For a team with so little success at the position throughout the last three decades, that’s a terrible sin. Instead, the team decided to throw three first round picks along with additional compensation to the Texans for Deshaun Watson, who has a 9-10 record in four years with the franchise. And that’s not even mentioning the financially crippling $230 million totally guaranteed deal they handed him.

Cleveland can’t always be betting on fifth-rounders to change the narrative. At some point, they need to draft smarter and develop quarterbacks in the top rounds. Otherwise, the price tag on those misses will always be staggering.

Identify what works for you

Let’s face it, Josh McDaniels is not head coach material. Yet, he’s now in his third stint as the offensive coordinator for the Patriots, the most accomplished coach that New England has had in that role during all their dynasty years. Why? Because he’s successful at it.

On the other hand, the Browns are now facing the resignation of their most successful coach on staff for the last couple of years in Jim Schwartz. The fact that Cleveland wouldn’t hire him as head coach -- when he had a ton of support in the locker room -- and couldn’t convince him to stay on as defensive coordinator really puts the team in a bind, especially this late in the hiring cycle for coaches.

Now Cleveland is forced to start over on the only unit within the team that could’ve offered -- and deserved -- some level of continuity.