Tag: Cleveland Browns front office

Browns make several new hires and promotions in the front office and scouting staff

The Cleveland Browns make several hires and promotions in the front office and scouting staff

Throw out your old Cleveland Browns front office org chart. Thursday saw several changes to the management and scouting staff under GM Andrew Berry.

The Browns hired seven new people into the football operations staff and also promoted or added new titles to 13 returning members, most of them on the scouting staff.

Among the new hires are a couple of expected names. Catherine Raiche is the new Assistant GM and Vice President of Football Operations. She comes from the Philadelphia Eagles and is the highest-ranking female in any NFL front office. Another ex-Eagles staffer, Shawn Heinlein, comes with Raiche to Cleveland. Heinlein is the new Southwest area scout for the Browns, a capacity he’s held with other teams for over 20 years.

The other new hires:

Hajriz Aliu – Scouting assistant

Chris Buford – National scout

Ryan Conway – Scouting assistant

Jimmy Raye – Senior Executive advisor

Cyrus Wolford – Scouting assistant

You might recognize Raye’s name. He has over 20 years of front office experience, including a stint as the Assistant GM of the Houston Texans when they drafted Deshaun Watson in 2017.

The shuffle of the existing employees includes promotions for seven members of the scouting department. In their new capacities:

Adam Al-Khayyal – Director of pro scouting

Zack Ayers – National scout

Josh Cox – West Coast area scout

Sam DeLuca – Assistant director of pro scouting

Matt Donahoe – Southeast area scout

Joe Dever – Mid-Atlantic scout

Max Paulus – Director of college scouting

Former Lions GM Bob Quinn moves from senior assistant to senior personnel/coaching executive, while Joy Tapajcik moves into the role of player personnel and football operations process manager. Shane Normandeau moves from scouting assistant to Football Operations coordinator.

Tyler Hamblin takes over as the director of Football Operations, moving up from the role inherited by Normandeau. Glenn Cook added Assistant GM to his title of VP of Player Personnel, while Callum Mahoney jumps into the role of salary cap and contract analyst.

Report: Browns expected to hire Eagles exec Catherine Raiche

Raiche has been the Eagles VP of Football Operations

The Cleveland Browns are set to add another voice to the team’s front office, and this one will be a female voice. Per a report from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Browns are expected to hire Eagles vice president of football operations Catherine Raiche.

Raiche previously worked with Browns GM Andrew Berry during his stint in Philadelphia. The role Raiche will take on with the Browns is unspecified but was deemed “high-ranking” in the report from Josh Tolentino of the Inquirer. Her background is in player personnel and football operations.

She would be the highest-ranking female the Browns have ever had in their front office. Cleveland already blazed a trail with Callie Brownson as head coach Kevin Stefanski’s chief of staff, and Brownson became the first female to ever coach a position group during a regular-season game.

Breer: Andrew Berry following the Eagles model, not Sashi Brown’s

Albert Breer noted in this week’s MMQB that Browns GM Andrew Berry is following the Eagles model, not Sashi Brown’s. And he’s 100% right.

It’s a very common notion, particularly amongst the gadfly media catering to the browbeaten, to inextricably link new Browns GM Andrew Berry with former GM Sashi Brown. Berry rose through the ranks under Brown, the team’s head personnel man from 2016-2017 and shares the academic, analytics-based background, so it’s an easy connection to make.

But as Albert Breer smartly notes in the latest installment of MMQB on Sports Illustrated, it’s simply not reality. Instead of following in his old boss’s misguided footsteps, Berry is marching down the path plotted by his 2019 team, the Philadelphia Eagles.

It’s something many in the Browns-centric media have been trying to convince a (rightfully) hardened and skeptical fan base for months. The recent moves in the front office confirm that Berry is walking away from Brown’s model, and it’s something Breer highlights in his column,

The new structure is, in fact, one reason why so many of the guys Berry worked with previously had to go—former assistant GM Eliot Wolf and VP of player personnel Alonzo Highsmith would have had to take de facto demotions to make it work. As the Eagles have it, the scouting department is set up in two silos. One is headed up by a VP of player personnel (Andy Weidl), the other by a VP of football operations (Berry’s old role). The former basically leads scouting, the latter everything else (analytics, etc.) In that structure, there was no room for an assistant GM like Wolf, and Highsmith likely would’ve had to be re-assigned to allow for Berry to have his own guy as scouting head (remember, Highsmith was hired over the top of Berry by GM John Dorsey)

Brown’s Browns had a definite bureaucratic kitchen slant to them, with a lot of cooks putting their own flavors into every single dish. It produced a lot of mismanaged, foul-tasting concoctions that would have set Gordon Ramsay into a profane tizzy. That’s not Berry’s way, something that was very evident from how he handled the scouting combine, free agency and the draft.

It’s not a guarantee that Berry’s path will succeed. But emulating a Super Bowl champion franchise is much smarter than leaning on the ways of a system that produced an 0-16 campaign and several regrettable personnel choices.

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