Cleveland Browns: Managing the salary cap for a 2018 run

The Cleveland Browns have managed their salary cap for the purposes of setting up a playoff run come 2018. Find out if they can pull it off.

The Cleveland Browns shook up the NFL by canning the traditional methods of team management. Given the team’s track record over the past 16 seasons, who can blame them?

Instead of seasoned NFL management veterans, the Browns hired every available Harvard graduate on the market. Ok, maybe not all of them – but close.

These Harvard graduates brought with them an analytical approach to team building. Analytical models are being used in baseball and basketball. These approaches have been so successful in erasing the gap between the “haves” and “have nots”, that any team not using an analytical approach in those sports is now a dinosaur.

But analytics has not been employed as a driving force of team management in the NFL. The Cleveland Browns, who have a long history of innovation under Paul Brown, have returned to their tradition of being non-traditional.

Their non-traditional approach began with the hiring Harvard Graduate Sashi Brown, whose previous job involved cap management as the executive vice president of football operations. Traditionalists scoffed at this move claiming that a salary cap manager is not qualified to evaluate personnel.

Not to be outdone, or sensing there was another Harvard graduate on the market, the Browns hired famous baseball executive Paul DePodesta as the chief strategy officer. DePodesta attained his fame for his role in the Oakland Athletics strategy to utilize market inefficiencies called “Moneyball”.

This lead to all sorts of speculation that the Browns would be employing a Moneyball-type scheme in the NFL.

Have the Browns done anything this offseason to suggest they are employing a Moneyball approach? If so, how are the Browns using analytics to save money?

Next: Basics of the cap