Daily Dawg Tags: Browns a landing spot for Mularkey?
By Thomas Moore
The Cleveland Browns need an offensive coordinator and reports are out that former Tennessee head coach Mike Mularkey may be in play.
The Cleveland Browns need an offensive coordinator.
The fans know it. Most of the media know. General manager John Dorsey certainly knows it.
Deep down, even head coach Hue Jackson probably knows it. The problem is that he doesn’t want to accept the reality.
The Browns offense has been bad in its two years under Jackson, finishing 31st in points scored in 2016 and 32nd this past season. Jackson came to town with the stated goal of fixing the team’s quarterback situation, but has only managed to make it worse.
Shortly after being hired as the fifth general manager under owner Jimmy Haslam, Dorsey declared that the Browns would be bringing in an offensive coordinator. But Jackson, who reports directly to Haslam rather than Dorsey, has pushed back on that statement and has only acquiesced to the idea of “considering” an offensive coordinator.
Which brings us to Mike Mularkey, who was relieved of his duties as head coach of the Tennessee Titans on Monday. Shortly after that news broke, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport tossed out a Tweet that Mularkey could find a new home in Cleveland with the Browns:
One potential landing spot for former #Titans coach Mike Mularkey: The offensive coordinator to #Browns coach Hue Jackson. There was interest if Mularkey ever became available.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) January 15, 2018
As bad as Jackson has been in his role as offensive coordinator, the idea of Mularkey taking over the offense is not very inspiring.
While the Titans offense was statistically better than the Browns the past two seasons — it would be almost impossible for it to be worse — the team regressed this past season. As ESPN’s Cameron Wolfe points out, the Titans offense in 2017 was an underachieving unit that was too “predictable.”
The interesting part about Mularkey coming to Cleveland is that he could be viewed as a backup plan in case the Browns start off slow this fall and Haslam finally decides to fire Jackson.
That’s not a very exciting option, however, as even after going 9-7 the past two seasons with the Titans, Mularkey is toting around a career record of just 36-53. Again, that looks great compared to Jackson, but not something that would inspire excitement in a beleaguered fan base.
Which means that, given the way the offseason has gone so far for the Browns, we should be expecting Mularkey to be putting pen to paper on a contract any day now.
Cleveland Browns news:
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"A team that hires and fires coaches with regularity is going to have a fair amount of alumni sprinkled around the league. So it is with the Cleveland Browns, who have had nine coaches, 15 offensive coordinators and 12 defensive coordinators since 1999, the year of the team’s return from a three-year hiatus."
NFL news:
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"The highest-impact signing of the 2017 offseason happened on March 31, more than three weeks after the frenzied opening of the NFL free-agent market. It was a little-noticed, one-year, $2 million contract by the Vikings for a backup quarterback who had lost the Rams’ starting job to Jared Goff five months earlier. Keep this in mind this March, when you’re wailing, “When will my team sign somebody?”"