Cleveland Browns: How to tell if firing Freddie Kitchens was the right move

Freddie Kitchens was fired after just one season with the Cleveland Browns, and it will be easy to test whether that was a mistake or not

It’s very simple to determine whether the Cleveland Browns erred by firing Freddie Kitchens Sunday night — wait and see what his next job will be.

Many fans have argued that Freddie should not be judged by the results in just one season, and that it is better to have continuity. Many great coaches had lousy first years, including Chuck Noll, Tom Landry, Jimmy Johnson, and others.

If Freddie Kitchens is truly head coaching material, he will soon be a head coach or at least an offensive coordinator for another team. On the other hand, if those of us who were critical of the team under his regime are correct, other teams will shy away from Kitchens. It would come as a surprise if he were given more authority than, say, a position coach.

I like Freddie Kitchens and admire him greatly after what he has gone through in his life. If you haven’t read about it before, Freddie suffered an unusual and terrible injury to his heart, a torn aorta. Forget about football, this was life and death and the odds were against his survival.

Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Andrew Goldstein, who was amazed at how calm Kitchens was in the face of probable death.

"“He was kind of supernaturally relaxed and kind of matter-of-fact about it. It wasn’t that he was telling me what to do, but he was like, ‘OK, man, let’s get this taken care of.’ It was unreal, especially because he had been told he was most likely not going to survive.”"

Kitchens was given an artificial heart valve and put back together with miraculous medical attention and survived and was able to continue his coaching career. The odds were way against it, but he pulled through. He faced the worst adversity anyone can face and triumphed over it.

That is why you can be sure that Freddie Kitchens will land on his feet —but not necessarily as a head coach in the NFL anytime soon.

To many of us, the Cleveland Browns were an undisciplined hot mess this season. Was there ever a Browns season with more penalties, ejections, and fines than this year? Was there ever a team that took itself out of offensive drives with failed trick plays as often as the Browns did? Perhaps those problems can be improved with a different coach.

It was troubling that there had never been a problem with Myles Garrett before, but in 2019 he was fined on three separate occasions, with the last one including an ejection and suspension. Garrett used to grumble about the discipline of Kitchens’ predecessor Gregg Williams, but maybe old “Double G” was correct.

These problems seem to be a weakness in the coaching process and not something that can be easily corrected. For those reasons, the Browns are correct to make a move at this time.

So, we can do the experiment to determine the suitability of Kitchens to be a head coach. There should be any number of interviews for open positions, and he should at least make it to the shortlist for the head coach positions available around the league.

If, on the other hand, the critics are correct and Kitchens is not ready to be a head coach, then it will be a quiet winter on the interview circuit. Kitchens may have time to do some bass fishing down in his home state of Georgia.

Eventually, he will get a gig in the NFL again, probably as a position coach, where he has had good success and got to the Super Bowl once.