Cleveland Browns land offensive coordinator in Alex Van Pelt

The Cleveland Browns have their new offensive coordinator as Mary Kay Cabot says Kevin Stefanski will be hiring Alex Van Pelt

Once again, the Cleveland Browns added a coach to their staff with some ties to a winning organization. In need of an offensive coordinator, they ended up choosing Alex Van Pelt, who was with the Buffalo Bills as a player from 1994 through 2003.

Before that, he spent time with the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers. Once his playing career was done, Van Pelt got into coaching and has primarily been a running backs coach for the past 15 seasons.

His best success came with the Green Bay Packers, where he was the running backs coach from 2012-2013 and then spent the next four seasons working with Aaron Rodgers as the quarterbacks coach. Van Pelt spent the past two seasons with the Cincinnati Bengals but now moves to northeast Ohio according to Mary Kay Cabot.

Van Pelt is clearly not a household name but he has been around the game for a long time. And he also has some experience as an offensive coordinator, having served in that role in 2009 for the Buffalo Bills.

With Cleveland, his role will be interesting. Like Todd Monken in 2019, Van Pelt will not be calling the plays. It was already established that Stefanski would be doing this, just as Freddie Kitchens did during his one season with the Browns.

In all likelihood, Van Pelt is going to serve as a good mentor for Baker Mayfield as Cleveland looks to get him back on track.

While not a whole lot is known about Van Pelt’s style as an OC, we should just be happy knowing that he shouldn’t be telling opponents what a mess this team is before games. That’s something, right?