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Mike Pettine, former defensive coordinator of the Buffalo Bills, was introduced as the new head coach of the Cleveland Browns on January 23. Today, on February 11, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam announced that two of the men prominently involved in the decision to hire Pettine - team president Joe Banner and general manager Mike Lombardi - are leaving the organization.
Assistant GM Ray Farmer is now in charge of Cleveland's football operation as the new GM, and he inherits Pettine as his head coach, with an indeterminate amount of influence in the hiring to begin with.
Jimmy Haslam confirms that Ray Farmer wasn’t in head coach interviews. But he said Ray played a "key role" in information gathering
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) February 11, 2014
In those 19 days between Pettine's departure from Buffalo and today, the Browns and Bills have been building and re-building - respectively - their coaching staffs. Six former Bills assistants left to join Pettine in Cleveland, most prominently linebackers coach Jim O'Neil (now the Browns' defensive coordinator), while the Bills scooped up former Detroit head coach Jim Schwartz to replace Pettine and have hired new assistants to work with him, most prominently defensive line coach Pepper Johnson. We've been keeping track of those comings and goings here.
One has to wonder if Pettine's thought process on his new job has changed at all in the past 19 days, and whether he'd have left Buffalo nearly three weeks ago had he known this was coming. Feel free to discuss the developments below, or to guess how ticked off Pepper Johnson is going to be when Schwartz becomes a head coach next winter and the Bills replace him with Pettine. (We jest. We think.)
