For all the talk about Paul DePodesta's background with analytics and the Moneyball era of the MLB, Sashi Brown's Harvard diploma and the almost complete lack of activity out of Cleveland on the NFL free agent front, the new Browns decision-makers aren't simply giving over to statistics and mathematical models when it comes to putting together their team. As evidenced by their addition of former second-overall pick and one-time quarterback of the present and future in Washington, Robert Griffin III, last week, the Browns know that there's more to putting together a competitive football team, more to winning in the NFL.
And that more is the people, the players, like Griffin who make up a team.
"I wouldn't trade our process for any I've seen since I've been in the NFL," Jackson said recently, per Peter King. "I don't do anything without us all talking things through. They don't do anything with talking to me. Paul's input was very valuable in the process of signing Robert. He was good about the psyche of an athlete coming back from injuries or adversity, and about the fact that it's a people business. We all talk football, football, football, but this is a people business foremost. And all of us in the process here are joined at the hip."
Really, the Browns signing of RG3 means little beyond the hubbub that immediately followed it. Griffin, though he shot out to that electrifying start to his NFL career in Washington, has fallen back to earth and tumbled down the rabbit hole. Now, he's just hoping to find his way back to reality.
Taking ownership of his own hand in things falling apart so spectacularly in Washington - as Jackson indicated Griffin had - is a good first step for RG3. But again, unless what follows is Griffin appearing at Browns offseason work with a new attitude and a new approach to his own game, it won't matter much, if at all.
The Browns are almost certainly still going to take a quarterback at No. 2 in the first round of the 2016 NFL Draft, whether that be Carson Wentz or Jared Goff, and it's likely that the long-term future of football in Cleveland does not include RG3.
That Jackson, and by extension the rest of the Browns' decision-makers, were sufficiently swayed by Griffin's contriteness is a positive - for him. For the team, it's nothing more than the addition of another talented player looking to make good on all the promise he squandered at a prior NFL destination - a cheap add that can be built upon if it somehow works out, jettisoned easily if it doesn't.
Griffin gets $6.75 million in 2016, $7.5 million in 2017 if, and only if, he proves it wasn't all an act and he really is hell-bent on remaking himself in Jackson's ideal quarterback image.
Really though, the Browns adding Griffin should be viewed as a good sign by any Cleveland fan worried that the team will be fully given over to these Moneyball metrics - it means DePodesta and Co. are willing to be flexible when it comes to Jackson's perceptions of a player's intent and/or willingness to work.
The fact that it just so happens to give them a potential impact player on a cheap deal - one of the tenets of the Moneyball system - is surely just a nice coincidence.
