January 25, 2019: Jimmy Haslam to the Gulag

That time Woody Hayes threw a projector through a glass window, state senator sued for blocking constituent, and more.

An incompetent owner is the worst problem to have as a professional sports fan. The best hope is they die painfully and their adult kids who always hated them pawn the franchise for parts out of spite.

Truck fraud magnate Jimmy Haslam is the only thing capable of keeping the Browns from the Super Bowl.

Seth Wickersham of espn.com dropped a bombshell report yesterday, detailing the years of ineptitude under Haslam’s ownership. Here are three creepy things about the Browns’ maniacal owner (emphasis mine):

Some of the football guys in the room wanted to wait and pick Bridgewater in the second round. But the team had soured on Bridgewater after his interview dinner and workout with team brass; something about Bridgewater's handshake rubbed Haslam the wrong way, he told team executives.

Haslam displayed a powerful baby boomer brain here. Don’t forget the Browns also paid $100,000 for an analytical study that rated Bridgewater as the best QB in the draft.

What the hell does a handshake have to do with throwing a football? Not like Bridgewater went on to a Hall-of-Fame career, but the Browns went on to draft the QB who must have had a strong handshake due to rolling thousands of dollar bills in Las Vegas bathrooms.

[Former general manager Sashi] Brown was calm, eloquent and handsome and had graduated from Harvard Law School, which led Haslam to nickname him Obama. Haslam laughed at the nickname, but it offended many in the building as racial stereotyping -- a sentiment that became even more amplified in 2018 after a secret recording of Mark Hazelwood, a person close to Haslam and a former president at Pilot, was made public. On the recording, Hazelwood used a racial slur to describe football fans in a meeting of Pilot executives at which Haslam said he wasn't present. 

This makes sense when the article later notes Haslam didn’t “experience diversity” until he joined the NFL… in 2008… at the spry age of 54. This is honkey humor straight out of 1960’s rural Tennessee.

It’s also telling how everyone describes Haslam as a hands-on owner obsessed with the most minute details of his businesses, yet he had no knowledge of his racist subordinates’ schemes to pilfer truck drivers for half a decade.

It makes sense when you realize Haslam has a (now former) U.S. Senator for a college roommate and his brother governs the state in which his company was accused of doing crime. It’s illegal to prosecute guys like that in the Land of the Free.

The money shot, courtesy of Haslam’s wife, Dee:

"We just don't know what we are doing," Dee said in the office around that time, according to multiple sources in the building, a refrain they had heard her utter before but that she denied through a team spokesman. "If we'd known how hard it would be, we never would have bought the team."

She said this in 2017. The Haslams bought the Browns in 2012. They were minority owners of the Steelers before that. Did they think turning the Browns into a champion was going to be a moon-lit walk along the majestic shore of Lake Erie?

Billionaire bozos playing the victim card would be laughable if I didn’t have a brain disease forcing me to root for this forsaken franchise until my heart explodes at the ripe age of 35.

Looking back, Hue Jackson’s sorry ass took some years off my life:

[Jackson] would later tell friends the team undersold him on the extremeness of the rebuilding plan, a charge that Browns executives found absurd, given the level of detail shared during the interview process.

Fuck off forever, Hue. I hope I never have to think about you again.

Wait wait wait… this is the true money shot:

Marketing executives wanted employees to see how fans were engaging with the Browns on social media, so they projected the Browns feed onto a giant wall at the facility. It was like broadcasting talk radio over the entire building, and one day in particular, it was worse than that. One of the marketing staffers entered a search for #dp -- for Dawg Pound. The problem was, that hashtag carried a few different meanings, one of which triggered an array of porn to be broadcast onto a wall for the entire office to see for more than 20 minutes, until a tech employee killed the feed.

Twenty minutes??? If it was that big of a problem, the staff could’ve pulled the plug on the projector. The more likely scenario is the fellas came in extra horny that day and after a season of losing were just thankful to watch somebody else’s wife get double-penetrated on television for once.

My favorite type of sports executive is the one with no understanding of the common fan. On what planet is it a good idea to broadcast the mentions of a winless team on the wall of the facility?

Browns fans have probably condemned the last ten social media managers to decades of deep psychological therapy with what we tweeted at the @Browns account after watching Ben Roethlisberger waddle out of a collapsing pocket on third down for the sixth time only to throw a 50-yard dart to Antonio Brown.

And #DP — honestly? Until then, nobody had ever referred to the Dawg Pound as the “DP.” If I walked up to a random Muni Lot tailgate and said, “Hey, y’all ready to head to the DP?” an off-duty factory worker would cudgel me to death with a $5 dog bone.

Naturally, the Ohio T-Shirt Industrial Complex saw this as an opportunity to make money.

Somehow the Browns clown rodeo stumbled into John Dorsey, a talented Football Guy who has great takes like hating math and nerds while also possessing the fortune and foresight of drafting Baker Mayfield.

Haslam has deluded himself into thinking he’ll go down as a legend if the Browns win the Super Bowl under his stewardship.

He may be the first one to touch the Lombardi Trophies due to the boot-licking norms of American sports culture, but he will never crack the top-100 legends if the Browns win the Super Bowl. He is and forever will be the asshole who signs the checks — literally the most replaceable guy in the entire operation.

If the Browns somehow mess this up, the blame will fall squarely on Haslam, and I will never forgive him. The formula is simple: Let Dorsey cook and stay the fuck out of the kitchen.

Can his billionaire ego allow that? Probably not.

Sadly this won’t stop me from chanting “Su-per Bowl! Su-per Bowl!” until that train derails. And even then it only depends on how serious the head trauma is. God help me.

Ohio State fans idolize Woody Hayes because we like to think of winning head coaches as our friend instead of a sociopathic mercenary.

No doubt Ol’ Woody knew how to win a football game or two. Not sure what’s more amazing, though: Him lasting that long or nobody pressing charges.

Look at this story Lou Holtz tells like it’s entirely normal.

From Holtz’s memoirs, Losses and Wins, via actioncookbook of edsbs.com:

“In that first meeting, the staff and I broke up a physical fight between Coach (Woody) Hayes and an assistant coach over a student’s academics... the assistant respectfully disagreed, and Coach Hayes went after him, grabbing him by the shirt and starting a tussle... Breaking up the fight was just for starters. Later Coach Hayes got mad over something else and picked up the projector and hurled it through the glass door.

[several paragraphs of this later]

“Sure, he had a volatile temper; you never knew what was going to happen when he was around. But he was also a brilliant tactician.”

If Hayes existed today, he would definitely be a Trump voter who spends an hour every night browsing Breitbart in bed on an iPad with maximum text size. (Remember, Woody apoplectically called Richard Nixon and begged him not to resign.)

Imagine Woody swinging on Mike Vrabel after practice. Vrabel would fold that beefy geezer like a bad poker hand. If Woody tried swinging on a player in 2018 he would only remember getting suplexed into the turf and his team yelling “World Staaaaar” before awaking from a coma six months later as the villain of a viral video with over two million views.

Slugging a Clemson scrub in the 70s was as well as it could’ve ended for Ohio State. He wouldn’t last six months as coach in 2019.

As Sun Tzu once advised, “Blocking your enemies gives them screenshot content. Never give your enemies content.”

Republican Ohio State Senator Joe Uecker forgot the wise words of the Chinese warlord philosopher when he blocked a constituent, which is illegal.

From Jackie Borchardt of cincinnati.com:

Anthony Fambry of Batavia claims Ohio state Sen. Joe Uecker, R-Miami Township, illegally blocked him from Uecker's official Facebook page after a brief discussion over the senator's support for a controversial abortion ban.  

In a complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, attorneys say Uecker violated Fambry's First Amendment right to freedom of speech when the senator banned Fambry and deleted his comments from a post on his page. Fambry can still see Uecker's posts and others' comments, but he cannot leave any comments.

"This is both frustrating and distressful to me as I very much want to engage both the Senator and other members of the public regarding matters of public import on the official Facebook page of the senator who represents my district in the Ohio Senate," Fambry wrote in an affidavit accompanying the complaint. 

The best part is Uecker unblocked Fambry and thinks this should end the lawsuit. I’m not sure about that.

Props to Fambry regardless for suing a state senator over a social media block. That’s a pettiness to which every American should strive to hold their government representatives in 2019.

Yes, the Covington High School episode refuses to die. I’m sorry to mention it again. We’ve all seen and formed a now unshakable opinion on the latest cultural flashpoint in the Reality/MAGA divide gripping America.

What you might not know is nobody knows who ran the Twitter account that turned a 56-second video into a story that could define 2019.

From Kate Conger and Sheera Frenkel of nyt.com:

SAN FRANCISCO — Lawmakers are investigating the Twitter account that first shared a video of a group of white teenagers taunting a Native American protester in Washington, a collision of racial groups and politics that went viral.

The House Intelligence Committee asked Twitter on Tuesday to provide information about how the video took off so fast. The committee said it was also awaiting information about the account that first uploaded the video and accounts that helped spread it by retweeting it.

….

The identity of the person or people behind @2020fight remains unknown. The account used a profile picture of a Brazilian social media personality, Nah Cardoso, and purported to belong to an educator and advocate. It posted more than 100 times a day, including many overtly political messages that resonated widely on Twitter.

Super chill to live in an era when foreign despots can exploit the social fabric of America while our tech overlords shrug and pretend there’s nothing they can do.

Dwayne Haskins’ draft stock took a hit Thursday when he posted an Instagram Story with his “boy,” Johnny Manziel.

Haskins is either looking for a drug dealer or handshake tips. I won’t be concerned unless Manziel starts living off Haskins’ futon in NYC.

We’re now in Day 35 of President Adult Diaper’s Shutdown. Here’s how Day 34 went:

• Billionaire commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, a habitual grifter fond of wearing $1,000 velvet slippers, was perplexed by furloughed workers unwilling to take a payday loan with 9% interest.

• The Director of the United States National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, said unpaid workers are “volunteering” their services. When pressed further, he said they’re working out of respect to President Stale McDouble.

• Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin refused to testify to a House committee about the effects of the shutdown. Expect a subpoena soon.

• The president showed once again he doesn’t know how grocery stores work when he said broke workers can simply “work” with their local grocer to obtain credit.

• The GOP Senate Caucus is starting to crack. At a luncheon, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) reportedly blamed Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Hell) for the predicament. “Are you suggesting I’m enjoying this?” McConnell replied.

On a brighter note, furloughed workers in the Cleveland area can assuage the pain of not getting paid for a second pay-period in a row by getting blackout drunk at noon on a Friday on the tab of Geraldo Rivera.

Better than nothing, I guess.

BP committed a war crime in Ashland back in 2015 when it rebranded the Goasis into something not the Goasis.

The Ohio gods have smitten the abomination—as if you needed another omen the Browns are going undefeated this year.

THOSE WMDs. Shoot someone in a major U.S. city, and you’re likely to get away with it… Ruthless: How Kamala Harris won her first race… NATO fear this small Estonian town will be the epicenter of conflict with Russia… This is what happens when you sue your boss… City with 250,000 yearly arrests only employs enough judges and staff to take 650 cases to trial… Florida Secretary of State resigns after Halloween blackface photos emerge… We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s.