Puskas: Haslam, Browns got their man

January 14, 2016 at 12:10a.m.

The Browns have been Lucy Van Pelt to their fans’ Charlie Brown ever since the franchise returned in 1999.

Most of the time, Browns fans have never come close to kicking the football. Even if they did, the Baltimore Ravens would just block it and return it for a game-winning touchdown.

And the Super Bowl door the late NFL coach Bum Phillips once promised his Houston Oilers would kick down next season after a bitter playoff defeat?

Well, considering the Browns have been to the playoffs exactly once — in 2002 — since their return from NFL exile, it’s always next year for Cleveland.

But on Wednesday, there was something strange in the air in Berea and it quickly across northeastern Ohio.

It was optimism — a feeling that will take some time for snake-bitten Browns fans to process.

Owner Jimmy Haslam skipped the NFL owners meetings this week to focus on hiring a head coach and in typical Cleveland fashion, the move was ridiculed by some after he sent his wife, Dee, to the meetings.

But a funny thing happened on the way to another Browns joke. Haslam got his man Wednesday when the Browns hired Hue Jackson.

Browns-related social media — typically as cynical and snarky an arena as you’ll find anywhere — all but began an appreciative slow clap as word of Jackson’s hire hit the Internet.

The tide may actually have begun to turn after the team hired Paul DePodesta, the noted baseball analytics guy, for a key job in the front office.

After a day or two of reflection, some observers went from, “Those crazy Browns,” to “You know, nothing else has worked for Cleveland. Maybe this will.”

I know all about the Lucy Van Pelt factor with the Browns. I know about the bad hires, the bad draft picks, the bad games on Sundays and all the good ones spoiled by what can only be called a heaping dose of Cleveland. But I like the Jackson hire and it seems I’m not alone.

Jackson isn’t an analytics guy. He isn’t an egghead who crunches numbers. He’s 50 — an old-school football guy who played the game in high school and college — and worked his way through the coaching ranks from graduate assistant at University of the Pacific in 1987 to head coach of the Oakland Raiders on 2011.

But he’s offensive-minded, has had tremendous success with quarterbacks like Carson Palmer and Andy Dalton and his current and former players and coaching colleagues love him. Maybe all those things will make him the yin to the yang of DePodesta, Sashi Brown and the Browns’ yet-to-be-hired general manager or player personnel guru.

I wanted a guy who had been a head coach and it looks like the Browns did, too. Jackson had just that one season with the Raiders because Al Davis died, his son took over and a new GM wanted to hire his own coach. But an 8-8 record with Oakland (read: the NFL’s West Coast version of Cleveland) is an accomplishment.

I know. We’ve been here before. We’ve rationalized every Browns hire since 1999 as The One Cleveland Got Right and then repeated the cycle every couple of years after each one turned out to be a mistake.

But it seems like Haslam got good advice this time. At the very least, he hired a coach who is well-known and respected in NFL circles.

The next step is deciding which players stay and which go.

And then perhaps being a bit more patient than he was — and we were — with the head coaches who came before Jackson.

Write Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas at epuskas@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @EdPuskas_Vindy.