After being passed over for the Cleveland Browns head coaching gig in favor of Todd Monken, former defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz turned down an opportunity to stay with the club.
After months of silence, Schwartz discussed his decision with Ryan Ripkin.
“It’s the way it was,” Schwartz said. “We had a lot of success on defense, and the Browns changed coaches, and they passed me by with all the success we had and the ability to develop players, our best players had their best years, all these different things. And that was a decision they made. They wanted to go with an offensive lineman. They chose Todd. I’m fine with that. They can make decisions they want to be on board for me, but they don’t want to be on board for me. that’s in any business, you get passed you get promoted when you’ve done a really, really good job at your job and you think you were in line for the promotion.
Schwartz, who was Cleveland’s DC for the past three seasons, reiterated that he didn’t want to stick to a shotgun wedding.
“Todd deserved his own guy. Forced marriage won’t work in the NFL,” he said. “To have control over the players and to have control over the locker room, all those things are very important, and I felt like I couldn’t do my job after being passed over for the head coaching job. It put me in a difficult position. ‘Hey, we want you to listen to this guy, but we didn’t want to make him the head coach.’
“So I made the decision to resign and I have to sit out this year as a result. But I think anybody that’s been in any business, when you’ve done a good job, when you put those numbers, we weren’t one of the best defenses for three years, we were the best defense for three years. The decision they made, that’s their decision, but to expect me to stay on board and for me. wouldn’t have been good for me and it wouldn’t have been good for Todd to get his own guy in there instead of being with me in the organization and having me there and maybe have some players more loyal to me than him.
Schwartz is right, it could have been uncomfortable, especially for defensive players who may have been more sacred to DC than the head coach. The current question is whether Myles Garrett would have wanted to stay in Cleveland if Schwartz was the head coach — not that it changes the fact that compensation in the Browns’ trade was the right move by the club at this time.
With the Browns able to block his path to another gig, Schwartz, 60, will have to sit out a season. The fairness with which he is approaching the situation will serve him well in his next round of interviews.
“I wasn’t upset about it,” he said. “I was disappointed by it. I wasn’t upset about it; I wasn’t angry about it, but it’s just my experience that told me it wasn’t a situation that was going to work.”