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"At one end of the wood table sits Rob Chudzinski, the new head coach of the Cleveland Browns. He wears a visor and coach shorts, almost like a character from a Kevin Costner movie about who the Cleveland Browns might draft (which, as it turns out, actually exists). Sitting next to Chud is Joe Banner, the Browns' new CEO, who has come to the club after 20 years with the Eagles (he wears a hoodie promoting an Alaska-based brewery and drinks a Pepsi). Next to Banner is Ray Farmer, a former Eagles linebacker now serving as the assistant to the team's new general manager, Mike Lombardi, the fourth man in the room. Lombardi wears a suit and sometimes circles the table like a half-hungry hammerhead shark. Lombardi talks the most. Chudzinski talks the least. Banner runs the room. Farmer is the equilibrium (he rarely speaks first but provides the most balanced insights)." [emphasis added]
"On his laptop, Chudzinski is rewatching tape of a lineman he likes a little more than he probably should. He keeps watching footage from the same game, the single best performance the player had all year. Chudzinski knows the kid is flawed, but he remains intrigued by his physical frame. Banner is less bullish. 'What does a bust look like before it happens?' he asks rhetorically. 'It looks like four guys sitting in a room, trying to convince each other that some guy is better than we think he is.'" [emphasis added]
"Though I never directly spoke to the 60-year-old Banner, I was impressed watching him work. He might not be the warmest guy in the world, and I suspect he's a demanding boss. He's a little more sarcastic than necessary. But you can just tell he's hypercompetent. It's weirdly obvious. He seems like the kind of man who could effectively run any kind of business, regardless of what it did or what it sold."
"During the three days I visit the Browns organization, I hear the phrase 'This is off the record' more often than I've heard it during the past 10 years of my career. The team told me I would have unprecedented access to its workplace, which (I suppose) was technically true. I could walk around the halls and peer inside the empty offices. I could hang out in the weight room and use the locker room lavatory. The only problem was that almost none of the 150 people who work in this facility were allowed to answer any specific questions pertaining to football."
"The Browns live in a state of perpetual war, endlessly convincing themselves that every scrap of information they possess is some kind of game-changing superweapon that will alter lives and transmogrify the culture. They behave like members of a corporate cult. Yet what do these cultists watch on the day of the draft? They watch ESPN. They log on to the Internet and scan ProFootballTalk. The comments they make about college prospects are roughly identical to whatever your smarter friends might glean from the Plain Dealer. I've never witnessed this level of institutional paranoia within a universe so devoid of actual secrets. I don't even know what they don't want me to know."
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