Johnny Manziel’s future with Hue Jackson, Browns still up in the air

Jackson has head coaching experience, he knows how to develop quarterbacks and he brings discipline.

Just what the Browns were looking for. Jackson, who waited four years for his second crack at leading an National Football League team, has been hired as Cleveland…

Can Hue Jackson be the man to save Johnny Manziel and the Browns?

Jackson had also interviewed with the San Francisco 49ers and was scheduled to meet later this week with the New York Giants, but Haslam was not going to be outbid for a coach he coveted.

“I came here to win”, said Jackson, who says he’s comfortable with the team’s personnel department and new emphasis on analytics.

The team will introduce Jackson at an evening news conference at their facility in Berea, Ohio. He could also draft a quarterback as the Browns have the second overall pick in this year’s draft.

Embattled 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick be coveted by the Cleveland Browns, along with his current team, for 2016. When video surfaced of Manziel, he lied to the team about how old it was and reportedly asked his friends to lie for him about his whereabouts. But assuming that their management will be at least a little more patient than they’ve been in the past, Hue’s task has gone from meshing together a talented offense in Cincinnati to finding talent to mesh in Cleveland. A former college quarterback at Pacific, Jackson pushed Dalton to his best statistical season in 2015 and was known for his creative flair with unbalanced lines and unorthodox formations. Schottenheimer was sacked after the season but his impact was everlasting with Jackson.

“Analytics is just a part of it. It”™s not the whole thing, but it”™s a piece of it. If we can find another way of doing things well to give us an opportunity to have success, we all would do that.

“There is more than one way to do things”, he said.

Jackson has bigger challenges in Cleveland. Pettine had the Browns off to a 7-4 start in 2014, but he lost 18 of his last 21 games. “He’s smart, he’s tough, he’s confident, he’s competitive”.

The Browns met with Jackson again on Tuesday and Haslam offered him the job on Wednesday. “I can’t worry about what’s happened before me”. He would not want to play for a taskmaster, but in Jackson there might be good personality mesh. “You’ve got to make sure you surround yourself with great people”, Jackson said. The Browns have been lacking in all three of those.

It’s been a whirlwind few days for Jackson.

Cleveland hasn’t won a playoff game since 1994 and been absent from the postseason since 2002. There was a lot of talk that the Browns wouldn’t be able to find a head coach who would want to try to turn their situation around, but in the end, they landed one of the better candidates you could find.