The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Tennessee State hires Jackson
Ex-Browns coach will be offensive coordinator
Former Browns head coach Hue Jackson is back on a football sideline — or maybe he will be upstairs in the coaching booth.
Jackson on April 14 accepted the job of offensive coordinator at Tennessee State under Tigers’ new head coach Eddie George, the Ohio State Heisman Trophy winner and former Tennessee Titans star running back.
Jackson announced the news on his Twitter account @huejack10.
Jackson was the Browns head coach from 2016 to midway through the 2018 season. His teams were 1-15, 0-16 and 2-5-1. His 3-36-1 record is the worst in franchise history.
The Browns salvaged the 2018 season by going 5-3 after Jackson was fired for an overall record of 7-8-1. But that ended up backfiring, too.
Freddie Kitchens, who started 2018 as the running backs coach, was promoted to offensive coordinator
when Jackson and offensive coordinator Todd Haley were fired at the same time.
Kitchens was named head coach for 2019. The Browns stumbled to a 6-10 record. Kitchens and general manager John Dorsey were shown the door and replaced by Kevin Stefanski and Andrew Berry.
Soon after being fired by the Browns, former Bengals coach Marvin Lewis hired Jackson to finish out the 2018 season in Cincinnati, where Jackson worked as an assistant coach under Lewis, including the 2014 and 2015 seasons as offensive coordinator. It was those two seasons that led Browns owner Jimmy Haslam to hiring Jackson to be head coach.
Jackson ripped the Browns on March 29 during an appearance on The Really Big Show on ESPN AM-850.
“I got a contract extension at 1-23, midway through the (2017) season,” Jackson said. “I wanted to go public with it, but the Browns didn’t.
“There’s no doubt I was lied to by ownership and leadership of the team. They were going to be football plus analytics, but it was football vs. analytics. I think I became the fall guy because that was the narrative. The truth needs to come out.”
Jackson said he is writing a book about his experience with the Browns as a warning to other minority coaches.
Though the accusations by Jackson came to light on the WKNR interview, they are not new. Jackson met with the media covering the team after the 0-16 season, showed clips of players making errors and said, especially as a minority, that he never would have taken the job had he known the plan was to do a total teardown with Sashi Brown as director of football operations.