Browns 2021-22 Thread

[zigbee]

With OTA going on and news and notes I found this of interest to kick off the Fall NFL Browns Season:

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The NFL combine is all about the future. Itâ€s what the draft prospects represent and what coaches and GMs spend the week talking about. Each year, the Indianapolis Convention Center and nearby Lucas Oil Stadium become part of the pipeline for that future.

But on the first day of the 2020 event, you could walk two blocks down from the convention center, over to the JW Marriott hotel, take an elevator to the third floor and enter Grand Ballroom 4 to see a different kind of NFL pipeline.


This one isnâ€t that big and itâ€s not flowing so fast. You could argue that itâ€s more like a steady drip. But it is working, and the NFL knows it. Thatâ€s why the backdrop for the ballroom stage included a huge blue banner featuring the NFL shield logo and big white lettering that read “The Future Of Football.”

Yet there werenâ€t draft prospects seated below the banner, but four women. In front of them, an audience of more women. They were all there for a panel titled “How To Break In,” which wrapped up the opening day at the fourth annual Womenâ€s Careers in Football Forum.

Thatâ€s where Callie Brownson was on Feb. 25, less than a month after becoming Kevin Stefanskiâ€s chief of staff, making her one of just a handful of women with full-time NFL coaching jobs.

For Brownson, the moment was surreal, a milestone in a five-year journey that felt much longer. It wasnâ€t her first time at the forum, but instead of sitting in the audience, she was on the stage. She knew the longing in the audience, because sheâ€d been there, looking at the base of a mountain and wondering how to climb it.


“My piece of advice,” Brownson told the audience, “is I always try to leave an impression on every single person I meet, whether theyâ€re the person whoâ€s going to give me a job or whatever. ... Treat everybody in that regard, because you never really know who that one person is whoâ€s going to be talking about you in that room.

“What kind of impression did you leave on that person?”


‘I wanted to playâ€
Callie Brownson has never really gone unnoticed.

At 10, she told her father, Bruce, that she wanted to play youth football. She had spent many Saturdays in Alexandria, Va., rooting for the Miami Hurricanes with her father. Now she wanted to try the game on for size.

“We ended up going to a football program here in Groveton (Va.), which is an old neighborhood here in the area,” he said. “We showed up for sign-up and, you know, we got a few eyebrows.”

The guy who ran the league agreed to let Brownson watch three practices, and then, if she was still interested, she could give it a try. She was, and did, playing tight end and defensive end, and at the end of the season won a rookie MVP award.


For Bruce, it was fun to watch his daughter be able to compete in a physical sport against boys. Then, at the end of the game, when everybody took their helmets off and shook hands, heâ€d notice the double takes.

“It was great,” he said. “And I think that empowered her, the idea that itâ€s not something, traditionally, that a girl would do. But it was something that she wanted to do and she just went for it.”

Brownson also played baseball with boys and made her leagueâ€s all-star team. But roadblocks arrived in high school. Mount Vernon High wouldnâ€t allow her to play football, which Bruce indicated was a decision made by someone other than the football coaches.

It was her first real introduction to gender norms. She had played sports with boys her whole life. Football. Baseball. Ice hockey.


“So this was my first brush with like, ‘Wait a second, girls canâ€t do what?†This is my first time society kind of tried to tell me what a girl could or couldnâ€t do,” she said. “I remember that being the hardest part because I wasnâ€t used to that. ... Iâ€d never had to process those kinds of thoughts. So that was, I think, the struggle for me. I was just very frustrated as to why it was like that.”

Brownson remembers being offered an opportunity to be a kicker at Mount Vernon.

“No offense to kickers at all. Kickers matter, too,” she said. “But I wanted to play. That wasnâ€t an option for me.”

Bruce decided not to fight it. It was one thing to play football against boys in a youth league with weight or age restrictions. It was another to play in high school against boys morphing into men.


“Football is violent, and Callieâ€s not a big girl,” Bruce said. “Sheâ€s 5-4, weighs 140.”

Bruce had fought for his daughter before. He made sure a Little League summer camp in Williamsport, Pa., made accommodations even after the camp tried to pull her enrollment when it realized she would be the only girl. She ended up with a dorm all to herself. She had a ball turning on all the water and running around her own personal communal shower.

High school baseball wasnâ€t welcoming. She made the team, but was told it wasnâ€t likely that sheâ€d get a chance to play. So she switched to softball.

At the end of her junior year, Brownson decided to take one more swing at football. Her friends had encouraged her to go out for the team her senior year. There was a new head coach by then, so she found him on the last day of classes and explained her intentions.


“He just laughed at me, like, ‘No way. Not gonna happen,â€â€ she said. “So that was my second failed attempt. Thatâ€s when I was like, ‘Iâ€m done trying.â€â€



From player to coach
But football wasnâ€t done with her. Even before graduation, she learned there was a place for her in the game. It wasnâ€t in high school, or Virginia. But it was close.

The D.C. Divas had competed in national womenâ€s leagues since 2001. A family friend had been encouraging her to check it out. After a night of watching YouTube highlights, Brownson decided she wasnâ€t done trying to play after all.

At 19, she became one of the youngest players in the Womenâ€s Football Alliance. She did a little of everything -- receiver, running back, defensive back, kick returner. The team referred to her as the Swiss Army Knife.

In 2013, her success with the Divas led to a spot on USA Footballâ€s womenâ€s national team. Brownson was a defensive back on the 2013 world champions after a 64-0 romp over Canada. (Another defensive back on that team was current 49ers assistant coach Katie Sowers.)


By 2015, Brownson had graduated from George Mason University with a sports management degree. She was working at a local gym and helping coach softball at Mount Vernon.

Barry Wells had recently been hired as Mount Vernonâ€s football coach. Brownson ran into him in the hallway at the school and decided to introduce herself. Wells had heard she played womenâ€s football and was interested in hearing about it.

That led to a question that wouldâ€ve seemed silly to think about when she was in high school.

“Have you ever really thought about coaching football?” Wells asked. “Is that ever something thatâ€s crossed your mind?”

It hadnâ€t. Certainly not high school football. Definitely not boys. She wasnâ€t sure what to say. Wells explained that the team was holding spring practices and that she should check it out.

“I did and I clicked with the players pretty quickly,” Brownson remembers. “It was a lot of (Wells) extending the branch … for him to see no barriers and me being part of the staff was really cool.”


She coached receivers and defensive backs for three years. The girl who couldnâ€t play for the team became the woman who could coach the team.

Go figure.

“It was an opportunity to come full circle on an experience that was kind of bad for me,” she said. “Being told no and not being able to follow that dream of mine, but then coming back to coach, it was ... I didnâ€t have any bad feelings. There wasnâ€t any resentment towards the whole thing for me.

“It was just a cool way to change the norm in the same place it had gone negatively for me. I was able to create a positive experience out of it.”



Taking advantage
While Brownson was breaking down walls, Samantha Rapoport was thinking bigger.

The NFLâ€s director of football development, Rapoport was helping launch a womenâ€s forum in 2017 to open doors to NFL jobs. They had met years earlier through USA Football, and Rapoport knew Brownson was a high school coach.

Rapoport told her the program was right up her alley.

“It kind of got my wheels spinning,” Brownson said. “I was very curious as to what I was going to gain from it, who I was going to meet.”

She knew the Cardinals had hired the NFLâ€s first female coaching intern in 2015, but wasnâ€t sure what kind of opportunities might be available. At worst, the experience could be useful to pursuing a future as a high school coach.


But seeing NFL coaches and general managers at the forum created optimism about the possibilities. She followed up with the connections she had made and eventually landed a scouting and personnel internship with the Jets.

“Thereâ€s no better way [than an internship] to figure out if itâ€s for you,” she said. “Working in professional football, working in college football, itâ€s not for everybody. But an internship is a great way to figure that out, and thatâ€s really what that Jets internship did for me.”

The taste of what she wanted was great. Then the internship ended, which wasnâ€t. She found herself back in Virginia, working for her fatherâ€s company, KnowWho, which provides political contacts and information for lobbyist and advocacy groups.

“Itâ€s kind of a boring lifestyle,” Bruce Brownson admits.

At one point, daughter went into fatherâ€s office, laid on the couch and in a defeated voice, said, “Yep, Iâ€m just going to have to work for KnowWho the rest of my life.”

She was still able to coach at Mount Vernon, and her connections through USA Football provided a chance to attend the annual Manning Passing Academy as a coach in 2018. The camp was including girls for the first time, and Brownson was brought in specifically to help coach them.

Thatâ€s where Brownson caught the eye of Dartmouth head coach Buddy Teevens, who was impressed with her energy and confidence. She didnâ€t arrive thinking it was a networking opportunity. She was simply there to coach -- but still found herself asking Teevens for career advice.

A week after the camp, Teevens offered a preseason coaching internship at Dartmouth. It turned into a full-time spot as offensive quality control coach for the 2018 season, making Brownson the first full-time female coach in Division I football.

Media began showing up on Dartmouthâ€s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire. The Washington Post, ESPN, Huffington Post, NPR. It made clear that this was more than coaching football, it was a pioneering role. She told people she didnâ€t want to be the first Division I female coach. She wanted to be the first of many.

“You want to set a good example so that the people you work with every day, or the people who get curious about this, are getting a positive example of how women can add value ... to a program, whether it be a high school program, a college program or up into the NFL,” she said. “You know, everything that we do every day is setting a reputation, not just for ourselves but for every woman who wants to be involved in it. Thatâ€s just the nature of the game.”

Brownson was back at the womenâ€s forum in early 2019, this time as an employed college football coach. She wasnâ€t necessarily looking for job opportunities, but Teevens had been talking her up. Among those who had heard about her was Bills head coach Sean McDermott, who was impressed enough that he offered her an opportunity to shadow coaches for a couple days during Bills training camp.

That turned into a training camp internship, which turned into a full-time internship for the season.

“I went into that training camp for those few weeks thinking I was going back to Dartmouth, and Iâ€m going to leave here better than I started, and I was going to be a sponge,” she said. “When I was given the opportunity to stay on through the season I remember stopping myself and saying, ‘This is an incredible opportunity and I need to take advantage of every single day, every single conversation, every single person I meet.â€â€

Her next opportunity turned out to be pretty incredible, too.

Callie Brownson was a scouting and personnel intern with the Jets and an full-time intern with the Bills before joining the Browns.
Callie Brownson was a scouting and personnel intern with the Jets and an full-time intern with the Bills before joining the Browns.AP

Fast track
Kevin Stefanski was asked about the importance of having diversity on a coaching staff during his introductory press conference in January.

“I am glad you asked that because it is important, and I am going to do everything in my power and my role to affect change there,” said Stefanski, who by the end of the month had hired Callie as his chief of staff. It was the position that gave Stefanski his NFL start in 2006.

“It's very involved in every aspect of a football operation,” Stefanski said. “Callie is uniquely situated where she can go interact with football ops or PR or the locker room or the equipment room. She's really the liaison to the rest of the building for me. I'm going to lean on her heavily and already have.”

Two weeks after Brownson was hired, the Redskins hired Jennifer King as the NFLâ€s first full-time African-American female coach.

While 89 women have been hired to NFL jobs through connections made at the womenâ€s football forums, only eight have been hired to full-time coaching positions. Even the leagueâ€s annual report on diversity and inclusion has yet to examine womenâ€s careers. But it does suggest future research is needed on how to create more opportunities for women, noting the rise of Sowers, King and the Buccaneers†Lori Locust.

Brownson can be included on that list, too. Her rise has been impressive. Five years after being invited to check out a spring football practice at her old high school, she is coaching in the NFL.

“It seems fast, and then it also seems like itâ€s been 10 years because thereâ€s a lot of work,” she said. “Itâ€s definitely a grind.”

So many of her opportunities came with little time to prepare, requiring her to relocate within a week. But being prepared for your moment was part of the theme at the forum earlier this year, as Brownson explained her NFL path.

“If this is really something that you want to do,” she said, “and you understand that maybe itâ€s going to be a hard road and an uphill battle, when you come to terms with the fact that you wonâ€t settle for anything else, youâ€ll find those little avenues, those little relationships, those little connections that help accelerate you another step forward.

“Ultimately, when you continue that drive and you continue to find the little victories -- and maybe a massive defeat inches up -- all of a sudden this door opens up and you meet that person whoâ€s willing to give you the opportunity, youâ€re ready for it and you sprint through it.”

[zigbee]

Callie Brownson is in a rare category in the NFL and is one of just a handful of female coaches. Last month, she was arrested for drunk driving when her blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit.

Callie Brownson was pulled over in Brunswick, Ohio, on May 27th for driving 55 mph in a 35 mph zone. The Brunswick, Ohio police department tested Brownson's blood-alcohol level at .215, while the legal limit in Ohio is .08. Brownson could have put her future with the Browns in jeopardy.

Callie Brownson is heading into her second season with the Cleveland Browns, which could start with disciplinary action by the franchise. The Cleveland Browns' Chief of Staff avoided jail time following her arrest, but was ordered to attend a three-day intervention course. Callie Brownson's license is suspended, and she must pay fines.

The Cleveland Browns have released a statement about the arrest of their Chief of Staff.

#Browns Chief of Staff Callie Brownson was arrested on drunk driving charges on May 27th, it is reported that she blew a. 0.2150 compared to the legal .08 limit (Via @MaryKayCabot ) pic.twitter.com/UcITOyOOQc— MoreForYouCleveland (@MoreForYou_CLE) June 8, 2021
"We are aware of the incident and are extremely disappointed that a member of our organization put themselves in this situation. We take this matter very seriously and will take the appropriate disciplinary actions," said the Cleveland Browns.
The NFL will also look into the situation, and Callie Brownson could face further disciplinary action by the league.





Cleveland Browns chief of staff Callie Brownson has been suspended by the team after being charged with drunken driving, but she won't lose her job, coach Kevin Stefanski said Wednesday.

Stefanski notes that Brownson was "very remorseful." Brownson, who has pleaded no contest and could face further discipline from the NFL, was not at Cleveland's OTAs on Wednesday.

According to court documents, Brownson was charged with drunken driving on May 27 in Brunswick, Ohio. She reportedly was driving 55 mph in a 35 mph zone when she was stopped at 12:27 a.m. Police said her blood alcohol content was .215. The state's legal limit is .08.

Brownson became the first woman to be a position coach on the sideline during an NFL game when she filled in for tight ends coach Drew Petzing, who was absent for the birth of his first child when the Browns played at Jacksonville this past November. Brownson is assisting running backs coach Stump Mitchell this season.

[zigbee]

Oh, God, I love the Browns....but daaaaaaaaaaaaaum.....with a neck that wide, that face, and build....how can this be a woman?  No FREAKING WAY.....So, best to Callie in recovery from the DUI and her work in Cleveland to help them to the Super Bowl.....PS...I can see how some people can't get it right on their gender.  She is a man.

[TcSoup]

Hair on her chest, clear down to her Balls.

[davebucknut]

This is what testosterone and steroids will do, "she" is mentally ill trainwreck.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

[Dzone1]

Browns should have canned that dude.

[Gordo8471]

Building the Browns is on YouTube right now. It's definitely a girl. Small frame.

Grear show if you haven't watched it.

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

[zigbee]

Football is BACK with Browns preseason game in Jacksonville.  6-0 at half.

[ScarletHayes]

Football is BACK with Browns preseason game in Jacksonville.  6-0 at half.

 

spoke too soon.  13-0

[Blinky]

Urbs is getting shutout in half #1.

[lrrps21]

Urbs is getting shutout in half #1.

Over/Under he uses headaches to escape year 4...

[zigbee]

Football is BACK with Browns preseason game in Jacksonville.  6-0 at half.

 

spoke too soon.  13-0

Yeah, nice catch by Davis to end the half for Browns.

[ScarletHayes]

Urbs is getting shutout in half #1.

Over/Under he uses headaches to escape year 4...

I wonder if Zach and his psychotic old lady's inability to merely successfully play house was the real issue.  Either way his physical issues makes one wonder. 

Whatever the case, he wins and that's why he keeps getting opportunities.  We'll see what he does with this one.

[ScarletHayes]

Hey Zig, did Sunshine play at all in the first half?

[lrrps21]

Urbs is getting shutout in half #1.

Over/Under he uses headaches to escape year 4...

I wonder if Zach and his psychotic old lady's inability to merely successfully play house was the real issue.  Either way his physical issues makes one wonder. 

Whatever the case, he wins and that's why he keeps getting opportunities.  We'll see what he does with this one.

I was surprised he stayed as long as he did due to the domestic issues. I don't blame him for leaving if over that burfle.