Rob Chudzinski lasted only a season as the Browns’ head coach.
Chudzinski was informed this evening that he is fired. A league source tells PFT that the rest of the coaching staff has been retained, at least for now.
“We appreciate Chud’s passion for the Browns, and we have great respect for him both personally and professionally,” the team said in a statement. “We needed to see progress with this football team. We needed to see development and improvement as the season evolved and, unfortunately, we took a concerning step backward in the second half of the year. Our fans deserve to see a consistently competitive team. We have high standards, and there’s an urgency for success. When we believed we were not positioned to achieve significant progress in 2014, we knew we had to admit that a change was needed, and move forward. Browns fans are the most loyal and passionate supporters in the NFL. We’re fully committed to bringing them the winning football team they deserve.”
The Browns hired Chudzinski in the hopes that he’d be able to do as a head coach what he did as an offensive coordinator in Carolina, and build a good offense around an inexperienced quarterback. Instead, the season was a disappointment as the Browns moved from Brandon Weeden to Brian Hoyer to Jason Campbell.
Still, it’s fair to wonder whether it’s really Chudzinski’s fault that the Browns were 4-12 last year. After all, he’s not the one who chose to go into the season with Weeden, Hoyer and Campbell as the team’s three quarterbacks. And Chudzinski going 4-12 this year wasn’t some big step backward for the Browns -- they’ve been either 4-12 or 5-11 in each of the last six seasons.
Now the Browns, who went from Romeo Crennel in 2008 to Eric Mangini in 2009 to Pat Shurmur in 2011 to Chudzinski in 2013, will hire their fifth head coach in the last seven seasons.
