On Black Monday, the Cleveland Browns were one of the first teams to fire their head coach, Kevin Stefanski. The Browns finished the 2025 season with a 5-12 record and had lost 56 games overall in six campaigns under Stefanski.
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But intriguingly, the franchise chose to retain GM Andrew Berry, who has the same losing record as the sacked coach. In fact, Berry was given a show of faith, even.
The Browns have tasked Berry with leading the search for the team’s next head coach. That decision is exactly what ESPN analyst Mina Kimes struggles to understand.
Speaking candidly on ESPN, Kimes questioned why the Browns still trust Berry to steward the franchise’s future when so many of their biggest failures trace back to his tenure.
“I am honestly a little puzzled that they trust Andrew Berry to be the steward of all the choices and the cap space and everything… The worst trade in NFL history happened under his watch,” the analyst said.
Kimes was referring to Cleveland’s 2022 trade for Deshaun Watson. Many still view the move as one of the most damaging decisions a team has made in the modern era. The deal saw GM Berry send six draft picks to the Texans, including three first-rounders. He followed it by awarding Watson a fully guaranteed $230 million contract.
While it’s true that Watson was arguably among the top three quarterbacks in the league at the time, spending a fortune should have come with a contingency plan. Watson turned out to be a major bust.
The quarterback’s legal issues piled up as well, leading to an 11-game suspension. It left the Browns tied to a contract that, to date, is nearly impossible to escape without catastrophic dead-cap consequences.
The worst part, however, was Watson’s on-field returns. Due to suspensions and back-to-back Achilles injuries, the 3x-Pro Bowler has appeared in just 19 games across four seasons, while consistently ranking near the bottom of the league in efficiency when healthy enough to play.
For Kimes, the indictment of Berry doesn’t end with the Watson episode. “It’s not just the quarterback… Watching this offense this year, the offensive line is a mess, and there [are] more burdensome contracts. The receiver group is one of the worst in the NFL,” she said.
“The worst trade in NFL history happened under his watch.”@minakimes is “puzzled” by the Browns keeping GM Andrew Berry pic.twitter.com/Nilc7qSWDi
— NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL) January 5, 2026
The Browns finished the 2025 season averaging roughly 16.4 points per game. They allowed a whopping 51 sacks, and languished in the bottom third of the NFL in offensive line play per PFF. All of that unfolded while Cleveland fielded what Kimes described as a Super Bowl-caliber defense, led by sack king Myles Garrett.
“That’s a Super Bowl-caliber defense. They should have been paired with a quarterback and offense that could compete, and they haven’t been for a couple of years,” Kimes said.
Keeping all these points in mind, the ESPN analyst reiterated why firing Stefanski while retaining Berry doesn’t make sense to her. “Moving on from Stefanski, yes, the offense struggled. But splitting them and keeping the GM… it doesn’t really make sense to me,” she said.
There are, however, reasons Cleveland may have hesitated to clean house entirely. Drafting Shedeur Sanders with a fifth-round pick while scouting Quinshon Judkins and Carson Schwesinger is good work from Berry.
In simple terms, trading the No.2 pick to the Jags for a No.5 pick, a second-round, a fourth-round, a sixth-round, and a 2026 first-round pick feels like insane business, considering how Travis Hunter’s season derailed. And most importantly, Berry has the ownership’s blessings to maintain stability, especially with the Browns preparing to hire their 11th head coach since 1999.
Still, the question raised by Kimes remains: How much does stability matter if the vision is in the wrong direction?
