The Browns are tired of people inside the organization ripping the team’s talent. Coach Hue Jackson has referred to the lack of talent, and new General Manager John Dorsey said former head of football operations Sashi Brown didn’t get enough “real players.”
Jason McCourty said Monday he was speaking for his teammates in declaring that the comments “bugged everyone in his locker room.”
“When you’re one of the guys on the team who’s playing your heart out and you are putting everything into it -- obviously, we are not getting the result we want, which is very apparent but still you are giving everything you have -- you don’t want to hear about what you don’t have,” McCourty said, via Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “You want to make the best of what you do have. I think that is just the bond that is built in this locker room of I want to win for Danny [Shelton]; Danny wants to win for me; I want to win for JT [Jamar Taylor]. You don’t really care what you don’t have. You are just trying to figure out what we do have in this locker room, how do we go out there on Sunday and figure out how to win this game. As a player, you just hate to hear that from anywhere.”
The defensive back, in his first season in Cleveland after eight in Tennessee, said the Browns don’t have “the talent to go win the Super Bowl this year, but this locker room is far more talented than 0-16.”
It was unclear whether McCourty was questioning the coaching, but Hue Jackson will return despite losing 31 of his 32 games. Still, McCourty expects “a lot of things [to change]” before next season.
“You can’t keep doing the same thing and think you’re going to get different results,” McCourty said. “That’s the definition of insanity. Obviously, there’s a lot of things that aren’t right.’'