After the Browns lost to the Giants Sunday to fall to 0-12, Browns coach Hue Jackson said — again — that he does not worry about his job status and remains focused on the Browns having a much better future.
“I am going to be here, and I have said that to you guys before,” Jackson said, per the team’s official transcript. “That is not what the [postgame] conversations are by any stretch of the imagination. It is not that. Please, so let me go on record of saying that. I have the full support of [team owners] Jimmy and Dee Haslam and [executive V.P. of football operations] Sashi Brown and his crew, and we are not apart or splintered or whatever term you guys want to use. There is none of that going on.
“I don’t like losing. I never have and I never will, and I have had my butt kicked up over my shoulders enough this season that I really don’t need my butt kicked anymore. I have to figure out how to quit getting my butt kicked. It is just that simple.”
The Browns are off next weekend. Jackson said the team will practice for two days, then he will excuse the players because they “need to get a little break” and get away before the Browns focus on their final four games and trying to get a win.
“I have never been through this but . . . I am not going to fall off a cliff or anything like that,” he said. “These guys, these players, this organization, Dee and Jimmy, Sashi and the group mean too much to me for me to ever feel like that. Do I ever get disappointed and frustrated? Yes, I do not want you guys to feel like I do not. I do want you guys to think I do not get mad or sad or disappointed. I go through all of those emotions. At the same, I know what I signed up for. I know through our injuries and the things we have been through this season where we are and where we are trying to go. You can either beat yourself up, and I do that enough, or you can just put your head down and keep fighting and push through this. That is what we are going to do as a football team and as an organization.”
Jackson said he takes responsibility for the Browns being 0-12 and said that “won’t change, even when we win the Super Bowl.”
So, yeah. Jackson really believes better days are coming.
“If you are going to get us, you better get us now because I am not feeling like this next year,” he said. “There is no way. Unh-uh. No. I am a fighter, and we have a bunch of fighters in that room, and I do not lose many fights. I have never lost many fights. We are going to keep swinging. I have lost a lot right now, more than I have ever lost in my life fighting, but we are going to keep fighting and we have to fight the right fight, and that is what we have to do.”