Hue Jackson Says He, Too, Was Asked To Lose NFL Games While Coaching Browns

There may be some company in the Dolphin tank.

Former Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson said he, too, was incentivized to lose, all part of a “four-year plan,” that led to his 1-31 record during the 2016 and 2017 seasons.

Jackson said that bonus money was his if certain “incentives”—aggregate rankings, being the youngest team, having an abundance of draft picks, etc.—were met.

“Teams that win are just not the youngest team, not that the youngest teams can’t win, so I didn’t understand the process,” Jackson said. “I didn’t understand what the plan was, I asked for clarity because it did not talk about winning and losing until Year 3 and 4. So that told you right there that something wasn’t correct, but I still couldn’t understand it until I had the team that I had.”

Jackson said he eschewed the plan to team owner Jimmy Haslam and instead wanted the extra dough to improve the team.

“And I remember very candidly saying to Jimmy, ‘I’m not interested in bonus money,’ because I’ve never known that to be a bonus,” he said. “I was interested in taking whatever that money was and putting it toward getting more players on our football team because I didn’t think we were very talented at all. I know what good football teams look like, play like, what they act like, and we didn’t have a lot of talented players on the team at that time.

“I do know that no head coach is going to survive if you lose a lot of games.”

Jackson and others implied on social media following the Brian Flores story breaking that he had been paid to lose games during the 2016 and 2017 seasons. One tweet says “we have records that will help” Flores’ case.

So…yeah.

A Browns’ spokesperson called the allegations “completely fabricated” and said that “any accusation that any member of our organization was incentivized to deliberately lose games is categorically false.”

Jackson said he’s mentioned this Browns’ situation to the league and commissioner Roger Goodell—“so this is not new.”

“I went to arbitration in this case against the Browns where I didn’t win anything,” Jackson said. “People don’t understand that I tried to sound this alarm.”

He said he “wasn’t offered $100,000 for every game, but there was a substantial amount of money made within what happened in this situation every year at the end of it.”

He adds that he can “prove anything and everything that I’m saying. The National Football League knows I can prove anything and everything I’m saying. And I don’t run from that … If they feel like I’m being dishonest, call me on it, let’s sit down in front of everybody and put it out all there and see who’s telling the truth.

“I’m not afraid to stand behind Brian when it comes to anything, because I know what our men go through, and I don’t want this for the men that come behind me, at all.”

Jackson was fired by Cleveland midway through the 2019 season; he was hired to be Grambling State’s head coach in December.