A Suggestion to the Cleveland Browns

For the second consecutive year, a Cleveland Browns second-round draft pick has been arrested on a domestic violence charge before training camp even begins. I’m not here to comment on the specific charges this year or last, those are matters for the legal system and for personal accountability. But I do want to offer a sincere suggestion to the Cleveland Browns organization: consider rethinking how you evaluate human beings.

Football is, of course, a violent game played by fierce competitors. Evaluating athletic performance like speed, strength, tape is essential. But when it comes to determining how someone will behave as a professional, as a teammate, and as a representative of your organization, athletic ability is only part of the equation. There’s another side to talent evaluation that too often gets overlooked: the deep, subtle, and nuanced process of understanding character.

Let me share a personal story from a very different world, corporate leadership.

Back in 2007, I was the General Manager of the Italian subsidiary of an American multinational. I was on the rise, and a major corporation, one with global revenues north of $10 billion had expressed interest in me for an executive-level position. As I traveled to the U.S. for final interviews, I was asked to meet a third-party evaluator in a private room at O’Hare Airport. This wasn't a business discussion. This was a psychological evaluation, conducted by a professional with an advanced degree in psychology.

I’ll never forget three aspects of that evaluation, each of which revealed something more about me than any resume could capture.

First, I was given a timed written test and left alone. Five minutes in, a cleaning lady entered by “mistake.” She interrupted me, apologized, and left. Five minutes later, she did it again. It wasn’t random. It was a test: to see if I’d lose my cool, become dismissive, or show signs of impatience under pressure. I didn’t. That wasn’t because I guessed I was being evaluated it’s simply who I am. I treated her kindly and kept my focus.

Second, the test itself contained a few questions that were unsolvable by design. The evaluator wanted to see how I’d react. Would I waste time stubbornly trying to solve the unsolvable, or would I move on and maximize my score? I quickly recognized the trick and finished the test well. That wasn’t about raw intelligence it was about emotional intelligence, adaptability, and judgment.

Third, and most importantly, the evaluator asked a series of quiet, thoughtful questions about my parents and my upbringing. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the intent. But looking back, I see now it was a way of probing my emotional maturity, my inner stability, and the kind of trust I’d learned to build with others from a young age.

In the end, the multinational made me an offer. I turned it down for other reasons, but what stuck with me wasn’t the prestige of the offer it was the quality of the evaluation. They had spent real resources to make sure they understood who they were hiring. Not just the professional. The person.

Cleveland Browns, you’re a billion-dollar enterprise in a league that generates tens of billions annually. Your players represent your brand on and off the field. You invest millions in each draft pick and you invest and guarantee up to $230M in one specific case of an athlete you traded for who had known character question marks. You make enormous investments in players and based on the results I have to seriously question whether or not you are doing the kind of deep, psychological, emotional, and relational evaluation that other industries would consider table stakes for leadership hires.   Maybe you are unlucky, but as the saying goes, fool me once....

Maybe it’s time to bring in expert help or if you already have one, a new expert. Not a guy with a stopwatch. A professional who understands people. Someone who can ask the right questions, create the right pressure tests, and separate immaturity from instability, confidence from arrogance, resilience from volatility.

No system is perfect. No process will catch everything. But with the right approach, you can reduce your risk. And perhaps more importantly, you can build a team of men who will make your fans proud both on Sundays and every other day of the week.

It’s time to take evaluating character as seriously as you evaluate combine results. Because the real test of a team doesn’t begin on the field. It begins with the choices you make off it.