Hue Jackson is one of the first coaches in the NFL that has offered his full support for Brian Flores and his controversial racism lawsuit against the league and a handful of teams. Jackson isn't only offering words of encouragement for his compatriot but the former Cleveland Browns coach has also come out with some completely shocking bribery allegations against his former team.
On a recent episode of ESPN's Keyshawn, JWill & Max show, Jackson provided the gory details of his accusations, and to say that they are absolutely astounding would be a complete understatement. While Flores has himself claimed that he was offered by the Miami Dolphins of up to $100,000 for each loss, Jackson has now revealed that his losing incentives from the Browns maxed out at a whopping $750,000:
“It was a total of $750,000, but it was based on whatever those benchmarks you hit,” Jackson said (h/t Nate Ulrich of the Akron Beacon Journal). “What it was that you got every year from it, I really don't know. Those things were directed right into your checking account.”
Jackson stated that he was not completely aware of the structure of the aforementioned bonuses. The organization did not make it clear to him. What was clear to the 56-year-old shot-caller from the get-go, however, was that something just wasn't right:
“You really don't know what it is until you're in it,” said Jackson. “When you're losing games like you are, it's so easy to put it together when you start to look back it because here's the losses and you're still getting what is considered a bonus, right? People don't get paid bonuses for losing. That makes no sense.
“It was presented to me as a bonus structure. This is part of the bonus of your contract. That didn't make any sense because I've never seen one of those. I've been in football long enough to know that that was different, but I still didn't understand what it was coming from. Later, it was described that this is something that they did at Pilot J Flying to keep all of the workers who worked together collaborative, working together, working for the same cause.”
The Browns have already responded to Jackson's claims and unsurprisingly, they are denying any and all of his accusations. According to a team spokesperson, the organization considers Jackson's claims as “completely fabricated” and that his allegation that the team “incentivized him to deliberately lose games is categorically false.”
Jackson also reiterated that this was not what he signed up for when he agreed to take on the head coaching post in Cleveland in 2016. He did not even know that the front office was going to “strip the team down” by eventually releasing a number of key veterans. His objective was to bring the best out of his squad regardless of how dire the situation might be. According to his allegations, however, the Browns had other ideas.
“What minority coach, when there's not many minority coaches in pro football, would take a team or take a job when he knows the team's going to be taken down to the studs? That makes no sense,” he said. “You can't win in the National Football League when you take a team down to the studs. So what am I saying? Again, I was not told these things. This is not what I was told when I took this job, and I wasn't told that there was going to be a bonus structure. I was going to find out a month and a half into the job.”
Jackson then presented more evidence to back his claims. He alleges that the Browns even apologized to him for the undesirable situation that he had been put in when they negotiated his contract extension in 2017:
“It was told to me, ‘Hue, I’m apologizing to you for what we did to you. I’m apologizing for putting you in this situation because we tried to do something that wasn’t right,'” Jackson said.
“My beef in this is you took a minority coach who was the offensive coach of the year when he left Cincinnati, you put him in a situation where he did not have a chance to be successful, you ruined his career, and we all think that’s OK. When I was in it, nobody wanted to listen.”
This situation is getting completely out of hand. These are some enormous accusations that Jackson has pinned on the Browns and if he is able to prove that these are true, then there's no denying that the sanctions will be severe.
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