Hue Jackson: John Dorsey's reasoning for firing me was 'disrespectful'

Hue Jackson still has some lingering hard feelings about being fired as head coach of the Cleveland Browns.

Jackson told Kristine Leahy of Fair Game that he felt GM John Dorsey’s reason for firing him was “disrespectful,” and confirmed that he had told Dorsey and owner Jimmy Haslam to “get the f–k out of my office” when they came in to fire him.

“I just didn’t believe that the reasoning that was behind it that the team had quit — I wasn’t buying that,” Jackson said. “We played in too many overtime games. We had too many opportunities to win games early in the year. So I felt that was disrespectful coming from John Dorsey.

“Go back and look at those first two years to get the team to keep playing and then look at [2018], I thought there was improvement happening. Obviously, we had games that we could’ve won that we didn’t win. At the end of the day, we didn’t. But I sure thought we were well on our way to improving.”

The Browns started 2-5-1 under Jackson in 2018, then finished 5-3 after Gregg Williams took over as the team’s interim coach. Jackson would probably point to this as evidence that he had the team close to turning the corner, but his detractors would argue that the upturn happened because he was fired. Plus, judging by how some Browns reacted to Jackson after the firing, they didn’t exactly seem sorry to see him go.