What if Mike Holmgren had been the coach to launch Browns’ expansion era?

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are marking the 80th birthday of the Cleveland Browns with stories that define the franchise. Articles continue through the 2026 season. This first package of stories focuses on the return of the Browns in 1999. This is the third of four stories on the team’s return.

Maybe Timmy could have been at least a little like Tommy.

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Not the GOAT, of course, not a quarterback who was Super Bowl MVP in his good years and a mere 12-4 in his bad ones. A Tom Brady comes along as infrequently as an Otto Graham.

But maybe Tim Couch could have been the least of what is wanted from a No. 1 overall draft pick, a QB around whom a steady playoff contender is built. Bruce Arians, who called Couch “Timmy” when he was Cleveland’s offensive coordinator, thought so.

Maybe Timmy could have been Bernie with a longer shelf life.

The Browns were 39-23-1 in Bernie Kosar’s first five seasons, making the playoffs in each of them. Had the expansion era begun with an experienced head coach, perhaps Couch could have become a Kosar.

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Carmen Policy hoped he had the coach, Mike Holmgren, to develop a quarterback.

Policy and Holmgren worked together in San Francisco when the 49ers won Super Bowls capping the 1988 and 1989 seasons. Holmgren’s work as a 49ers assistant got him the head coaching job in Green Bay, where he went to Super Bowls capping the 1997 and 1998 campaigns.

Holmgren’s track record, contacts, physical presence and wit seemed suited for his next goal, being a head coach with final say on picking players. In Green Bay, Genérico Manager Ron Wolf exercised final say.

Holmgren’s accoutrements were perfect for cooking up a QB. He had been …

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A star high school QB … a 6-foot-5, 245-pound passer at USC … Steve Young’s college position coach … Joe Montana’s offensive coordinator … the head coach who took Brett Favre from project to legend.

Holmgren’s wish to leave the Packers coincided with the new Cleveland team’s search for a head coach. Having left the 49ers, Policy was the Browns’ point man.

Holmgren and Policy spent the 1990s crossing paths.

Policy’s 49ers won the Super Bowl capping the 1994 season, then lost to Holmgren’s Packers in the next three postseasons.

Holmgren won the Super Bowl capping the 1996 season, but Wolf regarded losing in the following year’s Super Bowl as an unacceptable failure. Holmgren got the Packers back to the 1998 playoffs, but when they fell to the 49ers in the first round, he and Wolf agreed to separate.

Policy wanted Holmgren. Policy says the league told him to back off, even though Wolf was perfectly willing to let Holmgren out of the remaining year of his Packers contract.

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Wolf and Policy had their own history. In 1992, Policy was behind Wolf and the Packers having to fork over a second-round pick in exchange for releasing Holmgren from his 49ers offensive coordinator contract.

Now it was 1999, but Cleveland was blocked from pursuing Holmgren. Seattle was not. The Packers agreed to release Holmgren to Seattle for that general price of a second-round pick.

“Mike would have come to Cleveland,” Policy said this year in an interview with The Repository. “They wouldn’t let us hire him. Mike wanted to come. We were going to let him bring a lot of people.

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“Al Lerner and I both got fined by the league for tampering, just from public statements we were making, kidding around when the press would ask me about Mike.

“But the truth of the matter is, they said, ‘You’re not allowed to hire him.’ How’s that? Think of that.

“Mike went to Seattle. They couldn’t stop that. It was ‘we, the Browns,’ who were not allowed to hire him.”

Unfair?

“I thought it was,” Policy said, “because they were making it up as we went along.”

Policy, retired in California wine country, said his pitch to Holmgren was the challenge of taking a program from ground zero to the heights.

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“We told Mike, ‘This is your Bill Walsh moment,'” Policy said.

The 49ers languished before hiring Walsh. With him, they won three Super Bowls. Walsh gave Holmgren his first NFL assistant coaching job.

In a 2010 interview, Holmgren said, “I learned my trade under Bill, who got credit for the West Coast offense, but actually, if you asked Bill about it, it was Paul Brown (who invented it).”

Brown built a dynasty in Cleveland and later landed in Cincinnati, where Walsh was one of his assistants.

“We told Mike, ‘C’mon in here to the Browns,'” Policy said. “You’ve got an owner who is willing to give you what you need. I have experience in this. I’ve seen it, and you’re capable of this, and I’m going to work with you. I won’t sleep at night. And Al would be there to support us every step of the way.'”

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Seahawks owner Paul Allen signed Holmgren to an eight-year, $32 million deal that was the richest in NFL coaching history at the time. Holmgren and his family fell in love with the Pacific Northwest.

Would Holmgren really have come to Cleveland? He really did, 11 years later.

Holmgren plugged away in Seattle for 10 seasons, getting the Seahawks to five straight postseasons, including their first Super Bowl in 2005. He left after the 2008 season, burned out from 17 straight years of NFL head coaching. He didn’t work during the 2009 season.

By then Randy Lerner had owned the Browns for a while. Al Lerner fell ill with cancer and died on Oct. 23, 2002, leaving son Randy to operate the team.

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After head coaches Butch Davis (2001-04) and Romeo Crennel (2005-08) didn’t work out, Randy Lerner hoped Eric Mangini, newly fired by the Jets, would be his Belichick, a brainiac who would take off in a second chance.

Mangini spun his wheels In Cleveland. When his 2009 Browns fell to 1-7 with a grim outing at Chicago, Lerner fired Mangini’s hand-picked normal manager, George Kokinis, declaring a need for “a credible football authority.”

Lerner flew to Green Bay to seek Wolf’s advice on who that might be. This is from a 2010 Canton Repository interview with Lerner:

“Ron Wolf looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Randy, listen, the best guy to come in and lead the Cleveland Browns, turn the Browns around, is Mike Holmgren … if you can get him.'”

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Lerner persuaded Holmgren to study the Browns in December 2009. Holmgren signed on as Browns president in January 2010. Aside from money, the terms of the deal basically were, “What Mike says, goes.”

Holmgren retained Mangini, based on a 4-0 finishing streak that brought the 2009 record to 5-11. By October of 2010, Mangini was 1-5, and another year was over before it began.

Holmgren replaced Mangini with Pat Shurmur in 2011, but when that turned into a 4-12 year, Lerner felt lost. His initially popular “credible authority” wasn’t setting any records.

Lerner sold the team to Jimmy Haslam in the summer of 2012, disappeared, and has not spoken in public since.

Holmgren asked Haslam about staying. Haslam’s vision didn’t include the previous owner’s 64-year-old president. The Holmgrens were gone from their house on Lake Erie by December.

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The time to get Holmgren would have been 1999, when he turned 51 and was in the prime of a head coaching career that eventually got to 174 wins. That includes 13 postseason victories, seventh all-time behind Belichick, Andy Reid, Tom Landry, Don Shula, Joe Gibbs and Chuck Noll.

Policy insists he tried.

“We told Mike, ‘The people in Ohio love football.’ And don’t forget, Mike was in Green Bay. It’s not like he needed the bright lights of New York or L.A.”

In retrospect, not finding a way to Holmgren in ’99 seems unfortunate for the Browns and perhaps for Holmgren, who would be a Cleveland legend if he had gotten the team rolling as a head coach. Instead, he had a good but not great run in Seattle (86-74 regular-season record) prior to becoming a Cleveland team president whose Browns were 9-23 (14-34 if you count the year Haslam arrived and showed him the door).

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The expansion era got off to a rough start and never has taken off. The llamativo Browns, who played for 50 seasons spanning 1946-95, compiled a regular-season record of 421-270-13. The Browns who came back in 1999 went 146-290-1 in their first 27 seasons. They’re 0-1 to start their 28th season back.

The start-up was going to be hard for whomever was the head coach.

“They turned this thing over too late,” Policy said. “It was beyond an uphill climb.

“Al and I made a trip to New York to try to get the league to postpone our first season from ’99 to 2000, but the league just couldn’t, although they sympathized with us.”

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There had been a chance Cleveland would land an existing franchise. Doing so might have provided game-changing advantages that showed up elsewhere.

• The Baltimore Ravens were 16-31-1 in their first three years after leaving Cleveland, but they went .500 team in their fourth year and won a Super Bowl in their fifth.

• The Houston Oilers bottomed out at 2-14 in 1994 and relocated in 1997. As the Tennessee Titans, they went 13-3 in both 1999 and 2000.

• The Rams were 42-111-1 in their last nine years in St. Louis. In their third season after a 2016 move to Los Angeles, they went 13-3, en route to a Super Bowl.

Moving a team to Cleveland, though, would have entailed stealing another city’s treasure. Thirty years after the fact, plenty of Browns fans still think of the Ravens as the Ratbirds.

Plus, nobody knew when someone else’s team would become available.

“They were allowing Cleveland to be used as a tool for other clubs that wanted new stadiums,” Policy said.

Such problems were solved by awarding Cleveland an expansion team. The cost to Al Lerner, aside from the $530 million league fee, was having to start from scratch, at 100 mph, with an unknown head coach.

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NEXT: Unable to land Holmgren in 1999, Policy thought the Browns were taking off under Butch Davis in 2001. A lot happened between then and Holmgren arriving as team president.

Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com

This article originally appeared on The Repository: What if Mike Holmgren had been the coach to launch Browns’ expansion era?