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Sando: Browns' hiring of Paul DePodesta not as odd as it looks

It's been an eventful couple of weeks for the NFL's new guard.

Chip Kelly was never the "Moneyball" coach some mistook him to be, but his firing from the Philadelphia Eagles last week sacked the sports science movement's highest-profile practitioner. This week, the Cleveland Browns' hiring of Moneyball pioneer Paul DePodesta turned one of the NFL's worst-run organizations into a public laboratory for testing whether an analytics-driven approach can succeed.

The Browns will ultimately succeed or fail based mostly on their quarterback, not their new chief strategy officer (DePodesta's newly created title). The same was true for Kelly, who once pointed out that the revolutionary Moneyball approach worked for the Oakland A's to the extent that three little-mentioned pitchers allowed it to work.