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Jim Schwartz on leaving Browns: ‘A forced marriage isn’t going to work in the NFL’
Published: Jun 03, 2026 at 06:20 AM
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Kevin Patra
Senior News Writer
After being passed up for the Cleveland Browns head coaching gig in favor of Todd Monken, former defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz declined the chance to stay with the organization.
Following months of silence, Schwartz discussed his decision with Ryan Ripkin.
“It sort of is what it was,” Schwartz said. “We had a lot of success on defense and the Browns made a change at head coach, and they passed over me with all the success that we had and the ability to develop players, our best players had their best years, all those different things. And that was a decision they made. They wanted to go with an offensive guy. They chose Todd. I’m fine with that. They can make decisions that they want to make, but they can’t expect me to stay on board for that. Anybody that’s in any business, you get passed over for a promotion when you’ve done a really, really good job in your job and you think you were in line for that promotion. It’s time to go.”
Schwartz, who was the DC in Cleveland for the past three seasons, reiterated that he didn’t want to stick around in shotgun-wedding fashion.
“Todd deserved his own guy. A forced marriage isn’t going to work in the NFL,” he said. “Having command of the players and having command of the locker room, all those things are extremely important, and I didn’t feel like I could do my job after getting passed over for the head coaching job. It sort of put me in a tough position. ‘Hey, we want you to listen to this guy, but we didn’t want to make him the head coach.’
“So, I made the decision to resign, and I have to sit out this year as a result. But I think anybody that’s been in any business, when you’ve done a good job, when you mention those numbers, we weren’t one of the best defenses in three years, we were the best defense in three years. The decision they made, that’s their decision, but to expect me to stay and for me to be on board with that, that’s just a tough situation. It wouldn’t have been good for me and it wouldn’t have been good for Todd. It was best for him to get his own guy in there and to move forward with him as opposed to just having an arranged marriage and having me there and maybe having some players more loyal to me than him. It can just be a bad situation. 33 years in the NFL, I’ve never been around that before. That all went into the decision.”
Schwartz is correct, that could have been awkward, particularly for defensive players who might have been more devoted to the DC than the head coach. The current question is whether Myles Garrett would have wanted to stay in Cleveland if Schwartz were the head coach — not that it changes the fact that the compensation in the Browns’ trade was the right move for the club at this time.
With the Browns able to block his path to another coordinator gig, Schwartz, 60, will have to sit out a season. The bluntness with which he’s approaching the situation will serve him well in his next round of interviews.
“I wasn’t upset about it,” he said. “I was disappointed about it. I wasn’t upset about it; I wasn’t mad about it, but it’s just my experience told me that wasn’t going to be a situation that was going to work.”
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