After he was fired by the Cleveland Browns and sat out the 2009 season to recover from hip-replacement surgery, Romeo Crennel wasn't sure another head-coaching opportunity would come along. Now he's in command of the Kansas City Chiefs and feeling more prepared than before to take on the role.
"I think that the talent base here is a better talent base than we had in Cleveland when I first got there, because when I first got there, I think the (first-round) draft choices from the last two or three years were not even on the team," Crennel told Cleveland Browns Daily on Tuesday.
"And when you talk about having a nucleus and building a nucleus of the team, you try to build it through the draft. Your draft picks are the guys that you want to be around for a while, and we didn't have any.
(Not news to the city of Cleveland.)
"We had to kind of piecemeal and go into free agency and grab guys here and there and then try and get some guys in the draft," Crennel said. "And we really didn't have a quarterback, and this league is a quarterback league and you gotta have one of those. ... There were a lot of things that we had to work through to try to build that program.
"... This time around, because of the experience I had in Cleveland, I think I can better handle the things that will come at me as a head coach."
Good news for the Chiefs, but for the Browns, it's another case of a coach learning on the job before moving on to success elsewhere. Before Crennel, there was Bill Belichick, whose icy relationship with the Cleveland media during his tenure is well-documented. Three Super Bowls wins appeared to cheer him up some in New England.