CINCINNATI — Call Hue Jackson “King Midas,” because everything he has touched the last few years has turned to gold. That is, if losses are considered gold.
Since the 2016 season, Jackson’s teams have gone 3-40-1. That includes 1-15 and 0-16 seasons in Cleveland before finally being dismissed after starting this season 2-5-1.
Since his firing, the Browns have gone 3-2 while the Cincinnati Bengals, whom Jackson joined as an assistant on Nov. 12, are 0-4 since he came aboard and have passed the Browns on the way to the bottom of the AFC North.
In a press conference Tuesday after the Bengals’ 26-21 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday, Jackson said he is on a mission to pile up losses with each team in the division.
“I won’t stop until I’ve coached every AFC North team to last place,” Jackson said. “There’s no better feeling than that over-the-top celebration when you win a game after you’ve been winless for months and months. I want to experience that feeling everywhere I go.”
Jackson singled out the Browns’ sloppy win over the Chargers in 2016 to avoid an 0-16 season and their win over the Jets this year to snap a 19-game winless streak (a game that they were clearly on their way to losing until Tyrod Taylor got hurt and Jackson had no choice but to put Baker Mayfield into) as the highlights of his coaching career.
He said that next year when he takes over for Marvin Lewis as the Bengals’ head coach, it will be his sweetest victory yet when they win their first game in Week 15. Once Cincinnati fires him, he plans to go on various sports talk shows bragging about what a great job he did and how his players and assistants weren’t good enough for him to succeed, and then join the Pittsburgh Steelers or Baltimore Ravens to begin the losing process anew.