Sashi Brown resigns NBA’s Washington Wizards to take over as president of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens

Sashi Brown is leaving Monumental Sports and the NBA’s Washington Wizards to join the Baltimore Ravens as president, the team announced Friday.

Brown, 45, takes over as the Ravens’ third president, succeeding Dick Cass, who turned 76 last month and is retiring after 18 years in the position.

Brown is slated to join the Ravens in March and will become the team’s president on April 1. He’ll “oversee every area of the organization,” according to the Ravens, including player and staff personnel, coaching, corporate sales, operations, communications, and business ventures.

Brown has spent the last two years working for Monumental Sports and the Wizards after spending 12 years in the NFL. In November, he was named president and special adviser to chairman Ted Leonsis.

The Ravens’ hire of Brown, a Black man, comes amid increased scrutiny of the NFL’s diversity hiring standards in the wake of a lawsuit filed earlier this week by former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores, who says he was subjected to racial discrimination during his interview process.

For the first time since the Cleveland Browns fired him as executive vice president of football operations during the 2017 season, Brown returns to the NFL and the AFC North. With Brown in charge of personnel and Hue Jackson as coach, the Browns laboured to a 1-27 record, but they accumulated picks for future draughts and created more salary-cap room than any other team in the league.

On Wednesday, Jackson say that the Browns had a “four-year plan” that rewarded them for losing throughout that time. Browns owner Jimmy Haslam retaliated the next day, calling the notion that Jackson was paid to lose games “an absolute falsehood.”

Brown worked as the Jacksonville Jaguars’ senior vice president and general counsel for eight years, from 2005 to 2012. He was a football player as well as a businessman.

Brown joined Monumental Basketball in 2019 as chief planning and operations officer, which comprises the Wizards, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, and the G League’s Capital City Go-Go.

Brown succeeds Cass, the Ravens’ longest-serving president and a beloved figure within the organisation. Cass was hired in 2004 as Steve Bisciotti’s first hire as the Ravens’ new owner. He had a say in practically every important decision made by the organisation during that time, from corporate initiatives to social justice reform to stadium upgrades to steering the group that chose coach John Harbaugh.

Brown, Harbaugh, and general manager Eric DeCosta are now Bisciotti’s top leadership trio.