The Cleveland Browns, fresh off a 3-13 season rife with disappointment, remain atop the national sports news thanks to a couple of eyebrow-raising tidbits. Ersatz starting quarterback Johnny Manziel spent Saturday night partying in Vegas, replete with a disguise and fake name. His AWOL status during the club’s finale, a home loss to Pittsburgh, is bizarre to say the least. Yet to many eyes it’s not the weirdest thing happening with the Browns over the last few days.

After firing head coach Mike Pettine and heneral manager Ray Farmer, the owner, Jimmy Haslam, went far outside the norm in his search for a replacement. Instead of using a search firm as other teams are doing, or running through the usual suspects, Haslam opted to hire Paul DePodesta as something called the Chief Strategy Officer.  DePodesta is best-known to most as the character Jonah Hill played in the movie version of Moneyball. That’s right, he’s a baseball guy now charged with plotting the course for the chronically dysfunctional football team.

It’s all part of a larger, overarching embodiment of Chaos Theory in Cleveland.

Chaos is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. While most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control.

That is the initial definition from Fractal Foundation, and it’s a good summation of a principle most are familiar with. Another movie, Jurassic Park, brought the concept to the mainstream a couple decades ago with the incredibly snarky, sardonic mathematician Ian Malcolm, as portrayed brilliantly by Jeff Goldblum.

Jimmy Haslam has chosen to try and ride the wave of chaos instead of thrashing against it. No matter what different form of conventional football norms the Browns have tried over the last 17 years, all have led to drowning in a sea of misery. Chaos prevails on the southern shores of Lake Erie. In going outside football and choosing an analytical genius--albeit in a different sport--in DePodesta, the Browns are opting to surf on a different board.

And it just might be exactly what the long-suffering franchise needs to end the vicious cycle of being washed over by the rest of the league.

DePodesta is a purveyor of analytics in sports. While most fans think analytics is all about things like bigger/faster/stronger athletes and crunching numbers to optimize performance, at its root it is really about finding market imbalances and exploiting them. That’s what DePodesta and Billy Beane, the chief protagonist of Moneyball, did with the Oakland A’s. Through analytical analysis, they found ways to help a losing franchise take advantage of a different course to produce more optimal results, i.e. winning by going against the conventional tides of the sport.

As an example for the Browns, they have traditionally spent more on offensive line and less on wide receiver than other teams. While it’s been fantastic having Joe Thomas and Alex Mack at left tackle and center--each is an elite positional talent--it hasn’t produced wins. It hasn’t even produced average offensive production. The Browns have skimped at wide receiver, an area where more successful teams tend to spend more. Obviously the Josh Gordon butterfly effect hits here, but the average 2015 NFL playoff team allocated about $17 million to wideouts, a figure dragged way down by both Carolina and Seattle, teams with dynamic dual-threat QBs. The Browns spent about $14.7 million. In 2014, the disparity gulf was wider; playoff teams that year spent about $6 million more on wide receivers, and more than $6 million less on cornerbacks, than the Browns spent.

What DePodesta and his chosen staff will try to do is ascertain where the money is best spent. They will also weigh on the scouting department to find players who meet certain athletic thresholds. Edge pass rushers will need to have a 10-yard split on their 40-yard dash times below 1.6 seconds, and have a requisite arm length to go with it. Moreover, they will identify what positional traits the roster currently lacks and fill those as inexpensively as possible. The old staff actually did this by trading for punter Andy Lee, who was a significant upgrade. Expect more moves like that.

Folks are pillorying the Browns for hiring a baseball man to run a football team. Haslam threw gas onto his own fire by admitting he tried to hire Mark Shapiro away from the Indians last year, too. But DePodesta does have a football background. He played at Harvard and once worked for a Canadian Football League team. He’s actually more of a football guy than a baseball guy; his analytical prowess was his foot in the dugout, not any experience.

I’m intrigued by this new direction. Nothing the Browns have tried before, from trying the top GM candidate to mixing the waters from the Belichick and Holmgren regimes to hiring the hot collegiate coach to pretty much any other typical NFL convention, has done anything close to success. Then again, the last unconventional move the Browns tried resulted in a party boy QB who has become a national punchline. Still, it’s a bold new direction for a franchise in desperate need of wind behind its sails to escape the chronic doldrums of humiliation and losing. Just maybe this is the butterfly flapping its wings to benefit the Browns. Dr. Malcolm would approve.