Kansas City Chiefs lose Ray Farmer to Cleveland Browns

The Ray Farmer era is over. The Kansas City Chiefs have lost Farmer, their front office executive, to the Cleveland Browns. Just last month Michael Lombardi was hired in Cleveland as the team's VP of Player Personnel. On Tuesday, that title was upgraded to General Manager and the Browns also announced that Farmer, who has spent the last seven seasons in Kansas City, has joined the Browns.

"Ray is highly regarded in league circles as an outstanding evaluator of talent," said Browns CEO Joe Banner. "We had the opportunity to meet with Ray in our initial search for a general manager and came away extremely impressed. I have known Ray since he played with us in Philadelphia, and I am familiar with the type of person he is, his work ethic and his knowledge of the game. We are very fortunate that we were able to add someone of Ray's caliber to our personnel staff."

Interestingly, the Browns changed Lombardi's title to open up the position of assistant GM just so they could hire Farmer. He interviewed for the job in January.

"The change in Mike's title was a reflection of the need to create the assistant general manager title in order to get permission from Kansas City for Ray to be free to interview with us," Joe Banner said, via the Akron Beacon Journal. "There's no change in Mike's position at all. It's purely an add of Ray. The title change just facilitated our getting permission from Kansas City."

Farmer will always stick out to me because he survived multiple regimes in KC. He was hired under the Carl Peterson regime in 2006 and stayed through the Pioli regime when seemingly everyone else was getting the boot. That doesn't happen often and it shows what a strong personnel man he is.

We don't get to know anyone in the front office outside of the GM so I don't know much about Farmer. Joel Collier, for example, is the Chiefs' assistant GM and I've heard him talk maybe twice in my life. So there's a lot we don't know about these guys.

But what we do know about Farmer is that he was the guy on HBO's Hard Knocks who told Chiefs players they were getting cut. He was the guy who told Casey Printers he was cut and then Printers asked him how he was supposed to make chicken salad out of chicken shit.

In fact, re-live that moment again right here.