New Browns GM expects team to win AFC North in 2018: ‘Anything else is unacceptable’

For a team that is currently 0-13 and has not won a game since Christmas Eve last year, you wouldn’t expect too much next season. But for new Cleveland Browns general manager John Dorsey, he already has set lofty expectations for his winless Browns.

“I’m the eternal optimistic,” Dorsey said Thursday on the Really Big Show on Cleveland local radio WKNR 850. “I believe we have to be competitive in the AFC North, and my total objective going into the ’18 season is to win the AFC North. Anything else to me is unacceptable.”

The Browns have lost 15 straight AFC North games. For a mark in the win column, you’d have to go all the way back to Oct. 11, 2015, when Cleveland needed overtime to beat the Baltimore Ravens, who visit the Browns this Sunday.

Cleveland has won only one game in the last two seasons and four in the last three. The Browns haven’t finished above .500 since 2007, when they ended the season 10-6.

Dorsey has been on the job for only a week and replaces Sashi Brown, who was fired Dec. 7. Dorsey was candid that he wasn’t a fan of Brown’s player-acquisition practices.

“I’ll come straight out with it,” he said. “The guys who were here before that system, they didn’t get real players.

“As Bill Parcells would always say, ‘You are your record,’ and you know what? There it is, so that’s the truth-teller in this thing. And I’m going to do my darnedest to get [Browns coach] Hue [Jackson] players.”

The Browns have quite a lot of ground to make up if they want to compete with division rivals the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cincinnati Bengals and Ravens. The Browns will have at least two top 10 picks in the 2018 NFL Draft, which includes the No. 1 overall pick, and a little over $117 million in cap space to go on a free-agent spending spree, with plenty of change left over.

Twitter: @edmgonzalez

eduardo.gonzalez@latimes.com