Tag: trevor lawrence

Do You Trust Anyone In Berea?

The NFL Draft is about a month away and as usual Browns’ fans are both excited and showing their undying loyalty. It’s the tanking crowd, and one radio talk show host even recently said it is becoming irresponsible for the Browns not to trade Myles Garrett because he’s making the Browns too good to get one of the top three picks in the draft.

First of all, if you trade Garrett for say four first round picks, the odds of one of those players being even close to Garrett as a player is slim. The two-time defensive player of the year is headed to Canton when his playing days are over. And since 1999, the Browns have drafted two such players.

The Browns believe and have sold their fan base on the idea that there is one way to build a winning football team. Be bad enough to get a very high draft pick, let’s say top five, and draft a franchise quarterback. It seems like that is their only plan. They are always talking about “kicking the can down the road” until the following year to see if that can happen.

Apparently, that’s how other NFL teams have done it.

Oh, no they don’t.

The current NFL champion Seattle Seahawks worst season since 2010 has been a 7-10 record in 2021. The previous champ, the Eagles, have had two four win seasons in that same time span, but after their most recent poor season, they drafted a wide receiver in the first round.

Kansas City, who has won three Super Bowls since 2019, had one terrible season since 2010, a 2-14 record in ’12, following which they drafted Eric Fisher, an offensive tackle with their first selection in the next draft.

To be fair, the Rams won in ’21 and kind of did get their QB that way. Following a 4-12 season in 2016, the drafted Jared Goff with the first overall pick, and traded him for Matthew Stafford, a former first overall pick, who led them to their Super Bowl triumph.

So surely, getting a quarterback with a top three pick guarantees success. Three of the four QBs taken first overall did make the playoffs last season (Caleb Williams, Bryce Young, and Trevor Lawrence).

On the other hand, here are quarterbacks taken in the top three from 2020 to 2024: Joe Burrow, Lawrence, Zach Wilson, Trey Lance, Young, C.J. Stroud, Williams, Jaden Daniels, and Drake Maye.

Of those nine passers, four of them are hits, two would be considered huge mistakes, and the others it is too soon to tell. But the way the Browns’ front office talks, it would be a 100% thing and it simply is not.

Add in the Browns’ factor.

They did tank 10 years ago and did get the first overall pick in Baker Mayfield, who at the very least can be considered a serviceable NFL passer. And then they screwed it up.

They either didn’t put a good support system around him which didn’t force him to mature, or they allowed him to play hurt and/or the coaching staff or front office soured on him, and they were distracted by the shiny keys that is Deshaun Watson.

Either way, they mortgaged the future to make the ill-fated Watson deal.

We guess this is just our way of saying we don’t trust anything that comes out of 76 Lou Groza Boulevard and neither should the fans or media.

The reality is that group doesn’t know how to build a winning football team. They are just throwing crap at a wall and seeing if it will stick. Unfortunately, that’s what Cleveland football fans have gotten. Crap.

Everyone’s QB Question–Where Does Baker Rank?

We are in the middle of the NFL off-season and this is the time the football columnists start ranking players, and the position which draws the most attention is of course, quarterbacks.

Here in Cleveland, we have a QB that serves as a lightning rod for the national pundits, so there is constant debate around the football cognoscenti as to how good Baker Mayfield really is.

So we decided to enter the fray and decide where Baker Mayfield realistically be on the current ranking of NFL signal callers.

First though, some rules. Any rookie is not eligible for this list. So we will not be including Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Trey Lance, Zach Wilson or any other rookie on this list.

We are also not going to include any players entering their second year in the NFL, and that is because of Mayfield. Remember how everyone was hailing Baker as the next great QB following his rookie season of 2018?

So do we, and a year later, he was thought by many (and still is by some) to be nothing more than average. That same thing can happen to Joe Burrow, Tua Tagavailoa, or the new hot commodity, Justin Herbert.

The second time around the league, defensive coordinators start to see your tendencies and make adjustments to take away what you like to do. So, we aren’t going to rate someone real high based on a strong rookie year until we see what happens in a second year.

You can go ahead and call that the Mayfield Rule.

We can be accused of watering down the group, eliminating seven players who could arguably start for their respective teams this fall. However, we feel to give an honest evaluation of the position, you have to have a solid two years of performance to examine.

We will start with the QBs clearly better than Mayfield based on their body of work. Those guys would be Aaron Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes, Russell Wilson, and Deshaun Watson. Tom Brady as well, despite his age. If this was a list of guys we’d rather have Mayfield than, we wouldn’t include the six time Super Bowl winner because of the number of years he will still play.

One can make arguments about Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Ryan Tannehill, Derek Carr, Dak Prescott, Matt Ryan, Kyler Murray, and Matthew Stafford, so whether or not you consider Mayfield better than them depends on how you evaluate quarterbacks.

So, at the very least, we’ve named 13 quarterbacks. If you think Mayfield isn’t as good as any of those names we’ve listed he is the 14th best QB in the NFL. We do not think all of them are better.

Personally, we would rate Ryan and Allen over Mayfield. Prescott is a solid QB and we will see this year on Stafford now that he is with a better team, the Rams. Our opinion is we would rather have Mayfield than those two, understanding both put up big numbers.

Understand in the NFL, if you are losing a lot, defenses give up a lot of yards. Take for example, Prescott’s statistics against the Browns a year ago. He was 41 of 58 for 502 yards and four TD passes. Great numbers, right? Until you understand the score going into the fourth quarter was Cleveland 41, Dallas 14.

It wasn’t Prescott’s fault they were losing that big, but it does make it easier to accumulate stats.

Jackson is a separate case for us, because really he and Mayfield play different positions. We know we are dating ourselves but the Ravens’ QB plays kind of a single wing tailback position. As a passer, Mayfield is better, but Jackson is the better player overall. After all, he won a league MVP.

With the same head coach and offensive coordinator for two consecutive seasons, 2021 should decide the issue on Baker Mayfield. Right now, we have him in the 8-12 range among the league’s quarterbacks.

Another playoff appearance and success there will have him rising up this list with a bullet.