The Browns’ Andrew Berry is, overall, a good NFL general manager.

That’s obvious by looking at the team’s talent-laden roster.

But the one thing he doesn’t get — refuses to get, even to the point of cutting off his own nose to spite his face — is that backup quarterback is the second-most important position on any football team at any level. The most important spot is, of course, starting quarterback.

And now, here the impressive Browns are in this all-in, win-now season, right in the thick of the playoff chase and with the window of opportunity wide open, and, as the second half of the year begins, they won’t have starting quarterback Deshaun Watson, the guy who willed them in the second half, and especially in the fourth quarter, to that special 33-31 win in Baltimore last Sunday, after he underwent season-ending shoulder surgery. The news came out of nowhere. It caught the Browns flat-footed, as they don’t have anything other than mediocre backups available.

Things like this happen. So you have to prepare for the worst — like this — and hope for the best. They had a good plan B in Josh Dobbs, but they traded him away in the preseason.

You can’t do that. Like pitching in baseball, you can never have enough competent quarterbacks. So you spend more on that position. You can fudge at strong safety and tight end, but you can’t fudge at quarterback.

And when you do it, as Berry has done, you end up saying, just like Ralphie in “A Christmas Story,” “Oh, fudge!”

But the Browns don’t have time to worry about that now. They’re knee-deep in trouble, but the window is open so they have to figure their way out of it. There are no guarantees they’ll be 6-3 at this time next year.

Steve King