BROWNS STUN SPORTS WORLD BY TRADING FOR BECKHAM JR.

By STEVE KING

Who could have seen this coming a year ago?

For that matter, who could have seen this coming three months ago, three weeks ago, even just a week ago?

The Browns on Tuesday evening put themselves back onto the NFL map by trading for not just one of the top wide receivers in football, but rather one of the top players in the game overall, in Odell Beckham Jr.

Cleveland sent its No. 17 overall pick in the 2019 NFL Draft, its third-rounder (No. 65) and safety Jabrill Peppers, the No. 25 overall draft choice in 2017, to the New York Giants for Beckham, who, though, only 26 years year old, has put up video-game-like receiving numbers in his five years in the league.

It’s one of the biggest trades in Browns history – the current reborn franchise or the original one – and also one of the biggest in the NFL in quite some time.

That sound you hear is Browns fans screaming their lungs out in sheer glee.

It completely transforms the Browns and their offense, taking a good unit, one that come on in the second half of last season, and turning it into a potentially great one by giving franchise quarterback Baker Mayfield a prime-time, downfield receiving target who can beat any cornerback in the league on any kind of route and score from anywhere on the field.

The Browns, who, as we just pointed out in this space, was a 20-1 pick by oddsmakers to win the Super Bowl, are now 10- or 12-1 to do so. And this for a team that has never even been to a Super Bowl, let alone won one.

All this has been crafted by General Manager John Dorsey, who, in only 15½ months on the job since taking over in December 2017, has taken a club that was headed toward an 0-16 mark that season and 1-31 in 2016-17, and transformed it into one that, as people went to bed Tuesday night, had become THE talk of the NFL, if not of all sports.

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Just before the Browns stun sports world post there was this