We live in a microwave society.

Sometimes, it’s not even a microwave society. Indtesd, it is one in which you just take the thing out of the bag and eat it as is.

Indeed, whether it’s eating or grading the NFL draft, we don’t have time to wait. We have to have it right now.

But waiting is patience, and we all know that patience is virtue, or at least it used to be back in the day.  People had more patience then, and it usually paid off to the benefit.

We spend so much time looking to the future, but gleaning some lessons from the past isn’t a bad idea either, right?

You can’t grade a draft when the players haven’t even gotten into the city in which their new team is based. There are some players the Browns drafted over the weekend who couldn’t find Berea if they were standing in the middle of and it was on fire.

So, how can we ever figure out if they’re going to be good players if we’ve never seen them as players in the NFL?

You may think that you can indeed grade a draft as soon as it’s over, and in a way, you are right. You can judge a draft by virtue of whether the team addressed the area needs that it has and didn’t reach to get players. OK, I’ll give you that.

But in the end, everybody is going to forget whether these teams reached for players or not. All they want to know is whether or not the players developed into good  pros.

There are a lot of examples of drafts that looked good at first but in the end weren’t very good, and also of drafts that didn’t look very good immediately afterward but turned out to be pretty special. It’s true for all the NFL teams, including the Browns.

To illustrate what we’re talking about, we’re going to start a series looking back at some drafts i. Browns history that didn’t turn out like people thought they would right afterward.

We hope you enjoy it.

NEXT: When The Greatest and the greatest draft didn’t look great at all.

Steve King