So this is what it has come to in regard to cornerback Justin Gilbert and the Browns’ continuing efforts to get something – anything – from him?
Yikes!
The Browns’ latest attempt to justify the fact they passed on wide receiver Sammy Watkins with the No. 4 overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft to trade back to No. 8 to grab Gilbert, is to advertise him as the second coming of Josh Cribbs as a kickoff returner, and also to announce they might try him as a wide receiver since, according to the team, he has proven to be a playmaker when he has the ball in his hands.
OK, let’s see if we decipher all this: The Browns refused to take Watkins, a proven commodity, and now will see if Gilbert can help at that position. All the while, they refuse to discuss in detail why Gilbert has been completely unable to play cornerback, the position at which the Browns drafted him, even though the club was really hurting – literally as well as figuratively – at the position last Sunday with the injury, or lack thereof, to Joe Haden.
Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.
It would be way too easy for the Browns to draft Gilbert and, by his second season, have him really starting to make strides as a corner in covering the bevy of talented wideouts in the AFC North. Having swung and missed so badly on Gilbert, the Browns have had to conduct a manhunt to find capable corners to do the job that he should be doing.
Perhaps the Browns have given up on Gilbert as a corner. Perhaps they think using him to return kicks – on the few occasions when kickoffs aren’t booted out of the back of the end zone for a touchback – and as a wideout in training is getting good value for a player who should have been the eighth-best player in the 2014 draft.
Maybe the guy who drafted Gilbert, General Manager Ray Farmer, could be asked about this now that he’s back in the building after having served a four-game suspension for his involvement in Textgate last year. But that won’t happen because Farmer is not being made available to the media at this time.
It is the Browns’ continued practice of ignoring the elephant in the room in the hopes it will just go away. No, it won’t go away. Instead, it will just get bigger and bigger until you address it. Get ahead of the story and deal with it, and in doing so you will nip all the rumors and innuendo in the bud. That’s the main axiom of Public Relations 101, and why the Browns refuse to handle it properly is both mind-boggling and hurtful to the team.
But it does seem appropriate, in a way, that the Browns are handling the Farmer availability as if they know better, and are the smartest guys in the room, because that’s how Farmer sees himself. So the orders to do it the way the Browns are doing it probably came down from the man himself.
Farmer, though, had better take advantage of every opportunity he has to get some face time, because it’s likely those chances will dry up soon after the season is over when owner Jimmy Haslam cleans house – again.
As such, in the big picture, maybe it doesn’t make any difference at all whether Gilbert plays and excels at corner or not this season, because when the new regime comes in, those people won’t have anything invested in him and will have no more problem divesting themselves of him that they would a rookie free agent.
