Grant Delpit injury devastating
By STEVE KING
This website, Browns Daily Dose, is built on reading between the lines, not paying so much attention, necessarily, on what people say, but rather on how they say it, and what they meant.
Another case in point is the release the Browns sent out Tuesday on the injury to rookie safety Grant Delpit, a second-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft:
“MRI results on Browns safety Grant Delpit confirm a ruptured Achilles tendon. The injury will require surgical repair and he is expected to miss the entire 2020 season.”
Grant Delpit to undergo surgery, expected to miss 2020 season
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) August 25, 2020
📰 » https://t.co/eWhNPgq6BI pic.twitter.com/nss4svWI1j
Very straightforward and to the point, with no opinion or emotion. “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Jack Webb used to say on the long-ago TV show, “Dragnet.”
But, again in keeping with the theme of this website, we look at what the Browns – especially the members of their top brass, such as owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam, General Manager Andrew Berry, Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta and head coach Kevin Stefanski – were thinking in their hearts of hearts and wanted to say:
“To the surprise of absolutely no one, MRI results have confirmed that rookie safety – and second-round draft choice — Grant Delpit blew out his Achilles and, of course, he will miss the whole season and possibly a little longer. A ruptured Achilles is the worst injury there is, even worse than a torn anterior cruciate ligament. It can end the careers of older players, but Delpit’s youth will work in his favor and he will return at some point, though, again, we don’t know when. We’ve had all kinds of injuries in training camp thus far, so many so that it is stunning, almost unbelievable. What in the world is going on? Our defense, and our linebackers in particular, were already weak, and now they are even more so. We wanted to see Delpit play with talented second-year linebacker Mack Wilson, who is also out for the year, though with a knee injury, and that it won’t happen makes us all sick to our stomachs. We can sit around and complain about it internally, but that won’t help anything, and in fact will just make it worse. It’s next man up. It’s what the good teams say and do, and if we want to be a good team someday, which we do, then we have to simply plow forward. So, we will – with our fingers crossed that there aren’t more serious injuries on the way.”
YES, BROWNS LOOK BAD, BUT SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE
The rest of the NFL world is finally realizing what we’ve discussed on this site for weeks.
That is, the teams – all the teams – look bad. It’s not just the Browns, no matter what you’ve been led to believe.
The Browns’ issues are exacerbated by the fact they have a new head coach and coaching staff and a lot of new players. But no team – whether it be the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, the runner-up San Francisco 49ers, the New England Patriots, the Baltimore Ravens and all the rest of the clubs – is anywhere near where it wants to be, where it should be and where it needs to be with the start of the regular season coming sooner rather than later, in less than three weeks. These teams are all still trying to get not just on the same page, but rather to be simply reading out of the same book – the playbook, in this case. And it’s not an easy read.
The clubs should have been doing this installation stuff during the OTAs, but there were no OTAs this year, no minicamps, no anything. Oh, yes, there was virtual learning, which is OK for what it is, but it doesn’t suffice.
Like anything else in this world, you learn to play football but actually doing it, practicing it, many times over a period of months. You can’t cram for the test that the regular season provides. You just can’t. You can’t pass the class unless you do the homework, and there was no real homework given because there were no classes – hands-on work, not stuff on a computer screen – held.
In a perfect world, the NFL should start its regular season on the first weekend in October. That would give everyone a much better chance to get ready.
But that’s never going to happen – that is, cutting four games – because of the money that would be lost. So, the NFL is going to plow its way ahead and open on time, because, doggone it, that’s what it has said all along that it was going to do.
And also because the league knows the fans are starved for football and will be much more willing to accept lousy play, which is exactly what they’re going to get.
