A window into the future and a window into the past

EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2025 NFL Draft is right around the corner. This is Part 5 — the final part — of a series on the five most impactful drafts in Browns history. Today we look at 1978.

Sam Rutigliano has never gotten due credit — or any credit, really — for the way he changed football in his first year as head coach of the Browns in 1978.

And it was, in fact, a change so dramatic that it’s still being felt today, 47 years later.

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As Rutigliano was preparing for the NFL Draft that year, he sent his receivers coach, Richie Kotite, to Alabama to measure the backside of prospect Ozzie Newsome — yes, you read that correctly — to see if his frame was wide enough for him to put on some weight so he could be an effective blocker in the running game.

When Kotite returned and it was determined that Newsome could indeed add some pounds, Rutigliano targeted him as a player he wanted to get with one of the team’s two first-round picks.

Rutigliano’s previous job was as the offensive coordinator of the New Orleans Saints under head coach Hank Stram. Being in the heart of Southeastern Conference country, he got to watch a lot of Alabama games. Newsome was a wide receiver on head coach Bear Bryant’s wishbone offense, which meant there were not a lot of passes thrown his way. Even with that, Rutigliano was convinced that Newsome could be a prolific pass-catcher not as a wideout, but rather as a tight end. To that point in pro football history, tight ends were exclusively bigger, slower players who mostly blocked for running backs. When they did go for passes, the routes were simple and of 10 yards or less. Rutigliano envisioned his new-style tight end to be drastically different —another wide receiver, big and fast and able to run far downfield and catch passes. He would be a matchup nightmare for defenses, being too big for safeties to cover and too fast for linebackers.

So, the Browns drafted him with the latter of those two first-round picks, at No. 23.

The 68,000 fans in attendance at Cleveland Stadium for the Browns’
season-opening 24-7 win over the San Francisco 49ers on Sept. 3, 1978 had no idea they were going to see a glimpse — or two or three or four, or more — of the future.

It didn’t take long for Rutigliano to unveil his revolutionary new-look tight end. On Cleveland’s first set of downs, quarterback Brian Sipe turned and handed the ball to Newsome on an end-around going from left to right. It went for a whopping 33 yards as the crowd roared. It was the last thing the 49ers expected, for it was probably the first time in Browns history — and perhaps even in NFL history — that a tight end ran an end-around. Newsome caught just one pass that day, for but six yards, but it didn’t matter, because that run was the first sign that the times, they were a-changin’, at tight end.

By the time he had finished his 13-year career, Newsome had caught a Browns-record 662 passes, exactly twice as much as the No. 2 man at that time, wide receiver Gary Collins. That Newsome, a Pro Football Hall of Famer himself, did that on a club that has three HOF wideouts in Dante Lavelli, Mac Speedie and Paul Warfield, and a should-be HOFer in Collins, says a lot about “The Wizard of Oz,” Rutigliano’s standing in the history books as a visionary and the significance of the coach’s change in thinking on tight ends.

The Browns’ other first-round draft pick in 1978, outside linebacker Clay Matthews, who was tabbed at No. 12, was a big hit, too, and should also be in the Hall. But whereas Newsome was a window into the future, Matthews was a window into the past. Not long after he began his 16-year career with the Browns — he played three more years, 1994-96 with the Atlanta Falcons, after he left Cleveland, giving him 19 pro seasons overall — teams began changing linebackers on every play, according to the down and distance. But Matthews saved roster spots because, with his versatility in that he could play the run, rush the passer and drop back into pass coverage, he never had to come off the field.

Here’s a neat fact that you may not know, and it may be a first not just for the Browns but also for any NFL team when it comes to players picked anywhere in the draft, let alone in the first round, or even just the same round: Matthews (the 15th) and Newsome (16th) were born a day apart in mid-March 1956.

Steve King