HERE’S YOUR DRAFT GUIDE FOR NEXT YEAR

By STEVE KING

There are a lot of NFL Draft guides out there.

There are enough, in fact, to choke an elephant.

And most of them – almost all of them, really – are good in some way, shape or form. They all have at least something – most of them have plenty of things – that are interesting and thought-provoking and will get you ready to enjoy the draft, which this year, of course, begins Thursday night and continues Friday night and Saturday.

Through the advice of a friend – a guy, a coach who really knows his football —  I ran into a new one this year, and I was blown away with it, and by it. If you love the draft – really, truly love it and can’t get enough information, especially the intricate, detailed stuff that you are probably not going to see anywhere else – then, when all this rolls around next year and you need your fix once again, you have to get the Rookie Scouting Portfolio by Matt Waldman.

Now in its 14th year – it debuted in 2006 — it includes, as its cover states, “Game Film Analysis, Player Profiles and Scouting Reports,” and is “A Prospectus of Fantasy Rookies at The Offensive Skill Positions.”

There is nothing in it about defensive tackles, offensive guards, linebackers, defensive backs or kickers/punters/long snappers. You have to look elsewhere for info about, and analysis of, those prospects, and you won’t look far to find it. Every other draft guide has it.

Waldman’s work looks at the people who touch the ball – quarterbacks, particularly quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers and tight ends. And those players are the ones in which we’re most interested anyway.

Of those players, quarterbacks are the most important since theirs is the most crucial position in team sports. There is so much info about QBs – such a precise breakdown of what they can, and can’t do – that you may not be able to read it all before NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announces that the team with the No. 1 overall pick is on the clock.

Enjoy. I’m convinced you will.

And by the way, Waldman seems to be very much a Browns guy, which makes what he writes all the more intriguing.

FOR ONCE, THE BROWNS ARE FLYING UNDER THE RADAR

For the first time in who knows how long, the focus is not on the Browns as the NFL Draft gets ready to begin.

The Browns are not picking in their usual spot at the top of the three-day draft, which opens on Thursday night with the all-important first round. In fact, they don’t have a choice at all in the first round after having surrendered it, at No. 17 overall, to the New York Giants in the trade to get wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.

So, it’s possible that the evening will come and go with nary a peep from General Manager John Dorsey and the Browns, who don’t have a pick until the middle of the second round, at No. 49 overall.

But don’t bet on it.

Dorsey is, of course, aggressive, fond of pushing the envelope and taking calculated risks to spur change and make things happen, which is exactly what the Browns have so desperately needed to get them all out of the long, nightmarish malaise they’ve been in for virtually the entire duration of the expansion era. Without hesitation, he took, with the first overall pick last year, a quarterback who was deemed by many people to be too short to make it in the NFL in quarterback Baker Mayfield, and all he did was, after taking over early in the season, have one of the best rookie passing performances in league history.

With the search to find a franchise quarterback, long a Terminal Tower-sized problem with the Browns, having finally been accomplished, Dorsey will be able to turn his attention to a variety of other areas where the club could use some help, since as both lines, linebacker and cornerback. He could stay right where he’s at to get the best available player who falls to him, or he could package some of the Browns’ bounty of choices throughout the remainder of the draft – or perhaps even future drafts — to make a trade to jump into the first round to grab a potentially extremely impactful player he has targeted.

Again, I suspect Dorsey will do the latter – he would get bored doing anything else and letting the entire first round pass him by.

But we’ll just have to wait and see. It won’t be long. The answer is just hours away now.