The Browns’ Joe Haden is considered a great cover cornerback – one of the best in the NFL, in fact.
That is, when he’s healthy.
And last year, he wasn’t healthy, being limited to just five games with concussion and ankle problems. He was eventually placed onto the Injured Reserve List Dec. 14 because of the concussion issues that just wouldn’t go away, lingering on and on and on, thus ending a season in which he had no interceptions and just two passes defensed.
In his first five years, all with the Browns, he had 16 interceptions and 87 passes defensed. It was enough for Haden, taken at No. 7 overall in the 2010 NFL Draft, to be selected for the Pro Bowl twice.
The Browns showed their faith in Haden by signing him to a five-year, $68 million contract extension in May 2014, giving him more than enough money about five weeks ago to pay $4.3 million for a house in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino that has six bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms. No waiting in that place.
So the Browns got virtually no production – and limited availability – from Haden in 2015 despite paying through the nose to have him on their roster. That’s a bad deal for a club that, with all of its other issues and the fact that Haden is one of their few proven stars, desperately needs him to be a leader both on and off the field.
To say that last season was a nightmare – an unmitigated disaster – for Haden is being kind.
Really.
As such, Haden recently appeared No. 3 on a list of the NFL’s most overpaid players.
That makes the nightmare – and the unmitigated disaster – just that much worse.
The Browns last season bottomed out in a lot of different ways both collectively and individually. There is no better example of that than Haden.
Because of that, then, every member of the team, and especially Haden, has a lot to prove. He is a proud man who hates to be embarrassed, sometimes too much so for his own good in that he allows getting beat once to get into his head, causing him to get beat again.
But in this respect, that pride may be the best thing he has going for himself. It will push him each and every day to get better, and that includes getting his ankle healthy enough to allow him to be ready to go at the start of training camp in about a month, or least shortly thereafter.
As stated, the Browns, who are already depleted in the secondary with both of their starting safeties from last year gone, need Haden. And he needs the Browns as a platform by which he can restore his tarnished reputation.
That he is in the prime of his career – he is 27 and entering his seventh season – heightens the stakes on both sides of that equation.
So, too, does the fact that in many regards, Haden is the face of the franchise. Future Pro Football Hall of Famer Joe Thomas can’t be that face. He’s a left tackle.
And Haden can’t continue to be that face if 2015 repeats itself this year. He’ll have to give up that moniker to someone else.
We’ll see how it all works out, but this much we know: This is a seminal moment – a defining season – in Joe Haden’s career.
