HEY, BROWNS: IT’S TIME TO FINALLY GET IT RIGHT





EDITOR’S NOTE: The NFL Draft is this week. With that, then, we’re sending a letter — some advice — to each of the four teams in the AFC North. This last one goes out to the Browns.

Dear Browns:

Just get it right.

Please, just get it right.

More specifically, if you do nothing else in this NFL Draft, but get that right, then you will have done a great job that will cause your fans to strike up the band and cue a rendition of the “Hallelujah!’ chorus. Heck, we might even have a party — and a huge one, a memorable one, at that.

“It?” What is “it?,” you ask.

Once and for all, getting the quarterback situation right. Not just a little right, either, but right-in-the-middle-of-the-bullseye right, as in as right as right can be, almost perfectly right. Getting the franchise guy, the guy who will get the Browns out of this quarterback quagmire mess they’ve been in throughout the quarter-century-plus of this miserable expansion era.

Your team has been linked to every top quarterback prospect in the draft other than Miami’s Cam Ward, who, unless the whole world is wrong, will be taken by the Tennessee Titans at No. 1 overall, one spot ahead of the Browns.

I don’t care which quarterback you take or when you take him or why you take him, just get it right. Take the right guy for Browns, even if he’s not the right guy for any other team. The other teams don’t matter at all, just the Browns.

The Browns have other needs — a lot of needs, in fact — and the hope is that you guys will fill plenty of those holes as well in the draft. But nothing — absolutely, positively nothing — begins in earnest with the effort to get this team back on track until the quarterback — the right quarterback, that is — is secured.

Quarterback is the most important position in team sports. It is the foundation of any football team. If that quarterback is good, then the foundation will be good and the team has a chance. But if the quarterback is bad, then the foundation will be bad and the team has no chance.

It is really no more complicated than that.

The fact the Browns have struggled so mightily since they returned to the field in 1999 is a direct result of them struggling so mightily in finding the right quarterback.

You guys are part — a big part, really, and in fact perhaps even the biggest part — of that abysmal history. Trading three first-round draft picks for Deshaun Watson, who had a list of alleged sexual improprieties that stretched from one goal line to the other at Huntington Bank Field, and then paying him a fully-guaranteed $230 million contract, only to find out he can’t play anymore, is the worse move not just in the history of the Browns, but rather in the history of pro football.

So, you’ll understand if we’re all a little bit — or a lot — dubious of your ability to get it right this time.

We’re rooting for you. We have to. Because if you don’t get it right, then it’s bad for all of us because we’ll be treated to more seasons like the one in 2024, and you guys will eventually lose your jobs.

Good luck!

Sincerely,
Steve King