THERE ARE TWO BASIC THINGS THAT A QUARTERBACK MUST DO



By STEVE KING

The Browns are, of course, looking for a quarterback.

Again. Still. Seemingly always, which has got to stop if they are ever going to get to where they want — and we all want them — to go.

They have a guy in the short term in Joe Flacco, a professional quarterback in every sense of the term, and a player all of us — and perhaps, finally, also the Browns — were thrilled to have back in Cleveland when he re-signed recently.

They have another guy — possibly for both the here and now and also beyond — in Kenny Pickett, originally from TTOE (the team over east, in Pittsburgh), who, the Browns hope, will join the growing list of young veteran quarterbacks who don’t blossom until they get to their third or fourth team.

But the Browns also want to use the early part — perhaps even the first round — of the 2025 NFL Draft over the next several days to get their young “franchise” quartetback to hopefully be the face of the team for the long haul. I want that to be Shadeur Sanders for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that he has the “it” factor that a quarterback must have and has been so glaringly missing on the Browns for longer than anyone cares to admit. His presence on would immediately get the attention of everyone in that Cleveland locker room, in the league and throughout Browns Nation.

There’s no use reiterating the positives and negatives of all the prospects that quarterback-needy teams are considering.  You all know that better than the prospects themselves, and possibly also some of the teams that don’t know what, or who, they’re looking at, or what they’re doing, as members of the Clueless Club.

To understand quarterback, the most important and most complex position in team sports, we have to cut through all numbing amount of stuff — rhetoric, opinions, claims and numbers — and get to the only things that really matter.

And the best person to that, I’ve found, is Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. He breaks things down to their simplest, most basic and easy to understand terms better than anyone. And he did just that the the other day with the quarterback position. It was an epiphany of sorts.

What he said was, essentially, this (and I’m paraphrasing): “There are two basic things you want from your quarterback. The first is to be able to run the play that has been called, to get everybody lined up right, to read the defense properly and then execute the play to what is hopefully a successful end.

“The second is you want your quarterback to get you out of a bad situation when the play that’s called goes sideways. You want that guy to be smart enough, cool and collected enough, savvy enough, resourceful enough, heady enough, confident enough and athletic enough to make something positive happen in a desperate, chaotic and dysfunctional situation.”

Wow!

Double-wow!!

Florio is absolutely correct. Indeed, everything else a quarterback needs to do branches off from those abilities.

Think back in more modern Browns history to Bernie Kosar and Brian Sipe. It’s what those two greats did best.

So, then, no matter what quarterback the Browns select in this draft, let’s hope he can do the job — and then done — in both situations.

Steve King