NO LAUGHING MATTER, TIM COUCH BETTER THAN YOU THINK

By STEVE KING

Mention Tim Couch’s name and you get a lot of snickers, if not outright uproarious laughter.

Indeed, Couch, who visited Browns training camp on Sunday to get a look at his former team as he gets ready to work as the color analyst on their preseason telecasts this year, is the punchline for a lot of jokes. If you look up NFL Draft bust in the pro football dictionary, you’ll see his photo.



I can understand that – to a certain extent.

When a franchise that was tradition-rich during its first 50 seasons is reborn, and chooses not just a player – but a quarterback – at No. 1 overall to be its face, and that player fails to do great things, then the criticism and catcalls will come.

Fair or not, that’s just the way it is in this day and age of intense criticism if there is not almost immediate success.

But if the truth be told, Couch wasn’t that bad of a quarterback, relatively speaking. In fact, the man taken at the top of the draft in i999 is by far – it isn’t even close – the Browns’ best quarterback of the expansion era.

Now, considering who he is being measured against, that might not be saying much. But still, he’s No. 1.

In a career that lasted five years, from 1999-2003, Couch is third on the Browns in career completions (1,025), putting him ahead of people like Otto Graham, Frank Ryan and Bill Nelsen, fifth in passing yards (11,131), putting him in front of Nelsen, and sixth in quarterback rating (75.1), making him high-ranked than Brian Sipe and Nelsen.

This is not to say Couch was a great quarterback. He wasn’t – by any stretch of the imagination — and he is certainly not in the same class as any of the quarterbacks to whom I compared him. But he was a lot better than he is given credit for, which should stop at least some of the jokes.