OK, Browns fans, would you flinch if the team selected Paxton Lynch?

 

That just may be what the Browns end up doing in the NFL Draft when it begins on Thursday night with the first round.

 

Sports Illustrated’s Peter King writes that Browns head coach Hue Jackson is hot on the trail of the Memphis quarterback, so much so that he thinks Jackson will try hard to get him with one of the 31 picks that will be made that night.

 

That Jackson might well be interested in Lynch should not be a surprise to anyone following the Browns. Way back when in the winter, when all these quarterback ratings were still being made for the draft, Jackson met Lynch and his reaction was well-chronicled. He openly gushed about him, especially his size. Lynch is 6-foot-7 and 244 pounds and as such is bigger than either Jared Goff or Carson Wentz, the two top-rated quarterbacks who are expected to go 1-2 – in some order – in the draft.

 

Jackson wasn’t interested enough in either Goff or Wentz and so the Browns traded out of the No. 2 overall pick with the Philadelphia Eagles and moved down to No. 8.

 

As King puts it – and he should know, because he’s so well-connected and understands the NFL inside and out – the Browns could end up trading out of the No. 8 pick and then move back up in yet another deal to get Lynch. The Browns would resemble a yo-yo if that happened. Whatever the case, that’s how much that Jackson supposedly likes him.

 

We’ll see.

 

This much we know: Whomever Jackson ends up taking at quarterback, the guy will be big. Jackson has spent a lot of time in the AFC North, more than enough to realize that big quarterbacks are the way to go.

 

Lynch went into last season as the consensus top-rated quarterback, but his stock dropped rapidly over the course of the year, in no small part because of accuracy issues.

 

Wait a minute. Unless he got the dreaded “Steve Blass Disease,” where you can’t throw a ball straight no matter how hard you try, there’s no way that Lynch suddenly – and forever — lost his ability to hit the target. Either his mechanics got messed up, or his mind did, or both.

 

My guess, then, is that Jackson, a quarterback maker through and through, realizes that, and also realizes that he can fix Lynch.

 

But again, would Paxton Lynch, the reputed best of the bunch of the B-lister passers in the draft, becoming the Browns’ franchise quarterback cause you to flinch?