CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Browns’ quarterback room is crowded with options, but according to team insiders, that might be by design. On the latest Orange and Brown Talk podcast, cleveland.com analysts Mary Kay Cabot and Dan Labbe made a bold prediction: Browns fans should prepare to see multiple starting quarterbacks in 2025 — possibly as many as three.
“I don’t think that the Browns are going to get through the season with one starting quarterback. I think they will at least have two and probably three,” Cabot declared while analyzing the team’s newly released schedule.
Labbe enthusiastically agreed with this assessment: “If you put it at two and a half, if you put the over under at two and a half, I would seriously consider the over.”
This quarterback carousel prediction stems from multiple factors, including the team’s difficult schedule and current uncertainty at the position. The Browns enter 2025 with veterans Kenny Pickett and Joe Flacco competing alongside rookies Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders.
“We don’t even know who the starting quarterback is going to be for those first five, six, seven games of the season,” Cabot noted, highlighting how the quarterback situation remains fluid heading into training camp.
The schedule’s difficulty — particularly the brutal opening stretch against Cincinnati, Baltimore, Green Bay, and Detroit — had Labbe leaning toward starting a veteran early on.
“This does kind of scream to me like, I want Joe Flacco or Kenny Pickett starting the season for this football team, because having a veteran who kind of knows what he’s doing... I think having a veteran early in the season is going to be really important for this team,” he explained.
But even if a veteran begins the season under center, both analysts agreed the team will likely transition to evaluating their rookie options at some point — especially if playoff hopes fade.
“If they are completely out of it and they almost know that they’re not going to the playoffs by that point, then I think you turn something over to a rookie and you can see what the rookie has,” Cabot reasoned, pointing to the Week 9 bye as a potential transition point.
She added that the schedule’s difficulty could make this inevitable: “I’m going to go three because of injuries, because of effectiveness, and see how that all goes.”
The analysts discussed potential transition points in the schedule, with Labbe noting, “Unless they surprise us and start winning a bunch of games, then at some point you’re going to have to put one of these rookies out there.”
This approach would mirror last season’s strategy when the Browns turned to rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson late in the season.
The quarterback uncertainty adds another layer of intrigue to a schedule already filled with challenges — including a “juggernaut lineup” of opposing quarterbacks and no prime-time games, which Cabot called “a slap in the face to the Cleveland Browns.”
For a franchise that’s struggled to find quarterback stability since its 1999 return, this prediction of another multi-quarterback season suggests the search for a long-term answer continues — potentially with an eye toward the 2026 draft class that Labbe described as “a strong quarterback draft.”
Here’s the podcast for this week:
Listen and subscribe to the Orange and Brown Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Football Insider newsletter free trial: Take a minute and sign up for a free trial of our Football Insider newsletter, featuring exclusive content from cleveland.com's Browns reporters.
Note: Artificial intelligence was used to help generate this story from the Cleveland Orange and Brown Talk Podcast by cleveland.com. Visitors to cleveland.com have asked for more text stories based on website podcast discussions.