BEREA, Ohio — Browns quarterback Joe Flacco will joke, trade stories and pose for pictures with his younger teammates, but he draws the line at dancing.
The moves that rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders tried to teach Flacco in a viral Browns video last week? “I don’t know what dance he’s talking about,” Flacco said Wednesday. Even if he did, Flacco wouldn’t groove, especially not on camera.
Don’t get him started on Tik Tok bops.
“That is different to this generation,” Flacco said. “The fact that people want to get on their phones and show people (dancing), like, that’s embarrassing. You’re an adult. Be an adult. I can’t wrap my head around that.
“I get it. You have kids and you want to have fun with your kids. Have fun with your kids in private. That’s what I think.”
Call him old or out of touch, but with Flacco’s experience comes a grounding in reality. No retweets, no filters. Just the greybeard logic missing from this modern position battle.
See, the Browns QB competition exists in two worlds: One at the facility, where coaches see everything and evaluate carefully, and one on the internet, where fans watch short clips from select open practices — mind you, training camp is still about six weeks away — and react as if they’ve seen everything.
Through two days of minicamp, two voluntary OTA practices and two more days of rookie minicamp, the Browns are not close to denoting a depth chart. But thanks to forums like X, formerly Twitter, best known as badtakes.com, their fans harbor more June opinions than ever.
Who is your QB1 through Phase III of the offseason? Before answering, understand that only the best camp plays crack the internet because incompletions earn less engagement. And our view from — or even the view from a reporter’s camera — leaves context to be desired.
The best throw on your timeline could be based on the wrong read. The worst interception might result from misunderstanding. Some drills feature 11 defenders, others feature fewer.
Six seconds can only convey so much.
Here is where I should mention that coach Kevin Stefanski insists the Browns pay no mind to internet musings or other outside opinions. “Once we get inside the building,” Stefanski said, “we really do focus on where our feet are.”
And here is where I roll my eyes.
To be clear: I believe a 43-year-old coach (and self-professed social media holdout) pays the content world no mind. I trust Flacco, who entered the league as Twitter took off, does the same. I even gained faith in late 20-somethings after hearing Pickett’s social take during Wednesday’s media scrum.
“It’s a shame,” Pickett said. “It should never be considered the real world what you see online. So hopefully nobody buys into that...”
One hiccup: Many of Pickett’s teammates were born into internet culture. Their phones (like mine) are often glued to their hands. If your “real world” has always included artificial apps, the difference blurs. And from this perspective, our silly camp clips can cause harm.
With less context and more opinions than ever, June is the worst time for a football player to scroll his phone. As Flacco said Wednesday, badtakes.com has become a big news source. But its message board roots still dot our feed. To the untrained eye, trolls and trained professionals count the same under comment section. And this is quite a burden to bear for a young Browns mini camper.
Of course, we can help them by searching for context in camp videos (count those passing drill defenders). Players could help themselves by ignoring their mentions. Social platforms could police themselves better, to put it mildly.
But Flacco can solve each problem with his outdated internet strategy. Put simply: If you must dance, put the phone down. Reality, unlike the For You page, might issue a pleasant surprise.
“I’ve been on Instagram. That’s the only thing I’ve ever logged in on in my life,” Flacco said. “I won’t download the other things because I don’t miss them. Like, I, like, yeah, if you told me you’re taking Instagram away, like, I’ve been on it. I’m too far down the road. But, like, Twitter and all those other things, I won’t even download it on my phone just because I know it’s a trap to just, you know, get sucked in.”
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