_Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!_
"A big swing and a miss".
No kidding.
Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is either being lauded for saying the obvious this morning or being mocked for stating the obvious. I'm more in the former camp, viewing the comment made to reporters at the NFL Owners Meeting as an effective line of demarcation that the team is moving on from the Deshaun Watson disaster. It was well beyond time to move on.
No one has yet asked Watson how he feels about the remark, but that will be coming soon enough, and Watson is unlikely to be happy. But at this point, I don't care how he reacts. Maybe he'll block the team's official social media channel like he did to many other critics. Either way, he has plenty of money to finance trips to exotic locales with his fiance. He made serious bank, and no one can take that away.
I have limited patience with the entire lot of them. The Watson debacle was a disaster for sites like the one I aggressively mismanage daily. Die-hard fans had to hold their noses and plow on. First, a wave of fans wrote off the franchise for ethical reasons, then went years without draft picks (their Cleveland Browns "Christmas"), and then more fans fled as the team shed them during the disastrous "gives us the best chance to win" 3-14 campaign in 2024. Season ticket holders paid good money for garbage. The fans are lost in all this. Only the brief Joe Flacco run brought a smile.
It's all a big April Fools joke. Haslam's "big swing and a miss" wasn't a miss at all. They actually just fouled off the pitch, which rocketed like a bullet into the stands and smashed us all in the face. MEDIC!
But Jimmy Haslam gets to shrug his shoulders, ask the state of Ohio and its citizens for $600 million dollars, and try again, before and after surfing trips to his Scrooge McDuckian money vault. Despite all the mess, the Cleveland Browns were still guaranteed to make money, with TV contract income alone covering the cost of their athletic employees.
While insulated from the pain by thick walls of cash, the team at least should have learned some lessons from the debacle. Hopefully, it means better times ahead for the front office, which gets to learn from their mistakes.
But has it learned?
What I'm worried about is that the team learns the wrong lessons. Right now, the team either seems to be exercising prudence about moving forward (which would be positive) or is behaving like a youngster who burned his fingers on a hot stove and then refuses to approach it afterward.
Oopsie! Sorry about that three years of misery!
At this point, the Cleveland Browns quarterback room is, uh, Kenny Pickett. It's not exactly a strong bounce-back from the Watson situation. Head coach Kevin Stefanski is saying, with a straight face, that he's looking forward to seeing what Pickett can do.
As opposed to what I hoped to see—Stefanski taking the lead in finding the right quarterback for his system—he's instead saying that he's not pounding the table for any particular player with the second pick.
Oy vey. Consensus ad nauseum.
There's still time for the Browns to get this, if not correct, then at least palatable in 2025. A quarterback room of Kick Cousins, Pickett, and a promising rookie would calm many fan nerves but wouldn't exactly put the Browns in the catbird seat for the playoffs.
Lately, one gets the sense that the front office brain trust doesn't see 2025 as a make-or-break year but rather as a first step in the recovery process. So, we'll wait once more, likely for the 2026 draft and its more promising batch of quarterbacks, to plunge once again into the icy cold waters of taking a chance to hope that a ready-made quarterback savior will be available. So far, the team hasn't had much luck with that.
Some of us are running out of time, guys.
_Have a good one! GO BROWNS!_
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