Browns Continue to Provide Tremendous Theatre on "Hard Knocks"

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August 15, 2018

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August 15, 2018

Published by Scott Sargent on August 15, 2018

When Sashi Brown—wait for it…—traded down from the No. 2 pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, not only did he pass on Carson Wentz, Joey Bosa, Ezekiel Elliott, and Jalen Ramsey, he selected Corey Coleman ahead of Wil Fuller, Michael Thomas, and Sterling Shepard.

When discussing Coleman the night of the draft, Brown said the wide receiver was “a guy we identified very early” and used adjectives like “productive” and “dynamic.” When asked about Coleman’s personality on and off the field, Brown said the receiver was “top-notch” and would “fit well in the locker room due to his great personality.”

Laughs would be had. Paul DePodesta won a bet that Elliott would go to the Cowboys; Brown lost. When asked about jumping around in the draft on the first night, Brown and Andrew Berry smirked as they shunned off any notion that trading out of the No. 2 pick would be a mistake.¹

Fast forward to Tuesday night’s airing of HBO’s “Hard Knocks” and we see a player so upset with running with the second team that he tells Browns head coach Hue Jackson to trade him if the team doesn’t want to play him.

“That shit’s crazy,” Coleman told his boss. “If you don’t want me to play, why won’t y’all just trade me?”

It’s easy to see where Coleman was coming from. The first receiver taken in his draft, the team invested plenty in him. He’s one of just a handful of NFL players sponsored by Jordan. He has the traits to succeed, and the Browns have been awful since he arrived. A trade could potentially open up doors that playing in Cleveland would appear to have soldered shut.

Coleman was dealt to Buffalo (arguably a worse situation than the one he was in) shortly thereafter, for just a seventh-round selection.

According to those closest to the situation, Coleman running with the second team was the least of his issues. Dropped passes, not winning 50-50 balls, and questionable effort plagued the third-year receiver throughout training camp, and no person was trying to send a message more than Browns offensive coordinator Todd Haley.

“It looks like he’s running five miles per hour,” Haley tells GM Jon Dorsey after practice.

Captivating television throughout, “Hard Knocks” has not just pulled back the curtain on some² of the inner workings of Berea. Even as it’s edited for added drama, the scenes we get to see on this series are much more in the way of access than anything you get as a member of the media.

The first episode of the series provided fans with the cold, harsh realities of working in the NFL where a head coach seamlessly transitions from telling his assistants about the passing of his mother to the film breakdown of an inside zone defense. It provides fans with a look inside a team wrestling with the demons of yesteryear the ghosts of NFL Drafts Past while attempting to fight for their respective futures as players, coaches, and coordinators. The fickle nature of the game can have you on top of the world one week and traded to Buffalo the next.

It makes one wonder how last season’s team would have fared under this spotlight. The issue, of course, is that it’s a series based in training camp and the true toxicity doesn’t crest until the losses start to pile up during the course of the regular season. Nevertheless, the cast of characters in Berea this year are perfect for the narrative—historically bad team with new front office, highly decorated rookie quarterback, and a plentiful free agent season look to make up for the embarrassment that was their campaign a season ago.

However, this whole thing unfolds—the season, not the television series—will be one hell of a test case as fans throughout the NFL (not just in Cleveland) are captivated by what is taking place on their television sets. Ratings are reportedly the best they’ve been since the show’s first season, and could conceivably get the Dez Bryant boost in the event his (eventual?) meeting with the team comes to life. Since the start of this show, the Browns’ over-under for wins this season has gone from 4.5 to 6. But as more fans are invested in the team during training camp, more will, by proxy, follow along throughout the season.

Two weeks in and Todd Haley is stealing the show. Jarvis Landry was a superstar during the first week, with Carl Nassib not far behind. But if HBO has anyone to thank for these last two weeks of theater, Sashi Brown’s name should be at the top of the list. Without his failings, none of this would have been possible.