WFNY NFL Mock Draft Roundup 2.0: While We’re Waiting
February 13, 2019Waiting Games: While We’re Waiting
February 14, 2019It’s February 10th, 2014. Berea, Ohio has endured another Monday. Valentines Day will fall on a Friday this year, and procrastinating men and women still have four days to pick up a bouquet for their significant other. Restaurants are scrambling to jot down reservations for the upcoming holiday. Tonight, one local eatery is preparing for a large party. The long table in the back is set to host a team of executives from the Browns front office.
Outside, the temperature has fallen below 20 degrees. There has been a third of an inch of snowfall today, nothing spectacular for a gloomy winter in northeast Ohio. At the Browns facility off Lou Groza Boulevard, CEO Joe Banner is finishing up another day’s work. He is looking forward to the NFL draft now just two and a half months away. He is excited to use the 55 million dollars’ worth of cap space at his fingertips.
There is knock at the door and Owner Jimmy Haslam appears through the threshold. Banner has been expecting him and says hello. The two have made plans to get a bite to eat and discuss which free agents they should target this offseason. Haslam makes himself comfortable. The conversation is light. Banner’s stomach begins to make its presence known. He’s becoming hungry and suggests they should grab some food before it gets too late.
Before the conversation ends, Banner learns something about dinner he wasn’t expecting: It won’t include him.
He learns something about the future of the team he wasn’t expecting: It won’t include him, either.
Haslam appears at the restaurant as planned. Each chair is now filled with a member of the franchise’s front office. In the coming days, Ray Farmer will be announced as the team’s general manager, becoming the second youngest among the league’s 32 organizations. Mike Lombardi has also been relieved of his duties, as was head coach Rod Chudzinski weeks before. The firings marked the first time Haslam scrapped a front office structure of his own creation. The group huddling around the table in the back corner will have their work cut out for them, rallying behind an owner entering his second offseason, a rookie general manager, and a rookie head coach.
Back at Browns headquarters, Banner takes a long look at his office before dropping the light switch. Disappointment is written on his face. As he walks out into the cold, he takes his list of preferred draft picks with him. They are players who will find homes far away from the shores of Lake Erie. The future of the Cleveland Browns is no longer in his hands. Others will now shape its future and paint a much different picture on the gridiron this upcoming fall.
Fast forward. It’s now May 8th. Radio City Music Hall is packed with anxious NFL fans. The curtain has been drawn onstage and the countdown clock is nearing quadruple zeros. Analysts are beginning to speak quickly and rifle off their final arguments. After a moment, Roger Goodell appears at the podium and welcomes viewers to another year’s draft. He is ceremoniously booed by those in attendance. In a few seconds, he will announce that the Houston Texans have selected Jadeveon Clowney as the first overall pick. The 2014 draft has begun.
The Browns entered the draft with 10 picks spread across seven rounds, including the number four and twenty-six overall. The latter of the two was a product of trading running back Trent Richardson to Indianapolis eight months prior. The team found itself in a familiar position yet again. They needed a quarterback. Brian Hoyer was on the roster, but few saw him as a long term solution to the issue under center. Most ESPN analysts agreed that it was a quarterback-friendly draft and in hindsight, they were correct. Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater, Jimmy Garoppolo, AJ McCarron, and Derek Carr would all go on to be selected before the end of the weekend.
In his recent expose, Seth Wickersham reported that the Browns were interested in all but Garoppolo and McCarron who would both be taken in later rounds. Before his departure, Joe Banner hired an outside analytics team to help assess these players, ranking Bridgewater and Carr at the top of their list. Their two first-round picks allowed Cleveland enough wiggle room to take a chance and wait on selecting a quarterback. Enter former Buffalo defensive coordinator now head coach, Mike Pettine.
Pettine favored defensive backs who exhibited both size and speed. He found both in Oklahoma State’s Justin Gilbert. Gilbert had shown a habit of predicting receiver’s routes and beating them to it. His wingspan was formidable and allowed him the opportunity to fill some holes in Cleveland’s cavernous defense. The Jim Thorpe Award finalist also showed potential in his kick return game, but this was never discussed with Browns personnel. If a member of the staff had approached the topic, they would have realized that Gilbert had no intention of becoming a consistent return man.
They would also fail to predict Gilbert’s off the field issues which later plagued his short-lived career. Nevertheless, Cleveland would swap first round picks with Buffalo, moving from fourth to ninth and gaining a fifth-rounder for the 2015 draft. Farmer and company later became nervous that Minnesota would claim the defensive back a spot before, inspiring Farmer to trade up and surrender a fifth-round pick of his own. In the end, the Browns selected Gilbert under a hailstorm of boos. Draft commentators gasped. The world was waiting for Cleveland to select a quarterback, and they all had a guy in mind.
I spent the duration of the draft’s first round doing what college kids do best on Thursday nights: celebrating. That night, unlike most others, I had a reason. Cleveland was poised for a turnaround. There was a new coach, a new general manager, and a relatively new owner. I would go to sleep with cause to hope. That alone was worth the jubilation.
I found a seat on the couch surrounded by about a dozen friends, all wearing their team’s jersey. Being the token Clevelander, I often got a slap on the shoulder followed by someone reminding me, “big night for you guys.” When Gilbert was selected, every eye in the room went my way. Johnny Manziel was a college student’s hero. The scrambling, the cocky attitude. This guy was made for TV. At one point, the camera panned over to his table and revealed a half drank beer sitting in front of him. You’d have thought he was a high school acquaintance of everyone present.
Rumors of Cleveland’s interest in Manziel were a leading storyline heading into the draft. NFL fans everywhere expected him to be wearing the brown and orange. Not many stepped back and thought about Carr or Bridgewater and how they would fit into the overall scheme. The world was caught up in the hype surrounding ‘Money’ Manziel.
Terry Pluto of Cleveland.com claimed that Joe Banner would have never taken Manziel. His private research matched the opinion of the outside firm he hired months before. Manziel was bad news, and Banner knew it. A recent ESPN article had quoted Manziel’s father, claiming that his son may be an alcoholic. There were arrests and rumors by the dozens. One video even showed Manziel being denied entry to a house party at Texas A&M, his own school. That was the biggest red flag for me at the time. For a superstar quarterback to be denied entry to a student gathering on his own campus; something didn’t add up.
On Barstool Sport’s Pardon My Take podcast, Manziel claimed that Cleveland should have known he wasn’t ‘an X’s and O’s’ quarterback. They could have also looked at his bloated scrambling rate, haphazard throwing decisions, and history of substance abuse. Either way, Cleveland traded up to the twenty-second pick and called his name. The twenty-one-year-old flashed the money sign before embracing Roger Goodell onstage. I remained seated on the couch as the room exploded. Analysts onscreen burst with excitement and expressed their opinion on the selection.
Adam Schefter: “Cleveland went through a brutal offseason but in the end…it comes out on top.”
John Gruden: “This is better than the movie Draft Day.”
Later, people would buy me a drink at the bar and offer their congratulations. They were the same facilities where I’d watch the Browns crumble during the following seasons. Also in his article, Wickersham dives into the motivation behind selecting Manziel. He claims that Haslam stepped in and influenced the pick, much to the frustration of Farmer who had now distributed one first rounder to his coach and the other to the owner.
In the end, both picks were a disaster. Gilbert failed to compliment Joe Haden and become a productive addition to the secondary. He managed to play three games in his first two seasons combined before being traded to Pittsburg. Manziel would also spend a torturous two years with the Browns, culminating in his release in March of 2016. Cleveland would go without a stable quarterback for another two and a half years, ending on another memorable Thursday night in a contest against the New York Jets.
Although disheartening, the 2014 draft had its positives. The second round saw the selection of Joel Bitonio, followed by Christian Kirksey in the third. Still, the team added to their growing list of first-round disasters and ultimately began to creep towards the dawn of the Hue Jackson era. Justin Gilbert is out of the league. Johnny Manziel is now throwing pigskins north of the border. The money sign has been retired, and the 2014 draft serves as yet another painful footnote as the team continues Moving Forward.