Welcome to the big show
Welcome to the brand new Waiting For Next Year! It’s fitting that this is all happening around the NFL Draft. For most of my life, the NFL Draft was the Super Bowl for Cleveland fans. Every year, mock drafts were bandied about like TikToks are now. “Who do you think they are taking at No. 1?? Do they trade back up??” One of my dad’s favorite memories was the Joe Thomas draft when the Browns came back up into the first round to select Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn. For whatever reason, he wasn’t at home despite the big event of the day and he had saved the voicemail I left for him screaming, “we got him! They traded up! WE GOT BRADY QUINN!!” We know now that it was all for naught, and the Deshaun Watson trade broke many fans brains because they were unable to plan out who to get angry that Cleveland didn’t take in the top 10.
But this is different, while similar. The draft is still one of the biggest things on a Browns fan’s calendar despite the fact that they haven’t had a first round pick in the last three years and so should WFNY. Yes, we aren’t breaking news anymore, and yes, our article count has waned in the years during and after COVID took sports from us for so long, but we are coming at you in a new way. You can still find us on Twitter or X or whatever Papa Elon is calling his albatross social media nowadays @WFNYCLE, the same tag on Instagram and Threads as well. We have our Discord that you can join in and be part of our community, a community that has 15 years of history in the Cleveland sports pages. We are also adapting a newsletter, so if you’d like to be a part of that and have WFNY in your email inbox, sign up at the bottom of the page and let us know what you would like to see there. The Browns did not have a pick in this year’s first round, but if they had traded up like they had done so many years ago, trust that we will be there to cover it and discuss it. Because that’s what Cleveland and Waiting For Next Year is known for: eternal hope in the face of a huge past.
