Former Fresno State quarterback Derek Carr had a private workout with the Browns on Monday, and he thinks he aced it.
“It went so good,” Carr told Gil Brandt and Alex Marvez on SiriusXM NFL Radio. “Everything went great. It went exactly how we wanted it to and now, of course, we just wait till May and see how they’re feeling.”
Carr said he wanted to do everything he could to convince those in attendance -- including Browns General Manager Ray Farmer, coach Mike Pettine, offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan and quarterbacks coach Dowell Loggains -- that he’s worthy of a first-round pick.
“Coach Shanahan runs the workout,” Carr said. “So we do their drills, and they really want to tire you out. When you’re doing the individual drills, they really try to tire you out, see how you’re feeling, really grind you a little bit. And then you go into throwing routes. You throw routes while you’re tired, like a football game. So after all that, you do some bootlegs and they want to see how you move on the run when you’re tired. Then we do some reads that they have. Then [you] say, ‘If you want to see anything else, we’ll show you whatever you want to see to make you feel comfortable.’ That’s one thing: I want every team to feel they got to see everything they wanted when they leave Fresno. So it was a great experience.”
The Browns are also planning workouts with Johnny Manziel of Texas A&M, Teddy Bridgewater of Louisville and Blake Bortles of Central Florida, all of whom are generally regarded as better prospects than Carr. If the Browns end up taking Carr, it would seem more likely to happen with their second first-round pick, No. 26 overall, than with their first first-round pick, No. 4 overall.
Then again, the last time the Browns waited until late in the first round to draft a quarterback, they got Brandon Weeden. Maybe they’d be better off just taking the best quarterback on the board at No. 4.