Roster cuts are coming very soon, with every team dropping from 90 to 75 on Tuesday and then to 53 by the weekend. For the Browns, those cuts will include a decision on receiver Terrelle Pryor, who has potential but who has been unable to develop it due to a hamstring injury.
How much potential? Browns cornerback Joe Haden perhaps put it best.
“I just can’t wait for him to go out there because he looks like Calvin Johnson, so if he goes out there and plays half like him he’d be solid,” Haden said recently, via Tony Grossi of ESPNCleveland.com.
The possibility that Pryor eventually could be very good could help him get a roster spot even if he’s not one of the best 53 players on the team right now.
"[H]is skillset, could he be?” coach Mike Pettine said of Pryor, via Grossi. “It’s hard to say, especially with the rules nowadays, even if he had stayed healthy and gotten every single snap, to go from a quarterback who has never played wideout a snap, to go through an NFL training camp when we have other players to get ready as well.
“To announce that, ‘Hey, the project is complete. He can do this,’ I think that would’ve been unrealistic. It is a projection and the projection is we have less information to make that projection based on how training camp went for him.”
The problem is that training camp hasn’t really gone at all for Pryor, due to a hamstring injury. But that may still get him a roster spot, since Pettine admits that the bar is low.
“We know he’s a project. We understand that,” Pettine said. “We’re not expecting him to go out there and light it up and catch 10 balls for 150 yards and two touchdowns. Just continue to get better.
“At the beginning, to just make that decision and come into a training camp and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to switch my position,’ our expectations weren’t real high for him by the end of training camp to be a viable player at wideout. We understand it’s a process. It’s just been unfortunate with the injury, the setbacks, that we haven’t been able to get as good of an evaluation as we wanted.”
It all sounds like Pryor will be getting a roster spot, based on his potential and not on his performance. Which is smart, given his enormous athletic talents.
But given that guys like Pat Devlin and Josh Johnson are still getting quarterback jobs, and in light of the reality that Jason Campbell’s phone is ringing, it’s hard not to wonder whether someone would be interested in Pryor as a quarterback, if the Browns would decide that he doesn’t deserve a roster spot as a receiver.
Actually, given the total quality of the Cleveland depth chart at the quarterback position (after all, they just signed Devlin), Pryor’s ability to serve as an emergency quarterback should make the Browns even more inclined to keep him around.