The Browns have a ridiculous amount of both cap space (over $100 million) and draft picks (11 including five of the first 65), but they know that nothing will define their efforts to escape decades of Browns-ness like their search for a quarterback.
And coach Hue Jackson said the goal is to find the long-term answer at the position this offseason.
“We hope to,” Jackson told Albert Breer of TheMMQB.com. “We go into it looking to solve that. We all know until we have our quarterback, the guy that we want on our team [long-term], it’s hard to move forward. Now, that said, we’re not sure that guy is not on our team yet, I’m not trying to discount the guys that are on the team. You’re just always looking to improve everywhere that you can. We’re going to search high and low.”
We can save Jackson a little time because we like to help people. He isn’t on your roster now, Hue.
Now that that’s settled and we can move on, Jackson was able to talk about the time spent on possible free agents and trade acquisitions as well as the draft class.
“Every quarterback who has potential to be a free agent or someone that could be traded, I’ve watched everything they’ve done,” Jackson said.
He can’t say their names because that would be tampering and tampering is illegal, but one can safely assume he’s referring to Jimmy Garoppolo, A.J. McCarron, Mike Glennon, Tyrod Taylor, and others. Then there are the college kids: Deshaun Watson, DeShone Kizer, Mitchell Trubisky and Patrick Mahomes.
Whoever it happens to be, Jackson knows that with an unprecedented amount of offseason ammunition, he has to hit the target.
“It’s very exciting. But it’s pressure-packed too,” Jackson said. “You gotta get it right, because these are opportunities to take this organization in a whole new direction. So the thought of doing it the right way, doing it right all together, it’s on all of our minds. We want to get this right. We know this could catapult us into the future, and we have a lot of different ways to have success.”
The show Texas A&M defensive end Myles Garrett put on yesterday should make the first pick academic, assuming the analytic Browns don’t overthink things. But how they maneuver the rest of their picks and cash to find a quarterback will be essential to their potential recovery, and they know this is the time.