Inactivity: Brilliant or Crazy?

[Brown Warrior]

Originally Posted by YtownBacker

You are right. Al that means is sooner or later they are going to have to release some good football players to stay under the cap.

Well, that and Las Vegas has them as current co-faves for the championship with Green Bay and New England.

[Brown Warrior]

Okay, here's a "semi-positive spin."

The best teams are in fact "built through the draft." That is, a high percentage of their team is homegrown, drafted or signed as UDFAs.

That happens because they draft good players. Players good enough that you want to sign them to a second contract or extend them before they get to it.

Problem for the Browns: They've drafted really, really poorly so we don't have many of the guys we drafted until 2-3 years ago. Rubin, DQJ, Schaefering... who else before Thomas?

En toto, guys we know we'd like to hang onto that we drafted are probably Thomas, Mack, Rubin, hopefully DQJ, Haden, Ward, hopefully McCoy (too early to call)...

That's all I have. Can't make judgments on this class because they haven't even played.

That's the problem we have to deal with when we say we're building through the draft: We can make that commitment now, try really hard to draft better, get guys we want to extend... but we have 22 starting positions to fill at a high level and only 2-3 new starters can come in each year.

So what to do? Generally, you add young guys from other teams you believe have upside (like Belicheck did to extremes). You sign them to short-term deals so that if they don't break out... you can replace them with draft picks.

Hillis is a good one. So is Evan Moore. Maybe we can get that kind of action out of Jayme Mitchell and Usama Young. Possibly John Greco. Still... nowhere near enough. We need more of these guys.

I would've been signing at least five more 26-ish second-tier free agents. Seriously... five if not more.

The Browns seem to be pointing at some other people, including some draftees who haven't been all that good yet (Mo and Robo), all of their recent draftees including later picks and injured players (Hardesty, Marecic, Cameron, Lauvao, Pinkston) and some UDFAs we've accumulated (Norwood, Haggarty).

These guys will get an opportunity they might not normally get. Maybe it ends up being a oood thing... for some. Right now, we're neither deep nor highly talented.

Just not super clear on the plan, on how we bridge the gap between now and being a team "built through the draft." That seems several years away.

[mikeyP]

We can still build through the draft and sign players to 1 year deals so the on-field product isn't shit this season. Just pure.... nevermind.

[King of Kings]

Originally Posted by Brown Warrior

Well, that and Las Vegas has them as current co-faves for the championship with Green Bay and New England.

Thankfully they're going with Dog Killer at QB so this is purely throwing money into a fire for them, they won't be spending their way to a championship with what they have at QB and backup QB.

[Sez.EJ]

Originally Posted by Brown Warrior

Turns out we aren't brilliant OR crazy. Even with 30 mill left to spend... we're broke. Too much dead money, which means Lerner has us on a budget.

Settles that.

Do you seriously ingest every media story out there.. You believe Shefter... Really?