New Regime, Same Tactics for the Cleveland Browns

This doesn’t include a lot of the other players we’ve let walk. Those numbers above are also deceiving. All of those guys are depth options on their teams. Skrine was the third corner, Cameron was fourth on the team in targets, and Sheard and Rubin were rotational players. Some stats also doesn’t relate to how well they played.

This is just merely to show you what the Browns tried to replace their options with. Before people argue this too, Housler was originally signed to replace Cameron. Barnidge was on the team for years with little role before blowing up last year.

The Browns front office for two years now has gone with the approach of lets let our key free agents walk in order to rebuild and gain compensatory picks. I think that is a terrible idea. The NFL doesn’t work like MLB where you can get a first round pick for losing a key player to free agency.

No, the NFL gives you at best a third round pick. In reality, you can’t really even consider it a third rounder since it’s at the end of the round so it would almost be equal to the Browns fourth round pick. The Browns should be in line to gain some this year from losing free agents last year and also for next year after losing this crop of players.

Going through the names they lost this year and last year, the question is do you want the player at his new contract or a 4th round pick? I would have let Rubin walk, but besides him I’d rather have Skrine, Sheard, Cameron (pre-Barnidge knowledge), Mack, Benjamin, Gipson, and Schwartz at their current deal then a compensation pick.

Statistically speaking, you might have about a 25-33% chance of finding a starter with that pick. That’s a lot less probability than a known NFL starter at his position. They say you need three years to evaluate a draft class. Let’s see what big names we can find taken round four or later from 2013: Latavius Murray was the only one to make a Pro Bowl that was drafted.

Pages: 1 2 3 4