Are the Cleveland Browns Progressing or Regressing?

The team then drafted highly productive defensive ends Emmanuel Ogbah and Carl Nassib who played 4-3 DE in college but had never stood up in a 3-4 defense where they didn’t seem to fit well in Cleveland.

Duplicating high draft pick positions also meant that a third round pick in Nassib was going to be a backup.

Cody Kessler went about three rounds earlier than I thought and with the signing of Robert Griffin last year, the potential acquisition of Brock Osweiler in 2017 and drafting DeShone Kizer in 2017, Kessler has become an afterthought and a waste of a third round pick.

Just one year later, four of the 14 players were already not even on the Browns 53 man roster opening day. They did bring Rashard Higgins back on the roster from the practice squad to bring that number down to three.

Going back to 2016, the season saw about a total of three positives. Isaiah Crowell had his best season as a pro with career highs in multiple categories despite being behind a horrible offensive line.

Pryor had a 1000 yard receiving year in his first true season as a wide receiver. Last, Christian Kirksey had a breakout year at linebacker. Besides that it was a horrible year for Cleveland. The team had one win and lost a lot of potentially winnable games.

The offensive line allowed 17 more sacks than any other team and saw five different QBs play because of constant injuries. None of the young draft picks had a great year, the run defense still struggled and the secondary allowed more passing touchdowns than any other team.

With the rebuild in full progress of tearing everything down to the core, a lot of that was to be expected. This springs free agency seemed to go much better than last years of letting everyone go and bringing in pretty much nothing besides damaged goods.

After letting the offensive line walk and seeing how bad it got, they signed top free agents Kevin Zeitler and JC Tretter while extending Joel Bitonio to bring consistency to that unit. While that was the good, there was still the bad.

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