From Peter King at SI:
2018 Draft: Magnets, Mayfield and the Browns’ Big Secret
Inside Cleveland’s headquarters in Berea and how GM John Dorsey kept the NFL guessing on the top pick. Plus items on Ozzie Newsome’s final call, Green Bay’s picks, the Patriots’ QB plans and more
By
Peter King
April 30, 2018
BEREA, Ohio — Do you want to know how to keep a secret? Inside the draft room of the Cleveland Browns, on the MAM (Morning After Mayfield), I found out a couple ways GM John Dorsey kept the identity of the first pick under wraps for the draft season.
My favorite: Dorsey and a contingent of scouts and coaches spent the week of March 19 visiting four quarterbacks—in order, Josh Rosen, Sam Darnold, Baker Mayfield and Josh Allen. They dined with Rosen on Monday, worked him out Tuesday, dined with Darnold on Tuesday, etc.
Dorsey never told a soul which quarterback he preferred, though he had a very good idea on March 22 after leaving Oklahoma that he wanted Mayfield. Back in Ohio, at the top of the quarterback list on the Browns’ magnetic draft board, Dorsey turned the magnetic rectangular quarterback nametags upright. And at the top of the QB list, while every other name on the massive board was horizontally magnetized, four vertical QB nametags were at the top.
Rosen one, Darnold two, Mayfield three, Allen four. From left to right.
“Right in the order we visited them, and I kept them in that position until the day of the draft,” Dorsey told me.
Dorsey is still getting to know a lot of the people in the Browns’ front office, and they are still getting to know him. Throughout his first five months running the football side of the franchise, Dorsey said,
“I have harped on trust and honesty. What’s said in this room stays in this room.” Now, he just wanted a little privacy insurance. If he kept the quarterbacks in this vertical bunch, Dorsey would be the only one who would know what the 1-through-4 order was.
Late Thursday morning, about nine hours before the draft, he gathered the senior staff to tell them the order of the quarterbacks, and what he was likely to do with the top pick—take Mayfield. He kept the board covered until early evening, and shortly before the draft began, the room knew the QB order. And, of course, who the top pick would be. How’d I find out on the Sunday night before the draft that the pick definitely would not be Josh Allen, and how’d Adam Schefter find out Tuesday morning that Mayfield was definitely in play? Credit to Schefter, in particular, for smoking out the Mayfield stuff. And credit to Dorsey for having an airtight circle on his call for five weeks—or at least five weeks minus a couple of days.
So I was in Cleveland for the draft. I wrote a story for Sports Illustrated on one of the most significant days in recent Browns history (arguably, the most important of this century, without trying to be dramatic), and
you can read that here at The MMQB in the next couple of days. Much of what I know is in that story. No, I was not in the Browns’ draft room Thursday night, so I won’t have much of the inside play-by-play drama that I’ve had the past couple of years from
Dallas (2016) and
San Francisco (2017).
I’ll tell you a few things about the Browns, and then quite a few things—Ozzie Newsome’s emotional goodbye, the crazy rugby-player draftee, the Patriots’ frenetic weekend, the Trade of the Draft, the Packers’ wacky cornerback obsession—about the rest of the league.
A few things I learned about the most significant team in this year’s draft, as the Browns try to put a stop to their current 4-49 bender:
•
They got very little action on the No. 4 pick. Four teams called Dorsey with interest in moving up. None got serious.
Only one team (I’d guess Arizona) offered a 2019 first-round pick as part of the package to move, which is surprising considering that two quarterbacks were still on the board when the fourth pick came up. The team willing to include its first-rounder next year said to Dorsey before the draft began: “I’m coming up for one player and one player only, and that’s Baker Mayfield.” As Dorsey said: “I knew all along it wasn’t going to happen.” So for those wondering why the Browns didn’t try to pillage some team by moving down a few spots, they never had the chance.
• Sodium pentathol, and defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, came up in the wake of the Denzel Ward pick. Truth serum. My question to Dorsey on Friday morning: “If we gave Gregg Williams sodium pentathol right now, who would he have said he wanted with the fourth pick—Denzel Ward or Bradley Chubb?” Dorsey pulled out his cell phone and rang Williams. I asked him the question. W
illiams: “Ward. The reason is our need for a press cover cornerback. Denzel probably plays that position as well as anyone I’ve seen in college football in some time. We probably play the most press of any team in the league. There’s another reason. I’ve got a video of 28 snaps of Myles Garrett pass-rushes last year where he gets within two steps or less of the quarterback when the ball comes out. Basically, we aren’t covering long enough to let him get to the quarterback. Myles and others—especially [defensive end] Emmanuel Ogbah—will get more chances because of Denzel.” Ogbah, Williams said, was a major reason why the Browns went Ward over Chubb. “Ogbah’s a rising star in this league,” Williams said. “He’s got a chance to be Chubb.” High praise.
• The track record at quarterback: abysmal. Cleveland has drafted seven quarterbacks in the top three rounds since 2005. None is a current starter in the league, unless you consider The Spring League one. (Manziel is there right now as he tries to make his way back to the NFL.) The magnificent seven: Charlie Frye, Brady Quinn, Colt McCoy, Branden Weeden, Manziel, Cody Kessler, DeShone Kizer. Mayfield can only go up from here. I told Mayfield I met fans Thursday night who thought of him as Manziel 2.0. “It’s understandable, obviously. First-round picks by the Browns, close to the same size, playmakers … But we’re two completely different people. I care about winning. I care about doing things the right way. I just want to be judged for who I am.”
•
Good nugget from Peter Schrager about the Patriots and Mayfield. On the NFL Network telecast, Schrager said the Patriots spent time Monday with Mayfield, which raised some eyebrows. Mike Reiss, in his Sunday column on ESPN, added the fact that it was offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels who visited Mayfield in his hometown of Austin on Monday. That would lend credence to the theory in some corners that if Mayfield dropped down to, say, six or seven in round one, New England might have been able to offer enough to move up from the 23rd pick in the round to tempt a team in trade.
• Hue Jackson insists he’s on board. “I’m ecstatic,” Jackson told me Sunday afternoon. “Ecstatic to have such a real football guy as John on board, and ecstatic about this quarterback.” Dorsey and assistant GM Eliot Wolf said Jackson was fully supportive of the Mayfield pick, despite reports that Jackson wasn’t involved in the analysis or the selection. “That’s not the way it works here,” Jackson said. “We went through this together. John Dorsey came here to help me, help us move the organization forward. When you’ve got a GM picking players for the coach without consulting the coach, then the GM should go coach the team. We had good interaction on this pick when we went through it all.” On Mayfield: “Baker definitely has NFL arm talent. He has the passion, the ability to complete balls at all levels of the field, and he has the air about him. He exudes confidence. People will be amazed at how strong his arm is.”
• Mayfield won’t be a happy backup. Jackson: “My plan is for Tyrod Taylor to be the starter, and to play the season. But I am not going to stop Baker from competing. If he gets it fast enough, great. John has established a good quarterback room, with Tyrod and Drew Stanton and now Baker. They’ll make each other better.” Mayfield: “That’s not going to change my mindset. Whatever the coaches say, that’s their decision and I’ll respect it. They have obviously said Tyrod is the starter and again, I respect that. We’ll see. I know I will be able to learn a lot from Tyrod and Drew. All I can do is work hard, put everything out there on the field, and let the coaches make the decisions they’re going to make.”
• A preview of my story this week. In my SI story, I talk about one of the bricks in the wall of Cleveland’s decision.
Something happened that only a very observant person might notice about the kind of respect his Oklahoma teammates had for Mayfield. When he walked into the Oklahoma indoor practice facility for his workout in front of the Browns, seven teammates were there to catch balls for him, and they were stretching on the other end of the field. Mayfield cupped his hands and called out a two-syllable signal to them: “HEE HEE!”
“HEE HEE!” they called back. They came jogging over to Mayfield.
“Damndest thing I’ve seen,” Jackson said. “Exactly like Baker was the Pied Piper.”
• How do you turn around a losing team? There’s no formula. For 19 years the Browns have been trying with all kinds of quarterbacks, with all kinds of formulas, with all kinds of coaches. Now they’ll try it with a 6-foot 5/8-inch passer who was fourth on the respected Mike Mayock’s quarterback draft board. I had an interesting discussion with Browns vice president of player personnel Alonzo Highsmith about the quarterback position. He told me he had the good fortune as a player in the NFL scouting business to always be around good to excellent quarterbacks, going back to his senior year in high school in Florida, when Mike Shula was his quarterback. He played with Bernie Kosar and Vinny Testaverde at the University of Miami, and then, in his NFL stops, with Warren Moon, Troy Aikman, Testaverde, Joe Montana (in his last training camp in the NFL, in Kansas City) … and then, as a scout in Green Bay, with Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers. Said Highsmith: “I’ve never been concerned with the big arm or the size, necessarily. Those things help, obviously. But I was always looking for traits. Favre and Montana and Kosar and Rodgers and Troy—they had the kind of presence, like when you were a young kid and your big brother was around, and you always felt a lot more confident when your brother was there with you. One night in training camp my last summer, with Kansas City, we had the night off. Montana was going out with the guys and he saw me laying on my bed and he says, ‘Let’s go, Highsmith. Everybody’s going. Let’s go.’ They all had that smirk, that stare, that attitude. You never saw the deer in the headlights. When I met Baker, I saw that in him. And I told him, ‘You could have played with me at Miami. You could have been one of us.’”
• About those jerseys. In the picture atop the column, you see six Browns jerseys flanking Mayfield. The backstory: Walking around the Browns tailgate party on draft night in a downtown Cleveland parking lot, my eyes kept going to the endless parade of Browns jerseys. THOMAS (Joe Thomas, 73) led the pack, but he had good competition from BROWN (Jim Brown, 32) and GARRETT (Myles Garrett, 95). So I spent 20 minutes doing a lap around the parking lot and snapping 26 different jerseys and one T-shirt. A fan from New Albany, Ohio, wore this:
I Still Hate John Elway. In Cleveland, some things never change.
• So did the Browns do the right thing? Big answer: I don’t know. I don’t how you can know anything 72 hours after any player is drafted. The biggest problem I have with instant analysis on draft picks is instant analysis on draft picks. In 2014, Bleacher Report gave the Browns an A-plus for the Manziel pick. NFL.com gave the Browns an A-minus for the entire haul, including the eighth pick in the draft, cornerback Justin Gilbert, a gigantic bust. Overall, I trust the Pro Football Focus grades, and PFF, with an NFL eye on college prospects, had Mayfield as the top-rated quarterback in college football in 2016 and 2017. And if you hire three men with long experience at a franchise that’s picked great quarterbacks—Favre and Rodgers—and they unanimously believe Mayfield was the best of the five-quarterback first round, well, I think you've got to let them do their jobs and give them a shot to be right.
