Browns gutted as top four free agents leave in free agency
The Cleveland Browns: New regime, new players, same low expectations?
Has Joe Thomas reconsidered his stance on the team’s new direction? In light of the Browns’ first few hours of free agency, he might want to.
The Browns lost their four best free agent — four legitimate NFL starters, too — to other teams on Wednesday.
[NFL free agency starts Wednesday. Here are Shutdown Corner’s free-agent rankings for offensive players and for defensive players and specialists. Here are the top needs for all 32 NFL teams.]
First, wide receiver Travis Benjamin, the team’s second-leading receiver in 2015 and one of the league’s better punt returners, signed with the San Diego Chargers.
Then center Alex Mack, who signed an extension with the team two years ago, joined the Atlanta Falcons after he had voided his deal with the Browns.
And after the free-agency period began, the team also lost starting right tackle Mitchell Schwartz to the Kansas City Chiefs and safety Tashaun Gipson to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Schwartz, 26, hasn’t missed a start in his four-year career. Gipson played at a Pro Bowl level in 2014, before falling off this past season, but he’s 25 and better by far than any safety on the Browns’ roster.
Being a Browns fan is hard. Really hard.
Wednesday’s happenings would appear to fly in the face of what the Browns said previously they had wanted to accomplish with keeping their team intact. New Browns executive vice president of football operations Sashi Brown, who is running an NFL team for the first time, said at the NFL scouting combine that it was important to keep part of that core in place.
“We’ve identified the guys that we feel like really can help us and fit within the schemes that we’ll be running,” Brown said. “And so it is important for us to keep our own. I think it says something to the locker room when you reward guys that do it the right way and make sure that they understand that being here in Cleveland we want to build through the draft certainly, but we also need to retain our guys when we get to free agency.”
Ouch. His next few words were telling.
“And it’s been tough to do that, largely because there’s been so much transition,” Brown said. “So we talked to them about the continuity moving forward that we’re aiming for.”
They didn’t appear to be aiming for 0-for-4.
Added new head coach Hue Jackson at the combine, “We’d love to have them all back.”
Of course, if we’re taking a glass-half-full approach, maybe they Browns need some new blood. Yeah. Maybe if they weren’t winning with the old guys they can win with some new guys? After all, they often have spent money on the first day of free agency and been listed on “offseason winners” lists before, and look what that’s gotten them — a slew of third- and fourth-place finishes for a dozen years.
That sounds all nice and good and whatnot, but it just isn’t the whole picture, sadly. The Browns, who were 3-13 last season and losers of 10 of their final 11 games, are a worse team today than they were yesterday. They don’t have starter-grade players toiling on their bench, just waiting for a chance. They are not the Alabama Crimson Tide of the NFL. More like the Alabama-Birmingham.
Godspeed, Hue. And hey, you guys, they still have Johnny Manziel on the roster!
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm
