Football's Tungsten Arm O'Doyle

My buddy Tommy Tomlinson brought up a great point on Sunday — Myles Garrett is now Tungsten Arm O’Doyle. He’s the new Shohei on the Angels. Every Sunday, he performs miracles. Every Sunday, the Browns lose anyway.

This Sunday, Garrett had five sacks. The Browns lost by three touchdowns.

And on Cleveland.com this headline appeared:

Yeah. Jimmy Watkins called the five-sack performance a silent apology. A silent apology for what? What could Myles Garrett, the greatest defensive player in the history of the Cleveland Browns, have to apologize for?

Well, see, in the offseason, Garrett demanded a trade. He wanted to play for a winner. In his extraordinary career — he’s been the NFL Defensive Player of the Year, he’s a four-time first-team All-Pro, he might just be the best pass rusher in the history of professional football — he has been with the Browns since 2017, and over that time, the team:

And so on. So last year, yeah, he had enough. He went at it pretty hard with the idea of getting out for a brief time, but, in the end, he decided, for various reasons, to end the fight and stay with Cleveland and trust that this team that has no idea what it’s doing would figure out what to do. It was a fool’s bet, I’m afraid, but Garrett stayed anyway and talked about the Browns being like family and said he would do anything he could to bring a winner to town. Feels to me like that Cleveland should celebrate him with his own holiday for doing that.

Jimmy Watkins — and I assume he’s speaking for some number of Cleveland fans, maybe? — apparently feels like Garrett should apologize for ever doubting the Browns and for ever trying to get traded:

Funny, I don’t think he did anything wrong either — I think the Browns condemned him to eternal losing because of their incompetence and lack of moral compass — but maybe that’s just nitpicking.

There’s no doubt that you get a skewed perspective about what makes good football when you watch the Cleveland Browns every week. The Browns quarterback right now, their 40th quarterback since coming to Cleveland in 1999, is a kid named Dillon Gabriel, and with no intention at all of being mean, I’d say his upside is hanging around long enough to get to be a backup in one of those Progressive commercials.

But every now and again, Gabriel will make a nice throw or good decision, and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s what good football looks like!”

No. It’s not.

Drake Maye was the third pick — and third quarterback — taken in last year’s draft. He showed some promise last year as a rookie playing behind a collapsible offensive line. This year, he’s getting some protection, and he looks absolutely incredible. He’s completing 75% of his passes. He’s got a barely-computes 118.7 passer rating. He already seems to throw the best deep ball in the NFL.

And all that just at his awesomeness. The guy just has this poise, this confidence, I mean, the Browns are a joke, but that Browns defense is no joke. They crush quarterbacks. They shut down receivers. Myles Garrett sacked him five times. And yet, the kid seemed in control every minute of the game.

When I was in high school in Charlotte, Drake’s father, Mark, was the quarterback at North Carolina, and he was quite the star, and the feeling around the state was that Mark Maye was going to be an NFL star. He actually never played in the NFL — a fact that stunned me every single time I saw Mark May, a fine offensive lineman, play for Washington.

Drake carries himself like the son of a quarterback. There was always this confidence you saw in Peyton Manning … in Eli Manning … in Andrew Luck … even guys like Chris Simms and Brian Griese seemed to have it. That confidence alone is not nearly enough to make a young quarterback successful, but I think it’s a good thing to have.

Drake Maye has an abundance of it. There’s something I do as a football fan that I imagine a lot of you do too: As soon as the quarterback throws the ball, before the camera follows the ball to the receiver, I gauge how confidently he threw the ball and predict if the pass will be completed. Every single pass Drake Maye throws, I think: “Oh, that’s a completion.”

I’m right 75% of the time!

Life isn’t fair. The Green Bay Packers had Brett Favre from 1992-2007, Aaron Rodgers from 2008-2022, and now they will have Jordan Love for, I don’t know, another decade.

The Browns over that time have had … no, don’t worry, I’m not going to put you through that whole list again.

Favre was a 2nd-round pick a year after the Browns went 3-13 and hired Bill Belichick. The Browns took a guard named Ed King.

Rodgers was the 24th pick in the 2005 draft, the year after the Browns went 4-12. The Browns had the third pick in that draft, and their quarterback was a 34-year-old Jeff Garcia. They took Braylon Edwards.

Love was the 25th pick in the 2020 draft, the year after the Browns went 6-10. To be fair, the Browns did have a young quarterback named Baker Mayfield, whom they wouldn’t give up on for another two years. Still, they took a tackle named Jedrick Willis. And remember, the Packers still had Aaron Rodgers when they took Love.

Someday soon, I don’t know when, we’re going to get to that play where we really want to go.

Anyway, Jordan Love threw a terrible interception against the Browns a few weeks ago, and the Packers blew a game that was all but impossible to blow, and I just kind of wrote off Love as a good-but-not-great quarterback who plays in the league for 15 years, puts up terrific career numbers, but does not register as especially memorable.

I’ve seen Love play a couple of times since then — particularly Sunday night against Pittsburgh — and I now believe that I was wrong. He, too, is playing with absurd confidence, and he is so accurate, and he’s got so much composure when under pressure and …

… and I think watching the Browns just makes me think any quarterback who doesn’t fall down is the next Joe Montana.

From 1969 to 1984, NINE running backs were taken first or second in the NFL Draft. I mean, yes, this was a different time in the NFL, a running time, but it’s striking:

All the way to the mid-to-late 2010s, there was usually a running back who went in the top five of the draft. Then in 2018, the New York Giants took Saquon Barkley with the second overall pick … and, in my memory, got universally torched for it. Funny to look back at that now because, at least from a talent evaluation standpoint, the Giants totally got it right. Barkley was the NFL MVP last year. That’s the Lamar Jackson and Fred Warner draft, so there were other great players. But Barkley is as good as any of them.

No, they got torched because you’re not supposed to spend high draft picks on running backs now. They are, from what my football friends keep telling me, at least somewhat interchangeable. No running back has been taken in the top five since Barkley.

I bring this up because Indianapolis’ Jonathan Taylor does not seem interchangeable to me — not even “somewhat.” Taylor was the 41st overall pick in the 2020 draft, but it wasn’t because of his talents — I mean, he twice rushed for 2,000 yards at Wisconsin. No, he was the second running back selected. It’s just that franchise running backs had fallen out of fashion.

Well, thanks to Barkley, running backs are very much back in fashion now, and Taylor might be the next running back to take the MVP award. In the last six weeks, he’s scored 12 touchdowns — including an 18-yarder, two 19-yarders, a 23-yarder, a 46-yarder, and an 80-yarder. He’s averaging six yards per carry. The Colts have a discarded quarterback in Daniel Jones, a previously-meh receiving core, and an offensive coordinator with the impossibly wonderful name of Jim Bob Cooter, and they’re suddenly the best offense in football and a real Super Bowl threat.

Hello, Jonathan Taylor.

Maybe somebody should have taken him in the first round.