The Browns Love Rebuilding

There’s an easy argument to make that the Cleveland Browns did exactly the right thing for their long-term future Thursday when, instead of taking the electrifying Travis Hunter with the second pick in the NFL draft, they made a massive draft pick swap with the Jacksonville Jaguars. For the price of moving down three spots — so basically for the price of Travis Hunter, who Browns general manager called football’s Shohei Ohtani — Cleveland got Michigan’s high-revving defensive tackle Mason Graham, a high second-round pick today, and, most compellingly, the Jaguars’ first-round pick next year.

With the Jaguars and Browns being two of the worst teams in football, the Browns will get two bites at the apple for the top NFL pick next year, which might mean a shot at the forever-dream franchise quarterback — apparently, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is utterly infatuated with Texas quarterback Arch Manning, even though he hasn’t started a game yet.

For a team as bad as the Browns — a team that collapsed under its own weight in 2024 after years of believing they were just smarter than everybody else — the idea of stockpiling draft picks makes real sense. It faces the hard reality of this team’s hopelessness straight on.

Here’s the problem: Stockpiling for the future seems to be the only thing this Browns organization can do. They’re fantastic at throwing away seasons, as they seem ready to do again in 2025. They are the Shohei Ohtanis of rebuilding.

In 2016, after going 3-13, rather than take Carson Wentz, they made a blinding series of downward swaps that eventually led to them getting 11 extra draft picks. Exciting! They traded down in 2017 rather than taking Deshaun Watson out of Clemson; apparently he did not have enough pending lawsuits against him yet. Thrilling! They went 1-31 over two seasons. Fantastic!

Eventually they started picking players — in 2017, they took future Hall of Famer Myles Garrett with the No. 1 pick, and in 2018, they got top-pick Baker Mayfield, Denzel Ward and Nick Chubb in the first 36 picks, and that core did get them to the playoffs and made them the experts “team on the rise” a couple of years in a row.

But they didn’t rise, couldn’t rise, because “rebuilding” is actually the easy part. When you have the top pick in the draft two years in a row plus a bunch of other high picks thanks to trade-downs, yeah, you’d have to be pretty terrible at your job to not get better. But getting better is not the endgame, certainly not for a franchise that has never been to a Super Bowl.

I don’t know if Travis Hunter will be a transformational two-way NFL player or if he will be a disappointment, or somewhere in between. What I do know is that he’s exciting and the Jaguars are making a bet on him. The Browns are offering no excitement and making a bet on some vaguely promising future. It’s just what they do.

Joe’s Notebook is filled with web-only riffs. They will pop up whenever.