Should the Cleveland Browns consider drafting injured players?
A warning from the past
The analytics-minded front office knew the trade-offs involved with injured players. In fact, I can’t cite the precise source, but one time former Browns president Joe Banner actually predicted on the air that the Browns would draft an injured player, and darned if he wasn’t right.
On the other hand, the Browns made a stupid mistake in 2015 when they drafted Ifo Ekpre Olomu, a cornerback from Oregon who had had a career-ending knee injury prior to the draft.
Olomu, regarded as a promising NFL talent, had suffered a knee joint dislocation. From what I can understand, no player has ever come back from this injury to play in the NFL. This isn’t a dislocated kneecap, which happens all the time. The unfortunate Olomu had an injury so severe that the leg bones were separated in two.
While feeling very sorry for the player whose career was ruined, it appeared to be an uninformed move by Ray Farmer to draft him. The front office evidently let him down, because they didn’t advise him of the career-ending nature of the injury. That is, they did not perform the due diligence. They thought they were bringing in a fellow who would recover the next year and become an NFL starter.
At the time, my comment was that “when you find out who the Browns drafted, you should not have to immediately pray for a miracle,” but that is exactly the situation. Olomu needed a miracle.
Though he worked out and bravely struggled with the drills, he was not close to being the same athlete he once was. He did not get the miracle.
Everything we know about Ekpre-Olomu is that he is an outstanding individual. This isn’t a knock on him for being unlucky. It’s a knock on the Browns for not understanding the extent of the injury to the player they were interested in. Or maybe they took the view that seventh-round picks are usually disastrous anyway, so you might as well take one that has a one in a thousand chance of coming through because that is about the current Browns success rate in the seventh round.
The essential point is that the front office has to do the proper due diligence about the extent and type of injury. They cannot just draft anyone with a serious injury and just hope for recovery.
Next. 3 Small school sleepers Browns should draft. dark
If they have not done the due diligence, if they do not have the numbers, stats, and studies behind them, they cannot draft the player.