Talking about the NFL Draft less than a month into the NFL season is never ideal. But regardless of how things go this year, the Cleveland Browns were always aiming for the 2027 offseason to address their decades-long curse at quarterback.
General manager Andrew Berry admitted the team was still an offseason away from being more aggressive. After stacking young talent on both sides of the ball and securing two first-round picks for the second straight year, the writing is on the wall.
Whether the Browns will have a top-five pick and use it to get a quarterback remains to be seen. It's still way too early to discuss those scenarios.
What we can tell from ESPN's latest expert poll, however, is that it would take a catastrophe for the Browns to mess this up.
Regardless of draft order, the table is set for the Browns in 2027
ESPN's Pete Thamel asked 25 NFL scouts to answer a simple question: Who will be the top quarterback taken in the upcoming draft? Unsurprisingly, most of them leaned toward Dante Moore and Arch Manning, with LaNorris Sellers, Sam Leavitt, and CJ Carr also receiving votes.
But what if the Browns decide to go another route with one of their first-round picks? This might be the deepest quarterback class we've seen in recent history.
Scouts also pointed toward late first-round options like Darian Mensah, Trinidad Chambliss, Drew Mestemaker, John Mateer, Julian Sayin, Josh Hoover, Desmond Williams Jr., Nico Iamaleava, Jayden Maiava, and even Brendan Sorsby as potential franchise-caliber prospects.
The board will start to take shape further down the road. Some of those quarterbacks will either play themselves into the top-10 conversation or entirely out of the first round, so there's no point in fixating over a specific prospect this early.
It takes some hopeless optimism to pull for a team like the Browns. It always looks like next year will be the year, which also makes it tough for anyone to take this approach seriously. But for the first time in decades, next year might truly, really, actually be the year.
The Los Angeles Rams' first-round pick will, barring a surprise, be one of the least valuable. Even so, the Browns can always package it with their own first-rounder to move up the board and go after the prospect they covet most.
Knowing Berry, they could also work the board by trading down, acquiring even more picks, while still landing a franchise-caliber quarterback. There are so many options, both in terms of players and ways to approach this draft, that it would take an all-time blunder for the Browns not to get significantly better next April.
It's easy to see the glass as half empty when this organization has repeatedly found new, more heartbreaking ways to let the fan base down. This time, it's not even about giving the Browns the benefit of the doubt or trusting them to do the right thing — it's that it's almost impossible to get it wrong this time.
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