Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
Most Browns sites realize the same thing we do – people generally aren’t sitting at their computers as much on Saturdays. Errands, fun, and trips to the grocery store are the norm, so content slows down and limits the available stories on Sunday morning. All this presents a bit of an issue for your favorite webdork as he sits down to crank out a Massive Morning Missive on Sunday morning.
With credentialed content from news sites at a minimum, it’s generally on Sunday mornings that I dip into the section of my feeds that I eloquently dub the “Crap Pile”. This isn’t fair at all, because someone somewhere poured their heart and soul – or a few minutes of thought and time with ChatGPT – into each and every story that winds up there. These are people who sit through the sports talk radio excerpts posted on Xitter, and refer to guys I simply can’t take seriously as “analysis” or “insiders”. Then, they title their stories things like “Analyst has serious bad news for the Browns prior to the draft”, which generally means some guy offered a hot take of some sort. It must work as a business model, but it doesn’t respect the reader’s intelligence and tries to trick them into clicking. Hence, I consign them to the Crap Pile.
Anyhow, since I was short of real content and had to dip into the Crap Pile this morning, you’ll have to take my word that trading Myles Garrett is a big topic there. I’m not going to link to any of the articles, because I don’t want to encourage this sort of manipulative behavior. One of the brilliant concepts that appears to have some steam is trading Myles Garrett to the Eagles, which would net a bunch of picks in the 26-32 first-round range in exchange for the league’s top defensive player. If you’re going to trade Garrett, trade him to a team so badly run that they would continue to fail even with him on their line. Like the Cleveland Browns, but another team like that.
Garrett has remained quiet about his feelings since the hiring of Todd Monken over his preferred candidate, Jim Schwartz, who bolted in anger after being passed over for the head coaching job. As an observer, you can read anything you want into that, and we don’t have a sense of his feelings on playing for the Browns right now. We do know that he didn’t show up for voluntary workouts, which you can also interpret in various ways. If you want to interpret all this, plus the team’s mysterious contract manipulation, as a sign that a deal is imminent, go right ahead. Even credible outlets like The Athletic are speculating on it.
Personally, I think that Todd Monken plays a role in all of this. The reason you hire a guy like Monken is that you need to fix the offense, not because you’re about to throw him the additional challenge of mounting an effective defense without his star player. The status quo on defense is sort of assumed, so he can focus on the offense. Fix that, keep the defense operating effectively, and you have an opportunity to be somewhat competitive. That would seem to be the approach the Browns are taking.
Trading away Garrett on June 1 is an admission that the Browns are not going to compete in 2026, and Monken’s first season is likely to be another moribund 5-12 campaign, or something similar. If that’s the case, the only fair thing to do is to give Monken assurances that he’s not going to be judged on the season’s results since the Browns would clearly be playing for 2027 and a top draft pick. If you deal Garrett and dump Monken after one season, that’s just going to look awful for ownership.
The Browns changed that contract so they could keep their options open, which is fine if they think they could trade Garrett and absorb a $41 million cap hit for their beloved Arch Manning or another top QB prospect. But they had better be ready for fans to throw in the towel before the season even starts, and they had better be ready to do the right thing by Monken.
The Browns have provided little for fans to cherish since 2017 (and before), but at least we can point to watching Myles Garrett raise havoc. It’s what we can remember from those years, besides Hue Jackson and 0-16 parades. I’d love to see the Browns keep him for his career, and I have faith that they’ll be bad enough to land a good selection in the 2027 draft.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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