Before the draft, Phil Savage said the Browns sent letters to every college in Ohio informing them of the weekend tryout situation. The Browns, as the letter said, would need bodies in order to have a full practice, and any eligible player who’d like to take a crack at the NFL would be considered for the opportunity.“They can always say they wore that orange helmet and played for the Cleveland Browns, if only for one weekend,” Savage said.
This proves that the regime’s earlier efforts to bring in players with local ties (Cribbs, Fraser, Zastudil, Stewart, Bentley, et al) were not just tokenism, not that I had any doubt. It does help cement the Browns as a destination employer in regional football circles.
That’s a little jargony, I know. But really, I’m strongly in favor of anything that helps localize pro sports teams, counteracting the prevailing, all-too-accurate perception that athletes are just mercenaries who’ll follow the money wherever it leads them, at the expense of continuity, cameraderie, connections, community.
Of course the Browns should and do go anywhere to secure the talent necessary to win. But if they become known as a franchise that looks with extraordinary care for gems in their own backyard, then that becomes one more great reason to root them on. It ain’t just cheering for the laundry. It’s supporting a local institution that offers tangible hope to the thousands of young area athletes at all levels who strive to excel at the sport.
It helps paint their football dreams in brown and orange.
Now back to the nitty-gritty. NFL owners recently beat back a proposal to expand the off-season roster above the current limit of 80. The demise of NFL Europa and the NFL pre-season roster exemptions for its players will make things even tighter this summer as teams prepare for cutdowns to the 53-man limit for the grueling regular season.
The roster on the official site currently lists 90 players, so any given tryout player will need to show something amazingly special pretty darn fast to have even the slightest chance at a brief Browns career. Realistically, the best he can hope for is to merit a callback should opportunities later arise at his position. A spot on the eight-man practice squad would be his ceiling for 2008.
Still, the large tryout is no mere formality. In this salary-capped era, there are only so many ways of getting a competitive edge. The gradual but huge expansion of coaching staffs has been one strategy. Making full use of the scouting department’s work, plus scouring the small schools other teams probably overlooked, just makes good sense.
Mining through a mass of raw talent, if it has even a ten-percent chance at yielding a golden flash like Josh Cribbs, is well worth the catering bill.
