Monday, September 16, 2013

Time to give up on Brandon Weeden



           I hate when we as sports fans overreact to situations but I believe its already time for the Cleveland Browns to give up on quarterback Brandon Weeden. 
            Weeden will turn 30 years old on October 14th and is two games into his second season as an NFL starting quarterback.  He underwhelmed enough in his rookie season to find himself in an offseason quarterback competition with the painfully average Jason Campbell.  Through the first two weeks of his second year in the league, he has led the Browns to two losses, 16 measly points and what looks like yet another season in the AFC North cellar.  Oh yeah, he is also injured now. 
            The Weeden injury is a minor one, a sprained thumb that should only keep him out a week or so, but it just goes to show that it is always something.  More importantly is the opportunity cost.  In the college ranks you currently have Aaron Murray at Georgia, Tajh Boyd at Clemson, Teddy Bridgewater at Louisville, Brett Hundley at UCLA and even Johnny Manziel at Texas A&M who are all much more tantalizing options to be a franchise quarterback than Brandon Weeden.  The same could also be said Christian Ponder and Blaine Gabbert, but that is for another discussion. 
            We have seen what a good quarterback can do for a bad team.  Look no further than RG3 and Andrew Luck.  We have even seen that an exciting, yet not-so-talented quarterback can make an unwatchable team suddenly watchable (We’re talking about you Terrelle Pryor). 
           Weeden supporters will point to the fact that his top three pass-catchers are guys you 

probably haven’t heard of in Jordan Cameron, Davone Bess and Greg Little.  Not a good enough 

excuse.  Pryor has found a way to be exciting and win nearly two games with an even lesser 

receiving corpse.  In Cleveland, things are bad.  They might even want to gut the team, but 

there are a few bright spots like Josh Gordon, Barkevious Mingo and Trent Richardson.  The 

most important thing for a bad football team to do is to either get a quarterback who adds 

excitement or a quarterback who adds offensive production.  Weeden does neither and, as has 

already been written in this article, there are many quarterbacks in the college ranks who 

appear very likely to add at one or both of those things to an offense. 

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