Dawgs By Nature
The Browns roster is full of new bodies including Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, Shedeur Sanders and Dillon Gabriel
The 2025 version of the Cleveland Browns will be different than last year. It has to be. Nobody can accept another 14-loss season without heads rolling.
Training camp is just two short months away. There are several storylines that will intrigue Browns fans, and the entire league, for that matter.
This could be the only subject in this article, and everyone would agree. Front and center will be the competition with this group and the attention it will garner.
Veteran Joe Flacco was signed to a one-year deal worth $4 million to be the starter for the 2025 Browns. Whether or not that comes to fruition will be determined. He will be entering his 18th season and is 40 years old. When he arrived in Cleveland in 2023, he played in just six games, one being a playoff disaster.
That season, starter Deshaun Watson had issues moving the offense and scoring points. Flacco had the opposite effect in that he had four games in which he passed for over 300 yards, including a 374-yard outing against the Chicago Bears in Week 15. In three of those games, the team scored 31, 36, and 37 points.
But place Flacco into the wait-and-see category. Before he took control of the Browns’ offense that year, he wasn’t even the New York Jets starter the year before and hadn’t played at all that year until he got the call from Cleveland. He hadn’t been a starting QB since the 2017 NFL season. When he left Cleveland and signed with the Indianapolis Colts, he didn’t set that franchise on fire and only started five games.
Browns’ GM Andrew Berry traded for Kenny Pickett. Normally, a franchise doesn’t ship off its valuable draft picks to another team and then not keep the player. He is a former first-round draft selection and has 25 NFL starts. Pickett has come out publicly and stated he has no intention of handing the job to Flacco and will work every day to supplant him as the starter.
It may just be that Pickett is very talented. Steelers Hall of Fame QB Terry Bradshaw said this about Pickett’s time in Pittsburgh:
“They throw a kid in there for two years, and you’ve got an offense that doesn’t fit and doesn’t work, and they can’t run because their offensive line’s not even good enough for a run-blocking team. Now, they’re saying Kenny Pickett is a failure. He wasn’t a failure, the Steelers were a failure.”
Then there are the two rookies.
Shedeur Sanders comes to camp with a ton of social media attention. He is saying all the right things about competing for the starting position and will become the best player in the room. At one time, he was projected to be a Top-5 player but fell five rounds as every NFL club passed on him...
