Dawgs By Nature
The Cleveland Browns had aspirations of a better season going into this year’s training camp. They would feature a new quarterback, although it wasn’t clear which of the five would start, a new offensive coordinator, new players in the safety room, at running back, receiver, and three new linebackers.
But the new boss so far has been the same as the old boss, as the song goes.
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The Browns lost 14 games last year. They are 1-5-0 so far this season. But the good news is that the schedule opens up a bit on the softer side beginning this weekend against the 1-5-0 Miami Dolphins.
Cleveland defensive end Alex Wright was recently a guest on the Yahoo! Sports Daily podcast with hosts Jason Fitz and Caroline Fenton to discuss how this year is progressing.
Wright is playing in his fourth season, so he is a younger veteran. He was selected by the Browns in the third round of the 2022 NFL draft out of UAB, where he was named to the Conference USA All-Freshman team. He was voted Second Team All-C USA in 2021 and then declared for the draft.
Currently, he is listed as the backup to Isaiah McGuire for the right defensive end position, although he plays quite a bit. This season, he has played 158 snaps, which is 44.26% of all defensive plays. McGuire has the other percentage points, so they swap in and out all game.
The interview with Yahoo! Sports Daily went as follows:
Q: There’s a new quarterback in Cleveland. Dillon Gabriel has taken over the starting role. What’s he like as a person, as a competitor, and in the locker room? How has he been taking over this role?
Wright: “As a rookie, you’d be surprised. I consider myself a young vet, considering the fact of the age that I came in, and just to see him, his preparation for the game. I would come in, and he would be like one of the first people in, one of the last people to leave, just working on mechanics and stuff with the assistant coaches.
You see it, like we’ll be at lunch or we’ll be getting ready to leave or I’ll be getting to go home after the meetings and stuff, and he’ll be out there with the assistant coaches going through just cadences, calls, just walking through his steps and stuff like that. So, for him to be that type of person, he takes the game very seriously, and as a person, he’s like, he speaks to everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re defense, special teams, or whether you’re the lunch ladies, whether just him being that type of type of kid just coming in with a smile on his face and just knowing he’s just happy to come to, happy to come to work.
*I know he doesn’t take it for granted. Last week in Minnesota, I gave him a fist pump after the game,...
