You’ve got to admit, the drama can be fun to watch at times when it’s not your drama. In the afterglow of their offseason Super Bowl, the Cleveland Browns’ follow-up actual season campaign has been anything but super. While they continue to hover below the .500 mark—they must win two of their final three games to avoid yet another losing season—questions continue to be raised as to whether or not anybody knows what they’re doing over there—or even if anybody wants to be there.
Such things might come about when you have the sort of head coach who not only wears a ‘Pittsburgh Started It’ t-shirt but also explicitly states that he would do it again. Or when you knowingly bring in volatile personalities who didn’t even want to be traded for in the first place.
That would be Odell Beckham, Jr., the former New York Giants star, who is having the worst healthy season of his career. The Browns sent the Giants first- and third-round picks, plus former first-round safety Jabrill Peppers, to go and get him, thinking it would instantly vault their offense into the stratosphere with budding second-year quarterback Baker Mayfield.
It hasn’t exactly gone as smoothly as that, and, reportedly, Beckham may have even been interested in pulling the plug on this Cleveland experiment early. According to Jay Glazer, he was telling players from other teams that he was facing to ‘come get me’ leading up to the trade deadline at the end of October.
Two of the teams believed to have possibly been among them did end up trading for a wide receiver—the San Francisco 49ers acquiring Emmanuel Sanders and the New England Patriots obtaining Mohamed Sanu. Considering the Patriots signed Antonio Brown, it’s not so far-fetched to think they may have floated the idea of acquiring Beckham. The 49ers reportedly attempted to trade for Beckham last year.
This report comes off the heels of his giving a rambling and indecisive answer to a query about his future in Cleveland, in which he essentially said that he couldn’t say if he would be there next year—or would even want to be.
Of course it’s entirely reasonable for any player to not want to be in Cleveland, but it’s generally good praxis to avoid saying it publicly when you’re there. Not that Beckham is known to exercise good praxis.
