The Cleveland Browns’ offensive nucleus didn’t spent much time at the team facility this spring, but they have been working out together on their own. Quarterback Baker Mayfield recently brought together a number of his teammates to work out during the downtime between minicamp and training camp, with their star receivers participating.
Jarvis Landry has begun chronicling his experiences via YouTube in a series called Just Juice, and the first episode features his discussing the upcoming year with fellow Browns wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., with whom he has been friends for many years going back to college.
Beckham, once a perennial Pro Bowler for whom the Browns gave up first and third-round picks and a starting safety via trade in 2019, suffered a torn ACL in the seventh game of the season in 2020. He has spent his time since recovering, and he acknowledged that he’s still not where he needs to be.
“I feel like month four was the hardest for me, every day fighting”, he said at one point in the video. “Now you’re getting to six months and now you can run. Now, you’re trying to cut and you’re like, ‘oh, hold on’. You’re running full speed, but…”.
Wide receiver is no doubt one of the toughest positions to come back from after tearing your ACL, a position that requires so much nuanced movement in your knee joints, especially for a player like Beckham whose strength lies in his route-running, and, of course, speed.
But he’s now about seven months out from surgery, and by the time the regular season starts, it will be about 10 months. Timeline-wise, that’s certainly doable for a relatively young and fit athlete such as himself to be able to go. Not everybody is Adrian Peterson, of course, but it’s more than possible.
The former first-round pick hasn’t had much luck on the health front in recent years, even just since being traded to Cleveland. Even though he didn’t miss a game in 2019, he played the entire year through multiple groin tears, which he had surgically repaired in the offseason. He still caught 74 passes for 1,035 yards and four scores.
Yet there have been those who argue the Browns’ offense is better without Beckham. There are some statistics you could pull up and work into an argument in favor of that narrative, but it’s still a tough one to buy, especially considering the projected growth of Mayfield, and the stability of the Kevin Stefanski offense heading not a second season.
