Browns head of football operations Sashi Brown hopes suspended wide receiver Josh Gordon straightens up enough to be reinstated into the NFL, but the executive is not counting on it.
That was Brown’s message Wednesday during an interview with SiriusXM NFL Radio.
The NFL denied Gordon’s petition for reinstatement into the league Tuesday on the heels of Fox Sports reporting a day earlier he failed a drug test in early March. The 2013 All-Pro selection who has missed 27 of the Browns’ past 32 games because of recurring violations of the league’s substance-abuse policy will be eligible to re-apply for reinstatement on Aug. 1.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would then take however much time he deems necessary to decide whether to grant Gordon re-entry. Gordon, 25, would need to convince the league he remained abstinent from substances of abuse in the interim, and Goodell is on record saying he wants to be assured the player wouldn’t repeat his previous pattern of behavior if he were reinstated.
“Disappointed for Josh,” Brown said during the radio interview. “Organizationally, we’re focused on the 65 or so players on our roster right now. Once Josh was suspended, we organizationally set our mind frame to not counting on him coming back, and I think that’s the only healthy way to operate and the way we continue to look at it. And If Josh is fortunate enough to be reinstated, obviously we’ll have some discussions with him at that time.
“In the meantime, the main thing that I think I take away from it is I just hope Josh gets to a place where he’s able to be reinstated. And I don’t want to say his life’s not together, but [I hope] whatever might be preventing him from being reinstated, he can have addressed and get on a good path moving forward. He’s got a bright future ahead of him, and he’s still young as heck. So we’re rooting for him, and if it comes to pass that he’s back in the league, great.”
Gordon has been banished from the NFL since Feb. 3, 2015. He filed an application for reinstatement on or around Jan. 20, only to have it rejected.
Fox reported Gordon’s sample collected last month tested positive for marijuana and a diluting substance. An unnamed source told Fox the “A” and “B” samples tested positive for marijuana and a diluting agent, and although the level of marijuana was below the 35 nanograms per milliliter required for a positive test, the diluted sample is considered a positive test.
Gordon has also raised eyebrows recently by hanging out with troubled free agent quarterback Johnny Manziel in Los Angeles. TMZ.com reported Wednesday Manziel was a passenger in a vehicle that hit a light pole Saturday. After Manziel and the driver fled the scene on foot, they were picked up Gordon, according to the report. Neither Gordon nor Manziel is accused of any legal wrongdoing in the incident.
Brown addressed other topics with SiriusXM NFL Radio.
Pick of the litter
The Browns have the second overall pick in the April 28-30 NFL Draft, but there’s plenty of speculation that they might trade down from the spot to compile more selections.
NFL.com draft analyst Lance Zierlein tweeted Tuesday there’s “smoke” around the Browns being willing to move down from No. 2 and pick a quarterback in the second round (they also have the 32nd overall choice).
Brown said other teams have expressed interest in the pick and he expects discussions along those lines to intensify in the coming weeks.
“There has been some interest in the pick, but there always typically is toward the top of the draft, just teams feeling each other out,” Brown said. “I think in earnest as you get closer to the draft, probably in about a week’s time we’ll start getting real calls with more substantive traction to them.
“But whenever you have quarterbacks in play that teams feel like can start for a long time for them, or I think the top of the draft is reasonably heavy at pretty important positions whether it’s pass rusher with [Ohio State’s Joey] Bosa, [Mississippi’s Laremy] Tunsil at left tackle, [Oregon defensive lineman DeForest] Buckner inside, who’s a rare talent, and [UCLA linebacker Myles] Jack and others, [Notre Dame offense tackle] Ronnie Stanley, there’s going to be some interest in those players. And my anticipation is we, along with Tennessee [at No. 1 overall] and the other teams in the top five or six, will have a number of teams call just to inquire, if nothing else, what we might take for those teams that [want to] have an opportunity to pick one of those players.”
QB questions
If the Browns stay put at No. 2, there’s a good chance they’ll draft their quarterback of the future there. Whether it would be California’s Jared Goff or North Dakota State’s Carson Wentz is a subject of much debate.
Most draft analysts consider Goff better-equipped to play in the NFL right away and Wentz the prospect with greater upside. The Browns might not agree.
Although many analysts have predicted the Browns would pick Wentz, Jason La Canfora of CBSSports.com reported Wednesday unnamed sources told him associate head coach-offense Pep Hamilton prefers Goff and considers him “far and away the better candidate.” Meanwhile, many of the team’s scouts prefer Wentz, but some of its executives prefer Goff, per the report.
Either way, without the quarterbacks being mentioned, Brown was asked whether the Browns would favor a player who’s ready to play immediately or one who would be better long term.
“Ideally you’d have the best player in the long run that can play soonest, but that rarely is the case,” Brown replied. “We are going to take a long-term view. From our perspective, we’re going to make the decision to select the player that gives us the best chance to win over the long term. I mean that is our goal here to have that sustained success. We will be patient and develop our players here, but ideally you’d have a guy that when we line up in September Week 1 is out there playing for us. But we will be patient and make that determination depending on who we select, and the player we select will be the guy that will put us in position to win or have the greatest impact in our ability to win over the long term.”
RG3 getting a shot
Even if the Browns draft a quarterback early, reclamation-project Robert Griffin III will receive a shot to win the starting job. The two-year, $15 million deal the Browns gave him last month suggests they view him as a bridge starter.
“He’s going to have a chance to compete to be our starter,” Brown said. “Really excited about the opportunity to bring him in. He’s a guy that’s obviously had some success and has not had some success in the league, and there’s a number of examples of quarterbacks that have gone on to a significant amount of success, Kurt Warner and others, that went through periods of time in their career when they didn’t have a ton of success and that’s actually made them hungry.
“[We were impressed with Griffin’s] desire to be great and his hunger to really get back to a starting level of performance in the game and willingness to listen and learn and be developed and want to be coached. And I think the narrative out there about him was very much the opposite of that, but we wanted to make sure we had our own separate process, not just in talking to him, but in talking to others around him to assess that about him. And we felt really comfortable with him and are excited about the opportunity for him to re-establish himself as a starting quarterback in the league here with the Browns.”
Analyzing analytics
The Browns are strongly committed to analytics, and they recently fired six scouts. Those facts have fueled a perception that the organization will lean more on analytics than scouting when it makes player personnel decisions.
But Brown insisted that’s not the case.
“The more informed decision is usually the best decision, and we view analytics as nothing more than information,” he said. “Traditional ways aren’t necessarily the best ways. They’re also not necessarily the wrong way of doing things. Our methods aren’t really going to be that innovative or different than kind of what we’ve done here previously.
“But we certainly are wedded to the core of our decisions being driven by traditional scouting functions, and we’ve got a good scouting staff and coaching staff here that has a lot of wisdom about what it takes to play this game. And we do believe that the most important thing we can do is watch guys play the game as opposed to try to evaluate a guy based on some statistic.”
Nate Ulrich can be reached at nulrich@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Browns blog at www.ohio.com/browns. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/NateUlrichABJ and on Facebook www.facebook.com/abj.sports.