The Cleveland Browns have the ability to change their franchise during the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft, as they own both the No. 1 and No. 4 overall selections.
The Browns could look to trade one of their top picks to a team looking to move up to draft one of the high-profile quarterbacks in this year’s class, but it appears that new general manager John Dorsey isn’t about to do that.
Peter King of TheMMQB wrote in a piece published Monday that a friend of Dorsey told him the Browns do not plan on trading the picks and that Dorsey already has a good idea of who he wants to take with those top selections.
“This friend of Cleveland GM John Dorsey believes he’ll go Wyoming quarterback Josh Allen over Sam Darnold with the first overall pick, keep the fourth pick, and take Penn State running back Saquon Barkley,” King writes.
The biggest part of this rumor is the idea that the Browns, who have passed on Carson Wentz and Deshaun Watson in favor of trading down in recent years, now are looking to draft upper-echelon talent instead of stockpiling draft picks.
That being said, drafting Allen would be an interesting decision. The Wyoming quarterback comes with high upside but has a number of question marks that you don’t normally see with a No.1 overall pick. Allen has a rocket arm but completed only 56.3 percent of his passes last season and threw the highest percentage of interceptable balls among the top five quarterbacks in the draft class. He also had the lowest percentage of dropped passes among that same group of prospects.
Barkley would give the Browns a franchise running back and another electric skill position player to put alongside Josh Gordon and the newly-acquired Jarvis Landry. Of course, there’s no guarantee Barkley will fall past the New York Giants at No. 2. If the Penn State product does become a Giant then we wouldn’t be surprised if the Browns took Bradley Chubb to pair with Myles Garrett on the defensive line.
