Written by Thomas Moore

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The Cleveland Browns made the right move on Tuesday, deciding to take the risk and hold on to second-year wide receiver Josh Gordon.

The NFL trading deadline passed at 4 p.m. and Gordon remained on the roster despite weeks of speculation that he would be moved out of town in large part because he is firmly entrenched in the NFL’s substance-abuse policy.

While the Browns are taking a risk that Gordon will not receive another suspension down the road, it was the right move to make. The team already had enough trouble putting points on the board and Gordon is one of only two players on offensive (along with tight end Jordan Cameron) that opposing defenses need to think about come Sunday afternoon.

Gordon missed the first two games of the season so he doesn’t appear near the top of the receiver rankings, but if you were to project his production over eight games he would currently be second in receiving yards and third in yards per reception in the entire NFL. Push that out over a full 16-game schedule and Gordon would finish with 83 receptions – only Ozzie Newsome and Kellen Winslow have ever had more receptions in a single season – and a franchise-record 1,552 yards.

That talent is the biggest reason why it was important for the Browns to resist the urge to trade Gordon and pass the risk of losing him to a suspension off onto another team.

Acquiring future assets is great when you are a team like the Browns and have numerous holes that remain to be filled. But even with Gordon on the roster the Browns still need another wide receiver and if they had traded him it would have just created another hole.

Now that the Browns have made the decision to ride with Gordon, there’s no criticizing the decision down the road if it backfires on them. Gordon makes the Browns better on the field and they made the right call (for a change) to keep him.

The More Things Change …

Cleveland is such a great place.

Where else could a quarterback go three-and-out on the first three series of a game, lead the offense across midfield only once on the final five drives of the game, put up just 17 points and lose and still be praised for offering “hope” for the second half of the season?

That’s what Jason Campbell did on Sunday against Kansas City, in the process earning the opportunity to try and become the first Cleveland quarterback to beat Baltimore with Joe Flacco when the Ravens come to town on Sunday.

“I thought Jason played very well,” Browns coach Rob Chudzinski said during his Monday press conference. “After looking at the tape, he was able to manage the game, was able to escape and get out of trouble, create some plays. He did a good job from a decision-making standpoint, protected the football and gave us a lift in that game.”

Campbell did all that, but the biggest thing he did was not be Brandon Weeden.

We certainly are not advocating that Weeden return to the lineup, but we also missing something when it comes to all the love being shown Campbell – after all, the Browns did lose the game.

Against the Chiefs, Campbell led the Browns to 340 yards of total offense and 17 points, numbers that look remarkably like what we’ve been seeing out of the Browns since the start of the 2008 season. Here, take a look:

• In 2008, the Browns average 249 yards and 14.5 points per game, ranking 31st in the NFL
• In 2009, it was 260 yards and 15.3 points, ranking 32nd
• In 2010, it was 289 yards and 16.9 points, ranking 29th
• In 2011, it was 288 yards and 13.6 points, ranking 29th
• In 2012, it was 314 yards and 18.9 points, ranking 25th

Finally, coming into Sunday’s game, the Browns were averaging 317 yards and 18.5 points, ranking 24th

So Campbell goes out, essentially puts up the same numbers, and for this he is praised?

Campbell can’t be faulted for receivers dropping passes or for the ongoing embarrassment that is the Browns running game – just like the quarterbacks that preceded him could not be faulted for the same shortcomings.

We’re OK with Campbell being the starter the rest of the season, but it’s probably a good idea to dial back the praise just a bit.

While Campbell may look better than Weeden and may be (marginally) better than Weeden, the bar here shouldn’t be to just be “better than Weeden,” but rather “be a winning quarterback.” Eddie Murphy once told a joke about how, if you are starving and were given a Saltine cracker, you would think that Saltine was the best thing ever. Campbell is the Saltine to a starving Cleveland fan base.

The only hope that Campbell provides is the hope that next year the Browns will have a quarterback that can actually lead the team to the playoffs and end the ongoing circus that surround the team’s quarterback position.

Just When You Think You’ve Heard It All …

Deadspin came out with a story today about how several quotes on the walls of the team’s training facility in Berea – the one that CEO Joe Banner was so eager to show off to the media before the season started – meant to inspire employees are “misattributed, incorrectly transcribed, or indeterminately fraudulent.” (You can read all about it here.)

Because of course they are.

In a lot of ways we are more embarrassed by this than we are of the on-field play of the Browns. Is it really so hard to get these things right?

We know a lot of people in higher education believe that studying the Humanities in this day and age are a waste of time, but certainly somewhere in the vast enterprise that is the Cleveland Browns there is an intern that graduated from a liberal arts college who could have fact-checked these.

Until next time.

(Photo by The Associated Press)