Written by Brian McPeek

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I figured I would hand out draft grades this week in The Wrap. Everyone else does it, right? I figure that regardless of there being no way 99% of the people who hand out grades actually has any familiarity with 90% of the guys selected that I should give it a go too? I think I might be contractually obligated, actually…no?

Well, I’m not doing that. And anyone who does unless it’s an NFL personnel director is full of crap (unless, of course, it’s here on these pages). But I am going to talk about the Browns draft in terms of whether they improved or not (Jeez…they had to, right?), and at what cost they improved (it was significant given they also made Pittsburgh much better).

I also have to comment on the Tribe’s Ubaldo Jimenez after watching him seemingly throw half of his 113 pitches into the dirt this past Wednesday and what it means for the Indians today and tomorrow.

Here’s The Weekend Wrap.

Deficit Spending

Because I have an interest in sports, a keyboard, the ability to put a few sentences together and the stupidity to set aside time every week to write a column, people wonder what I thought of the Browns draft. They ask whether Trent Richardson and Brandon Weeden along with Mitchell Schwartz and the creator of characters such as Uncle Buck and Long Duk Dong….wait…it’s not that John Hughes??….damn…. anyway, they ask me if those guys were the right guys and whether the Browns did the right thing.

The answer is I have no idea.

First of all, I’m not Mel Kiper or Mike Mayock or Todd McShay. Secondly, those guys have no idea either. They can put in time and look at tons of players but at the end of the day they have no way to know whether their thoughts and opinions are accurate when it comes to projecting what some 22-year old kid will do under immense pressure and while being paid a ton of cash. It doesn’t matter that they did it in college because college is just a different level (although the money and pressure in the SEC is close to NFL money and pressure).

My personal opinion is Trent Richardson is a terrific back and Brandon Weeden is better than Colt McCoy. On the Weeden thing, that’s not telling you much at all. You can go through the entire league and hit number two on some depth charts and see that it doesn’t take a whole hell of a lot to be ahead of McCoy. I’m not surprised the Browns took Weeden. I wouldn’t have been surprised had they taken Tannehill, just like I wasn’t surprised that they attempted to mortgage the house to get RG3.

They don’t like Colt McCoy. I told you that after he was knocked from Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney in that Thursday night game. I told you two days later that he’d never start another game for the Browns and, despite some bumps in the road and some bends in my theory as to who would replace him, it still holds true.

I don’t think Browns fans should be upset by the selections of Weeden and Richardson. They are better than what was sitting on that roster. What Browns fans should be pissed about is the holes at QB and RB were created in no small part by the same guys who just used extremely valuable first round resources as expensive dirt to cover the holes they dug themselves. And they did so while acting like the nervous kid sitting in the theater watching a scary movie.

Don’t give me the “they recognized their mistakes and fixed them and we should be happy about that” line of company bullshit. The mistakes this regime makes continues to grow in number and in cost associated with the errors. Not being able to meet in the middle on an agreement with Peyton Hillis was costly. In 2010 Hillis rushed for ~1200 yards and he also caught 60 balls for ~500 more yards. He scored 13 TDs that season. That’s a huge year. That’s a year you’d be thrilled to get out of Richardson this coming season.

But Hillis came without the cost of a first, fourth, fifth and seventh draft pick. Hillis came without a four year, $20million price tag. This regime also created that huge hole by moving up in the draft a couple years ago to select Montario Hardesty. Hardesty was a solid RB at Tennessee who many of you correctly pegged as an injury waiting to happen. He’s been hurt and ineffective for a couple seasons here.

Combine the valuable resources allotted to acquiring Hardesty as well as the failure to agree with Hillis (and I’m more than willing to accept Hillis may very well be crazier than a shithouse rat) and you have a huge hole at RB that you needed to fill. Instead of having a RB already and moving forward with the building of other parts of your team, you’re backfilling spots that shouldn’t be an issue at a ridiculously high cost of acquisition.

Again, they created the hole at RB and they drafted McCoy as a top 100 selection a few years back too. You don’t deal away valuable third round picks to move up to take an injury prone RB in the 2^nd round and you don’t draft a small, weak-armed, Big12 QB in the top 100 and whiff completely on both without setting yourself back.

But that’s what the Browns did. And I find it funny that rational people are so willing to swallow this year’s soup without considering what they were fed the last two seasons by an organization that not only made those mistakes but that also drafted a fullback early last year when one was just already siting here blocking the shit out of people and waiting for an offer, drafted Jordan Cameron Jordan (some combination of those two names is the TE the Browns selected last season), who threw McCoy back to the wolves against the Steelers after his concussion, who handed the ball to a blocking TE on 3^rd and 2 from the opponent’s 8-yard line for the first carry of his life and who have no track record of actually doing a whole lot right.

This isn’t an etch-a-sketch, folks. You don’t get too shake the organization every April and start perfectly fresh. Those lines you left from previous works are still visible. Some are darker than others but they’re still there. I know hope springs eternal but gullibility does too.

This regime has served us crap sandwiches, by and large, for three years and yet here we are in April of 2012 lined up and asking for more. And we’re willing to make excuses for them in terms of them moving up from fourth to third for a RB at the cost of three mid to late round picks and selecting a 28-year old QB at 22 who would most likely have been there at 37 (you can talk yourself into someone coming up to get him if you truly want to, but it wasn’t happening) and some people not only endorse it but they excuse the past transgressions that made it necessary. Or they at least conveniently set them aside.

“The past is the past and you have to move forward”, I hear. Yep. You do. You need a QB and you need a RB because they screwed the pooch previously on those guys that they selected and acquired to play there. So you have to have them for sure. What you don’t have to have is the blind and unfounded faith that this organization made the right moves to get them. There’s nothing in this regime’s ugly history that suggests that’s the case yet learned football fans ask me to swallow it without delay.

I can’t do that.

I don’t think the Browns needed to move from 4^th to 3^rd to get a guy who will help this team immensely. I don’t think the Browns needed to select Weeden at 22 when they could have had him at 37 and gotten a better OL prospect at 22 (David DeCastro, Riley Rieff). Those two guys went immediately after the Browns panicked on Weeden and the Steelers were one of the benefactors of the Browns selection.

I hear people say they got better and that they still got a RB/QB/OL with their first three selections. They did get better and they did get those positions filled. But the RT they took is not considered an elite guy like DeCastro and Rieff were and they could have taken one of them, deprived the Steelers of that guy and still likely gotten Weeden.

There is a butterfly effect and the Browns picks and panics enabled their division rival to ostensibly get an elite OL they had no thoughts about drafting when Thursday dawned. THAT is part of the price you pay for the stupidity and whiffs of previous years. It does continue to have an effect on you and your chances to improve and too many are too willing to overlook that or they make light of it.

The fact they painted themselves into this corner with Colt made it a requirement to reach for the QB at 22. No one with a brain believed the Browns would stay with McCoy after they tried to mortgage the future to grab RG3.

Did they get better? Yes, in all likelihood they got better. But they had pick currency that they misspent and that they didn’t maximize and it’s because of the mistakes they made in the past. Just because you have money in your pocket and need a truck doesn’t mean you pay sticker price or get talked into a vehicle you didn’t love.

Or you can simply believe that Thursday started the era when this regime wasn’t doing stupid things but actually turned 180 degrees and got it all right. Because that’s probably more likely, right?

Now and until time dictates otherwise the guys they took are my guys. I hope Richardson plays 12 years and then goes to Canton. I hope Weeden plays 12 years and then goes to Shady Acres with a couple Super Bowl MVP trophies. Mitchell Schwartz will be a 10 year starting All Pro RT and John Hughes will become a 7 sack per season guy who keeps Phil Taylor and Ahtyba Rubin fresh. Travis Benjamin will be the non-asshole version of DeSean Jackson, James-Michael Johnson and Emmanuelle Acho will make up a fierce and productive LB corps and Ryan Miller and Brad Smelley will open huge holes for Richardson to run through and be there next to him on the podium in Canton.

But come on. Call a spade a spade. Spending way too much too fill in holes you dug yourself isn’t laudable.

It’s just necessary.

And hopefully this time this regime actually got it right because they’re not only out of draft pick currency, but they’re nearly out of time.

You Can’t Spell Ubaldo without an ‘Uh’ and an ‘Oh’

Prospects have long before me and I have no great love or affection for Alex White or Drew Pomeranz. If those guys are fortunate they’ll have a career like the Indians Ubaldo Jimenez. Prospects have value either through them actually reaching their potential or being used as trade chips before they fail to reach that potential.

The Indians chose to use White and Pomeranz the second way when they dealt them to the Rockies for Jimenez last July.

Good for them. They took their shot and they made something happen and those people who bitch every day about the conservative front office that won’t spend any money had nothing to say when that deal was made.

The problem isn’t that they took a shot. The problem is it sure appears they took their shot on a guy who just might be damaged goods or the ‘product of a bygone era’. By that I mean when I watch Jimenez throw 113 pitches to get through five or six innings something starts to smell. Especially when you consider he bounced half of them in front of Carlos Santana and none of them were thrown above 93pmh. When he was in Colorado Jimenez threw long toss at 85 and regularly sat at 95-98mph.

He’s not getting close now and it’s the difference between a Cy Young caliber pitcher and a guy who can’t get outs and it’s the difference between a good trade and one that will be talked about forever as a deal that crippled the Indians for years to come.

There’s a world of difference between a few MPH. Greg Maddux at 92mph was a surgeon and a multiple Cy Young winner. Greg Maddux at 87mph was a veteran fourth starter on decent teams. Those extra mph for Jimenez were critical too. Hitter had no time to determine whether they were getting 98 at the letters or a slider at 90 that would bounce in the opposite batter’s box. They had to swing now if they had a chance to hit 98.

That 98 is gone and so is the indecision that gave hitters headaches. What I’d love to know is if it’s gone because Jimenez was/is hurt and structurally not right or if it’s because there were potential chemical methods that allowed a pitcher to throw 6mph harder.

The longer Jimenez stays in the rotation and struggles to regain his 2010 form the more I actually wonder. Maybe it’s mechanics and landing point and arm slot and all of that other stuff that allowed him to hit 98 in Colorado and he’s not replicating it here. Maybe it’s the thin air in Colorado but that wouldn’t account for his dominance in 2010 in other parks.

What I do know is the Indians have a ton riding on that right arm and thus far it has been an abject failure in terms of providing results and quality outings. Hopefully Justin Masterson an Josh Tomlin level out to what they were last season and hopefully Derek Lowe and Jeanmar Gomez continue to pitch at the level they’ve pitched at all season. That would help mitigate the disappearance of 2010 Jimenez. But he’s a critical component to tat Tribe staff and the Indians need to do every single thing possible to get him back close to where he was a couple seasons ago.

I’d hate to have to root against Pomeranz and White in order for the trade to be balanced. But I will if that’s all I’ve got to hang my hat on.

Follow @Peeker643