Quarterback Jayden Daniels is the linchpin of Washington's overnight turnaround, but he's not the only reason.
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Editor's note: Tony Grossi is a Cleveland Browns analyst for TheLandOnDemand.com and 850 ESPN Cleveland. He has covered the Browns since 1984.
At his season-ending press conference, GM Andrew Berry titillated his team’s long-suffering fans by drawing a parallel between the Browns, who own the No. 2 pick in the coming draft, to the Washington Commanders, who owned the No. 2 pick in last year’s draft.
“You can never really put necessarily a time frame on it with player movement and how things change in the NFL,” Berry said about the potential for a quick turnaround. “It’s hard to have a crystal ball, but we really will be focused on making the decisions that we think cannot just allow us to have a 10 or 11-win blip, but really allow us to stay there. And so, that will be balancing both the short term and long term.”
The Commanders turned around decades of dysfunction under Dan Snyder, a top-5 worst professional sports team owner of all time, seemingly overnight. They went from 4-13 last year to 14-5 and a spot in the NFC Championship Game.
They are a victory over division-rival Philadelphia away from reaching the Super Bowl for the first time since the Joe Gibbs-era Redskins of 1991.
By voluntarily comparing the Browns’ position today to the Commanders’ position a year ago, Berry inadvertently saddled more pressure on himself, coach Kevin Stefanski and owner Jimmy Haslam to duplicate Washington’s amazing feat.
Ah, if it were that easy. The task for Berry & Co. is far more complex than simply nailing the No. 2 overall pick in the draft.
Here is how the Commanders became an overnight sensation 33 years in the making and why an instant turnaround is so much more challenging for the Browns.
It’s the quarterback, stupid
Jayden Daniels is the No. 1 reason for the Commanders’ resurgence, without question. The Heisman Trophy winner not only was the NFL’s best rookie, his surreal, flawless play in the postseason arguably qualifies his first season as the greatest for a rookie QB in NFL history.
Now, to think merely taking a quarterback No. 2 ensures the Browns a clear path to recovery from their hellish descent to a 3-14 team is foolhardy, of course.
First, Daniels entered the 2024 draft a much higher-ranked quarterback by professional evaluators than Cam Ward, Shedeur Sanders, Jalen Milroe, Jaxson Dart or any other quarterback Berry chooses in the 2025 draft will be graded. Timing is everything. This is simply not a great draft class for quarterbacks.
Further, Washington’s choice of Daniels wasn’t an overly difficult evaluation.
Chicago took USC’s Caleb Williams No. 1. Daniels was the Heisman winner and was No. 1 on some team’s draft boards. The other quarterbacks available – Drake Maye, taken at No. 3, Michael Penix at No. 8, Bo Nix at No. 12 – fell off the board pretty much the way all the expert prognosticators predicted.
This year’s QB draft class is a crapshoot at this point. A consensus might be forming that Ward is No. 1, but the opinions after him are all over the map.
Does anyone – much less Berry -- have the expertise to make the absolute right choice at No. 2?
New football expertise
Prior to drafting Daniels, the Commanders, in the second year of Josh Harris’ ownership, made two important hires to their football operations department.
But first, Harris employed an outside-the-box advisor, former Golden State Warriors GM and two-time NBA executive-of-the-year Bob Myers, to help him revamp the team’s football operations.
This was not unlike Jimmy Haslam hiring former MLB analytics maven Paul DePodesta to help him construct a compatible front-office alignment. The difference was Harris added former Vikings GM Rick Spielman as an extra consultant to bring the expertise of a long-time NFL executive and contribute to the GM search.
Myers and Spielman produced Adam Peters as their GM choice. Peters, 45, wasn’t a GM newbie, like Berry. He brought a wealth of NFL personnel experience with New England, Denver and San Francisco.
Following the advice of his consultants, Harris then created a traditional football organizational structure of strong GM overseeing the coach. Peters led the search for a coach and chose Dan Quinn, 54, whose impeccable resume included stops at seven NFL teams, including a Super Bowl season as head coach of the Atlanta Falcons.
Great football decisions
Unsaddled with a salary-cap albatross such as Deshaun Watson’s contract, Peters inherited $43.4 million in salary cap space entering the 2024 transaction season. (Amazingly, the Commanders reportedly project to $94.7 million in cap space for 2025.)
Berry will enter 2025 with as much as $38 million OVER the projected cap. So, unlike Peters, Berry will have to dump veteran players and replace them with minimum-salaried rookies – at least in 2025.
But the Browns have led the league in available cap space before and have proved what counts is not the amount of space you have but how you use it. And the Commanders hit bulls-eyes on choice veteran acquisitions.
Among the gems acquired by Peters in free agency were tight end Zach Ertz, safety Jeremy Chinn, linebacker Frankie Luvu, defensive end Dante Fowler Jr., linebacker Bobby Wagner, running back Austin Ekeler, and center Tyler Biadasz. In November, Peters traded two mid-round draft picks in 2025 to New Orleans for four-time Pro Bowl cornerback Marshon Lattimore.
Each of those eight acquisitions has played big roles in the Commanders’ surge to the NFC Championship Game.
The right blueprint
So, it’s been more than getting the quarterback right that has accelerated the Commanders’ turnaround.
Peters’ draft included two other unsung rookie starters – left tackle Brandon Coleman, a third-round find from Texas Christian, and cornerback Mike Sainristil, a second-round pick from Michigan.
Added to Daniels and the eight veterans acquired through free agency or trade, Peters reshaped the team in one transaction season.
Berry has the draft assets – finally – to add much-needed youth to the Browns’ roster. He can possibly parlay the second overall pick into more draft picks.
But to duplicate the turnaround of the Commanders – which he brought up on his own – he has to get the quarterback pick right and also manipulate his bloated salary cap to acquire some veterans to make significant contributions.
Good luck, Andrew. You’re on the clock.