• Going into last night, the New York Jets’ defense hadn’t allowed a 300-yard passer in 33 games. Joe Flacco—available to the Jets and everyone else into mid-November—had 296 yards at the half against New York.
So the natural question, based on how Flacco has played for the Cleveland Browns: How did Flacco sit out there as a street free agent as long as he did?
“He looked done last year,” one AFC executive texted overnight. “Good lesson.”
What, I asked, was the lesson?
“That maybe an older player on a dogshit team should receive another look,” he answered. “Like maybe he wasn’t all in with the Jets last year.”
Another exec posited that, along those lines, he didn’t get the sense that Flacco really wanted to go be a backup somewhere—and waiting did wind up uncovering a place where he could flourish.
First, credit the Browns. It started for GM Andrew Berry’s crew in looking for a third quarterback in November when Deshaun Watson went down for the year. They kept the Watson news quiet for a couple days, and Berry dispatched assistant GMs Catherine Raiche and Glenn Cook to go through—independent of one another—the team’s free agent stack at quarterback and rank their top three. Berry, Cook and Raiche differed on who was second and third, but all three had Flacco first.
Meanwhile, Berry had coach Kevin Stefanski crosscheck with Gary Kubiak, who worked with Flacco in Baltimore, and Kubiak raved about him. With all of that done, they worked out Flacco in Cleveland, offered him that third spot, and the rest is history.
Clearly, the Browns did the work other teams didn’t. Clearly, there’s a lesson there in looking deeper into a veteran quarterback’s circumstances, and motivation, because if someone had, Flacco probably wouldn’t have been on the street as long as he was. And now, he’s not only revitalized the Browns, but his career, too.
I’m told Flacco wants to play two more years in the league beyond this one. And while he played as a practice-squad promotion over his first few weeks in Cleveland, two other teams reached out with serious interest in signing him, sources said, which would indicate the outside interest will be there for Flacco to do just that. If, of course, you weren’t able to deduce that simply watching him play.
