00:00I think there's an acknowledgement of it almost on the internal,
00:04but definitely not externally the same way that I thought people would.
00:08And it comes down to Andrew Barry.
00:11This is a guy who has obviously been on the hot seat,
00:13remains on the hot seat, by the way, with this year coming up.
00:16Nothing really changes on that aspect.
00:18Barry is still walking into this year fighting for his job.
00:23But I also think we're in a spot that, at least when it comes to me,
00:29and I've kind of been a almost buried defender,
00:33not in a way that I think he's done his job absolutely incredibly,
00:35but I think that he's caught probably too much flack over the past few years.
00:40Like, yeah, you deserve a lot of it for the Deshaun Watson trade.
00:42You probably should have been fired because of the Deshaun Watson trade.
00:45You could have been fired at the end of last year.
00:46And I would have been like, no, I definitely understand it.
00:49But if somebody was going to keep their job last season between Kevin Stefanski
00:53and Andrew Barry, it was undoubtedly in my mind,
00:56and Barry, because of what he had done with the draft
00:58and multiple other good things he had done around the organization,
01:00including trading for Amari Cooper.
01:03I know that a lot of people don't love it in this exact moment,
01:05but trading for Jerry Judy still looks like a pretty good deal.
01:09Barry hasn't been awful.
01:11He just hasn't been great, and understandably so.
01:14When you're drafting without first-round picks,
01:16again, a problem that you created,
01:17but it is hard to then make up for, you know,
01:20missing those first-round picks when the guy you traded for isn't very good.
01:24And that's something that Barry has to live with.
01:26But Jimmy Haslam gave the entire organization a pass for that move.
01:31He said, that one's on me.
01:33Everybody moved past it.
01:35And now we're getting to a point where,
01:37obviously, we watched Andrew Barry crush last year's draft.
01:40And we now look at this draft.
01:42And I would say a majority of us have walked away pretty happy
01:46with the way that Andrew Barry and the Browns have handled this year
01:50and the way that the draft currently looks, I mean, I'm happy with it.
01:55I think the Browns walked away with one of, if not the best draft across the NFL this year.
02:00And I get, like, early draft grades, and we can make fun of draft grades and not like them,
02:04and it's absolutely 100% true that you cannot grade a draft before those guys go out there.
02:09But I think a lot of us would have looked at that and gone,
02:12you know, if I had made a checklist of things that I wanted you to address,
02:16you covered a majority of it and got what was widely accepted as pretty good players.
02:21Like, Spencer Fano was, that's your guy.
02:24You went out and got him.
02:25Casey was probably pretty good at 24.
02:27Denzel Boston was definitely good at 39.
02:29Manuel McNeil Warren was definitely good at 58.
02:32Like, you landed, eh, with the top few picks going,
02:35oh, you addressed the offensive line and left tackle?
02:37Oh, you addressed the wide receiver room twice?
02:39Oh, you got an upgrade at safety?
02:42Those are all things that a lot of us have pointed to over the past couple of years
02:45as major issues for the Browns to the point where I can even scroll on social media right now
02:52and I can tell, even though it's not directly being said,
02:56it feels like a narrative on Andrew Barry has been shifted.
02:59It is an ever-changing narrative that sits there,
03:02and it is because, I think, again, we all walked away feeling really good about this draft on the day
03:08it happened.
03:09Andrew Barry's not out of the clear, but even listening to Nick Shook earlier today with Afternoon Drive,
03:15just talking about the picks that Barry made, was clearly very happy.
03:19First flush, the Browns get an A because they hit on all four of their first four picks.
03:26Obviously, moving from six to nine to draft Spencer Fano, getting Casey Concepcion.
03:30If he has more reliable hands at the pro level, that'll be a nice pickup for them as a catch
03:35-and-run guy.
03:36Denzel Boston, the inverse of Casey Concepcion,
03:38which really builds out your receiving core into a diverse group.
03:41And then trading back up to get Emmanuel McNeil-Warren,
03:44a guy that a lot of people, including myself, thought would go in the first round.
03:48You get him at 58, and you address needs.
03:50You make good picks for good value at the right spots.
03:53And while I have some questions about Fano long-term,
03:57whether he's going to be a tackler or a guard,
03:58if that's your guy and you were able to trade back three spots and still get your guy,
04:02then I'm all for it.
04:03And this is just, again, the way that it feels like almost everybody has reacted.
04:08And I'm not just talking about locally.
04:10I do feel that many of us locally are very happy at the way this went.
04:13But you just look, I mean, across shows today,
04:15Rich Eisen talking, Dan Patrick talking,
04:18several people just draft experts evaluating the way that the draft went.
04:22And it feels like everybody looked at the Browns and went,
04:25there's no way they should have walked out with those four players
04:29drafting four times in the top 60.
04:32Like, Emmanuel McNeil-Warnett was expected to be gone and just wasn't.
04:35Denzel Boston by 39.
04:37You thought there was a really good chance it was going to be gone.
04:40I mean, I think we could still talk about KC at 24,
04:44and people would have been like,
04:45yeah, didn't know that the fourth receiver off the board
04:48would have lasted until the 24th overall pick.
04:50Like, there was a chance that guy was going to be gone.
04:53We, I mean, said that Makai could have went as high as 12,
04:57and he dropped all the way to 20.
04:58We talked about teams like the Panthers could have went wide receiver.
05:02There were several others inside of that kind of middle range.
05:05The Chargers could have went receiver, and they just didn't.
05:08You ended up with what you felt like was at least the fourth best receiver
05:12if you're the Browns.
05:14And probably the fifth or sixth best receiver in Denzel Boston.
05:19You walked away feeling great.
05:20And if Barry walks away from this draft feeling incredible,
05:22and a lot of fans do too,
05:24I think that is the start of the shift in the narrative.
05:27And there's so many things that go into that, right?
05:30We talked on Saturday right after the draft.
05:31I was kind of wrapping up,
05:33and I brought up the idea of Paul DePodesta not being here anymore,
05:37and I think that is something that you can clearly point to is,
05:40oh, well, DePodesta has less of a hand in the football operations
05:44and the ability to draft,
05:46and Barry starts hitting on really nice players.
05:49Well, can we talk about who the player evaluator that wasn't doing so well was?
05:53Because if Barry's managing to do this, it's a really good start.
05:57And then I think it boils down to the connection between Todd Munkin and Andrew Barry.
06:01I don't know that I feel wrong in saying that through the short offseason that we've had,
06:06and now into this draft,
06:08it feels like Andrew Barry and Todd Munkin are more aligned than Kevin and Andrew were,
06:13at least in a really long time.
06:15I'm not going to say as ever, but it has been a very long time before I felt that the
06:20guys were this aligned when it came to it.
06:22That it felt like, oh, these are the players that would fit great in exactly what Kevin Stefanski would want
06:29to do,
06:30and those are the players they drafted, and they just made sense.
06:34Now the draft picks just make sense.
06:36And it's a kind of double-edged sword.
06:39If it's not the Podesta anymore, and we listened to Glenn Cook on Saturday talk about Munkin being outward and
06:45very spoken about the players that he likes
06:49and how they would be used, and it was a very nice thing inside of the war room.
06:53And when talking about prospects, it made everybody feel better about the players you were drafting.
06:58And it just kind of makes you reflect into, oh, well, maybe Kevin wasn't doing that.
07:03It's an odd thing to bring up in that way.
07:05If every coach was doing it, well, maybe Kevin wasn't.
07:08And it was just said in that way.
07:10I can't confirm or deny whether or not that's the truth, but it felt the way that Glenn Cook had
07:15said it,
07:15that maybe, yeah, Kevin wasn't going so far as to do that.
07:18But now it feels like a positive shift for Barry.
07:22If you're able to go back-to-back draft classes, and I think it's really difficult to look at the
07:26top four picks that you had,
07:28and went, oh, those four guys aren't going to make an impact and be immediate starters for you.
07:33Spencer Fano's going to play left tackle.
07:35Both of those wide receivers are going to get plenty of run.
07:38And I think Emmanuel McNeil-Warren, I would struggle to see him not to touch the field.
07:42I think you can go as far, even into a center out of Alabama like Brailsford, and think, that guy
07:47might start for you.
07:49Todd's been talking about Elton Jenkins as a guard since the day that he walked into the building.
07:55I'm thinking maybe I'm probably not going to be playing center.
07:59And that leaves Brailsford, that leaves Whipler, and either way, if you get five starters out of this draft, ridiculous.
08:04If you get four, still really good.
08:07And I think a lot of people have taken note of that, and it's hard not to.
08:10It's hard not to feel better about Barry.
08:13And again, this year has to play out before I think anybody's crowning him.
08:17But just having a better feeling about the way that he's drafted, the way that he started to construct this
08:22team.
08:23I mean, I feel better about the offense and the standing that it's in today as a result of both
08:27Barry and Munkin.
08:28I feel that Barry's ability to draft, either things have changed and you've gotten more power and taken a hold
08:34of it,
08:34and maybe you were the guy who should have been in more power all along.
08:37Or something clicked, and something changed over the last two years that maybe Barry needed a trial run.
08:44Maybe he needed to go through and struggle and struggle and struggle to just wake up and snap out of
08:49it, and he has.
08:50I don't know which one of those is true, but it feels like we're reaching that.
08:54And I bring this up.
08:55It was something that Nick Shook also talked about on Afternoon Drive today, sort of this changing narrative around Andrew.
09:00I think that a lot of people were pretty big fans of his draft last year, and then we saw
09:06the results.
09:06I don't know if that's revisionist or not.
09:08A little bit of both, probably.
09:10I think that this draft kind of backs or at least justifies Jimmy Haslam's decision to not fire him when
09:17they fired Kevin Stefanski.
09:18Now, you have to get results from this group, of course.
09:21But right now, as we stand in late April, it's positive momentum for a guy who needed to hit again.
09:26And we'll see.
09:27We'll see if this group, especially this top four or five, makes a difference like last year's class did.
09:32And if they do, then I think he's going to rewrite a lot of his narratives in just two draft
09:36classes.
09:37And I think it's a rewriting of the narrative to the point where we have looked at Andrew Barry's last
09:41two years as on the hot seat and kind of playing it year by year.
09:44Had you failed in the 24 class, you're likely going to be fired.
09:47If you failed this year, and it doesn't look good, even if we all walked away going, wow, we really
09:52like those picks,
09:53still a decent shot that Andrew Barry could be fired.
09:56If you hit on 2024 and 2025, it is not something that buys you into 2026.
10:02It is something that buys you into multiple years of the future.
10:05If you're able to turn around and get quality level starters out of the first two to three rounds of
10:11the draft over and over again.
10:13If you're able to do it back to back times, it tells me, you know, something about what you're doing.
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