Browns Should Take the Chance on Brendan Sorsby

I’ve made my frustration with this team’s quarterback situation pretty clear already. We’ve got a room full of question marks, a $230 million albatross still sitting on the books in Deshaun Watson, and zero proof that Shedeur Sanders or Dillon Gabriel is actually the answer. So when I heard Brendan Sorsby applied for the NFL supplemental draft, my first reaction wasn’t hesitation. It was, why wouldn’t the Browns at least look into this?

For anyone who hasn’t followed the chaos, here’s the short version. Sorsby was one of the most productive dual-threat quarterbacks in college football this past season, racking up 26 touchdown passes against just five interceptions, plus 580 rushing yards and nine more scores on the ground for Cincinnati, before transferring to Texas Tech. He’s 6-foot-3, 235 pounds, has a live arm capable of making throws from bad platforms and weird angles, and one Power 4 quarterbacks coach told The Athletic he’s about as good as it gets at the stuff you genuinely can’t coach, the off-platform throws, the tight-window stuff. Evaluators have talked about him as worthy of an early-round grade in a normal year.

Then the gambling story broke, and it’s bad. Sorsby admitted to placing more than 9,000 bets totaling at least $90,000 over four years, across three different schools, including at least 40 wagers on his own team’s games while he was a freshman at Indiana, some of them while he was still underage. The NCAA ruled him permanently ineligible. He fought it in court, won a temporary injunction, then abruptly reversed course and applied for the supplemental draft instead of returning to Texas Tech this fall. It’s a mess, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.

Here’s the part of this I think a lot of people are glossing over, though, including, honestly, my own first instinct on this. Taking him in the supplemental draft isn’t actually free. The way the supplemental draft works, whatever round you use to select a player, you forfeit your pick in that exact same round in next year’s regular draft. If the Browns bid a fourth-round pick on Sorsby and win him, they’re not getting a freebie, they’re paying with their actual 2027 fourth-rounder. That’s a real cost, not a “who cares, it didn’t cost us anything” shrug.

So what is Cleveland actually willing to spend? I went looking for real reporting on this, and it’s worth separating the noise from the signal. ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported that multiple league executives feel Sorsby is worth a second-round bid in general market terms, but that’s a value assessment of the player, not a prediction about what Cleveland specifically will do.

The Browns-specific reporting actually points the other way. Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com has said multiple times that the Browns are “unlikely to bid” on Sorsby. Her sourcing includes head coach Todd Monken calling the idea “a slippery slope,” and a more pointed concern: Sorsby is so early in his recovery from a gambling addiction that nobody can really know yet if it’ll stick. That’s not a baseless objection. That’s a real organizational risk, and Cabot has noted general manager Andrew Berry will ultimately make the call regardless of what Monken prefers.

But not everyone covering this is on the same page. ESPN’s Ben Solak floated the Browns as a logical fit before Cabot pushed back on the idea. Paul Finebaum has publicly pushed the Browns to make this move. And Heavy.com’s Sean Deveney laid out almost exactly the argument I’d make myself: Cleveland has 11 picks in the 2027 draft, including two first-rounders, so sacrificing a single second-round pick for a player some evaluators view as having first-round talent is about as low-risk as these swings get, especially for a team this desperate at the position.

So you’ve got local reporting suggesting Cleveland will likely pass, and national voices arguing they’d be foolish not to at least seriously consider it. I land firmly on the side of the national voices here, and I think the local hesitation, while understandable, is overly cautious for a franchise that has absolutely no business being cautious about quarterback swings right now.

And that’s really the point I keep coming back to. This is the same organization that guaranteed Deshaun Watson $230 million despite real off-field concerns that existed before that deal was ever signed. This is the same organization that drafted Johnny Manziel in the first round, a player whose off-field red flags were arguably just as loud as his college tape, and watched that pick implode almost immediately. If Cleveland was willing to take on that level of risk, at that level of financial and draft-capital commitment, then suddenly getting cold feet over a much smaller bet on Sorsby doesn’t track for me. A second or third-round pick is a fraction of the cost of either of those previous gambles, with arguably a higher upside than what either of those swings actually delivered.

I won’t pretend the legal and personal side of this isn’t a real concern. A gambling disorder that led to 9,000 bets, including wagering on his own team as a teenager, is a serious red flag, and I understand why some people don’t want anything to do with it. I’m not saying ignore that. I’m saying the Browns, of all teams, are in about as low-risk a position as you can be in to find out if the talent outweighs the baggage, and they’ve already proven, for better or worse, that they’re willing to take on far bigger risks than this one when they believed the upside was worth it.

Here’s where I land on the actual price tag, though, because I don’t think the Browns should go anywhere near a second-round bid for him. A third-round pick is my ceiling, and there’s a real strategic reason for that beyond just being cheap. If this Sorsby swing doesn’t pan out, and Sanders and Gabriel also fail to prove themselves this season, Cleveland is going to want every available resource pointed at next year’s draft instead.

The 2027 quarterback class is being talked about as one of the best in years, headlined by Arch Manning and Dante Moore, with names like Julian Sayin and LaNorris Sellers also drawing real first-round buzz. If the Browns spend a second-rounder on Sorsby and still need a quarterback next April, that’s a real chip gone from a draft where it could matter a lot more. Spend a third instead, and Cleveland still walks into that draft with two first-round picks and a second-rounder to find their guy if this whole experiment falls apart.

There’s also the suspension question hanging over all of this, and I think it actually works in the Browns’ favor if you look at it the right way. Because of the Terrelle Pryor precedent from 2011, where the NFL applied his existing college suspension to the start of his pro career, there’s a real chance Sorsby opens his NFL career sitting out games. For a team with no real quarterback competition to speak of, that’s almost a feature, not a bug. Let him sit, let him learn the offense, let the suspension play out while he’s not even competing for snaps that matter yet. By the time he’s eligible to actually play, the Browns will have a much clearer picture of whether Sanders or Gabriel has separated themselves, and Sorsby becomes pure upside sitting in reserve rather than a guy thrown into the fire immediately.

If it doesn’t work out, the Browns are out a future third-round pick, a fraction of what they’ve already lost chasing far bigger, far riskier swings at this exact position, and they’d still be fully loaded to go get one of next year’s blue-chip arms. If it does work out, they’ve got a big, athletic, productive dual-threat quarterback who fell into their lap a year early because of off-field issues rather than a lack of talent. Given where this organization currently sits at the position, and given what they’ve already proven they’re willing to risk, that’s a bet I’d take every single time, as long as the price is right.