How Have The Cleveland Browns Done When Drafting Receivers?

Barring a trade sometime between now and the NFL draft, the Cleveland Browns will have the 13^th pick in the first round. For now, the consensus seems to be that the Browns will use that first pick on a wide receiver.

Drafting wide receivers has not been a strength of the Browns through the years. Frankly, except for the last couple of years, drafting in general has not been an organizational strength, and the wide receiver position may be Exhibit A.

In the Super Bowl era (1967 to the present), the Browns have drafted 70 wide receivers. Only two of them became Pro Bowl selections: Braylon Edwards in 2007 and Webster Slaughter in 1989. That’s it.

(I’ve excluded Josh Gordon from this exercise because he was acquired by the Browns in the 2012 Supplemental Draft, which that year consisted of one player: Josh Gordon).

The two greatest wide receivers drafted by the Browns pre-dated the Super Bowl era. With their first pick, the fourth player taken overall, in the 1962 draft, the Browns selected Gary Collins, an underappreciated star from the days when the Browns were a perennial power. In that era wide receivers were called “flankers” and Collins wasted little time in establishing himself. In 1963, his second year in the league, Collins led the NFL with 13 touchdown receptions.

In 1964 he caught three touchdown passes in the Browns’ legendary 27-0 win over the Colts in the NFL championship game. In 1965 he led the NFL in punting, with an average of 46.6 yards per kick. That’s right, he was a wide receiver/punter. He was also a Pro Bowl selection in 1965 and 1966, and in 1969 he was named first team All-Pro.

With the 11^th pick in the first round of the 1964 draft, the Browns took the great Paul Warfield, out of Ohio State, and 19 years later he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

This concludes the roundup of the Browns’ triumphs when it comes to selecting wide receivers in the first round of the draft. In the Super Bowl era, the Browns have taken a wide receiver in the first round just five times. It’s a rather pedestrian group: Steve Holden (16^th overall in 1973), Willis Adams (20^th overall in 1979), Derrick Alexander (29^th overall in 1994), Edwards (third overall in 2005), and Corey Coleman (15^th overall in 2016).

In 2007, his Pro Bowl season, Edwards caught a career-high 80 passes, 16 for touchdowns, and his 1,289 receiving yards are the second-most in Browns history. But Edwards’ star quickly faded. He wore out his welcome in Cleveland and in 2009 the Browns traded him to Jets for a third-round pick.

Slaughter, the only other Pro Bowl receiver drafted by the Browns in the Super Bowl era, was a second-round pick in 1986, and had a much more substantial career with the Browns than Edwards. In his six years in Cleveland Slaughter caught 27 touchdown passes, including six in his Pro Bowl season of 1989, when he had 65 receptions, and his 1,236 receiving yards are still the third most in Browns’ history.

Coleman was a major first-round whiff in 2016 by the Browns’ burgeoning analytics department, which, in the runup to the draft, busied itself by trading players for draft picks. They arrived on draft day with a whopping 13 picks in the first five rounds. They used four of the 13 on wide receivers.

The first of that group was the lamentable Coleman, who the Browns made the first wide receiver selected in the draft when they took him with the 15^th overall pick. That was 22 picks before the Saints took Michael Thomas, 150 picks before the Chiefs took Tyreek Hill, and, parenthetically, 88 picks before the Cowboys took Dak Prescott. Coleman’s non-descript three-year, 27-game NFL career ended after the 2018 season.

The other three receivers selected by the Browns in the 2016 draft were Ricardo Lewis, a fourth-round pick who had a two-year career in the NFL, fifth rounder Jordan Payton, who had a four-game NFL career, and Rashard Higgins, who was more hit than miss. In his six years with the Browns (he’s still with the team) Higgins has 137 receptions for 1,890 yards and 12 touchdowns.

The Browns have had a handful of non-first-round picks who became decent wide receivers. The best of that bunch was Dave Logan (second round, 1976), who was one of the favorite targets of quarterback Brian Sipe on coach Sam Rutigliano’s “Cardiac Kids” teams from the late 70s to the early 80’s. In his eight years with the Browns Logan caught 262 passes, 24 for touchdowns.

Kevin Johnson, taken in the second round in 1999, played five-years with the Browns and caught 315 passes, 23 for touchdowns. The following year, 2000, Dennis Northcutt was selected by Cleveland in the second round, and in seven years with the Browns he caught 276 balls and scored 11 touchdowns.

Brian Brennan, a fourth-round pick in 1984 had a solid career and, his 315 receptions in his eight years with Cleveland is tied with Johnson for sixth place on the Browns’ all-time list.

Overall, however, a scorecard of just two Pro Bowl seasons out of 70 wide receivers drafted in the last 54 years helps to partially explain why, in the Super Bowl era, the Browns have been wallflowers.