The Cleveland Browns made a clear and stunning announcement concerning…..

“Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins” – Moneyball

Quite often in the NFL people view players through either a box score, how well they do in fantasy football, or how that player makes them emotionally feel. The issue is to be a serial winner in the NFL you need to be cold, hard, and calculated. If you have Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes at quarterback then you can afford to make stupid decisions and both teams have on multiple occasions. The Cleveland Browns aren’t in that luxury position. Jimmy Haslam is throwing money at the team like the league has never seen before outspending the league average at $50.5m a year over the last three years. While this is entirely sustainable as broken down here it is about maximizing the return on this money.

So in the spirit of this let us look at the seven players on the team who have over $3m of non-guaranteed salary on their 2024 contract and see what the team should do with them. We aren’t going to be getting into players with fully guaranteed salary here as this involves a trade and those aren’t very likely or usually end up with the team moving off of them eating a large part of that guaranteed money to facilitate a deal.

We are focused on cash in this piece rather than salary cap number because cash is king, it is what the team is paying that player to play for them this season. If a player has no guaranteed cash then they can be cut without a negative impact to the team. Andrew Berry has more than enough cap flexibility, I have written here for OBR VIP subscribers how he can create $84,889,974 of cap space with restructures if they need to.