Cleveland Browns/Matt Starkey

The Cleveland Browns signing of Jadeveon Clowney offers an opportunity not only to  assess the potential value of the No. 1 choice from the 2014 NFL Draft choice but also to admire the team’s ability to raise expectations while simultaneously lowering them.

This drives the fans wild.

To perform this super slick sleight of hand, the Browns needed the perfect accomplice for their magician’s magic—the media. Not the entire media, mind you, but just the right sidekick, one with a high profile and significant respect. It’s an old but still useful trick. The magician cannot evoke oohs and aahs without an assistant—most often not a bald sports columnist but an attractive person of the female persuasion—whom he saws in half with nary a squeal.

Though the ruse pays off for all concerned—team, media insider, audience—it is nevertheless the experienced cynic’s sworn duty to squeal on the parties involved.

Consider this The Big Squeal.

In “A Look Inside the Decision to Sign Clowney,” the long-in-the-making deal between Clowney and the Browns, represented by General Manager Andrew Berry, Cleveland.com’s Terry Pluto takes us where lesser media dare not trod. His commentary, as the headline indicates, does not require sourcing because everyone knows that Pluto is Mr. Insider in the Browns market. He plays fair, though, and warns his readers that what’s inside about this deal is merely “what I’m hearing.” He never says from whom he has learned what he has learned what is the Browns’ reasoning, not his own. We’ll have to wait for another day for his out-on-the-limb assessment.

Usually the Browns (and many other NFL teams) do not proffer the inside story to media that cover the team on a daily basis if they can get more bang from the national media. Thing is, the national media did not seem to be falling all over themselves for this story.

In any case, A Look Inside the Decision immediately lowers expectations—“Don’t look at [Clowney] as the No. 1 pick in the draft” and “Don’t look at him as a superstar”—before coming to the [Browns’] bottom line: “The Browns don’t say this, but you can view the Clowney signing as a low-risk gamble with a possible high payoff.”

The Browns did not have to say this because their trusty sidekick said it for them. If someone dusts this information for fingerprints, however, they’d be orange and brown. No crime there. Lots of teams go incognito. Hell, the Browns did for years. And before the New Orleans Saints got good—with recently retired quarterback Drew Brees—the teams’ fans wore paper bags over their heads, with eye holes to see the carnage.

Even Clowney, during his post-signing Zoom call, acknowledged that when Berry tried to sign him last year as a free agent he took a pass rather than rush passers for them. The difference now: “They’re winning.” But, the Browns still have something to prove, unlike Clowney himself: “I’m here to prove I can still dominate this league.”

When he emerged from the University of South Carolina, Clowney played as if a man among boys. He was frighteningly great. With the exception of his early most healthy NFL years when he and J.J. Watt held down opposite ends of the Houston defensive line, Clowney has been, as the analytics website Pro Football Focus points out, “a good, not great, pass rusher. He does his best work in the run game.”

He missed almost half of the 2020 season after suffering a meniscus injury. He did not have a single sack. The Browns hope, as they had with Olivier Vernon, that teaming Clowney with Myles Garrett, whom they drafted No. 1 in 2017, that they will create a synergy similar to Watt and Clowney with the Texans. Watt, however, the three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, provided the fire and steam that drove that wagon.

Clowney agreed to a one-year, prove-it deal for a reported $8 million and incentives  could lift his salary to $10 million and possibly the Browns to the Super Bowl, should he meet them. It may be that everyone has expected too much of Clowney, particularly in light of five knee surgeries and one core muscle surgery (2020). Berry, who is proving to be a shrewd judge of talent, said he thinks that Clowney is “going to add an element of ruggedness along our defensive line”—if he holds up. Berry does know that the three-time Pro Bowler makes the line more versatile, what with his ability to play inside or out.

What everyone should want to see as soon as the team can begin its voluntary off-season program is a player who is physically and mentally present and into not only proving himself but also setting an example, as Garrett and quarterback Baker Mayfield do as the leaders of the offense and defense, respectively. It is one thing to have the potential for greatness and another to show up and work at it even when not required contractually to do so. If this team is going to fulfill the promise that Clowney says he can see in it and that brought him to it, the team building begins now.

Andrew Berry, in his time running the front office, has, as longtime Browns writer Tony Grossi notes on his The Land on Demand Blog, been relentlessly aggressive in building up the offense around Mayfield and now the defense in a way that will allow coordinator Joe Woods to deploy the alignment—a 4-2-5, which often features three safeties—he prefers. Grossi wrote that he asked Clowney about Berry’s relentless pursuit of him.

“He was relentless getting after me and trying to get me up here,” Clowney told Grossi, “and I am going to be relentless on that field for him.”

Relentlessness can be a two-way street with head-on collisions. So show up or shut up.