Can Cody Kessler Become a Legitimate NFL Starter with the Cleveland Browns?

The Cleveland Browns are facing an identity crisis at quarterback. Or just a crisis. Take your pick.

I’ll optimistically go with the first form of crisis there, and please note that lingering questions with the draft still fresh might not be such an awful thing. Because at this point, there are no bad ideas at quarterback for a team that hasn’t sniffed playoff football since 2002.

Let’s not dwell on the past, though, because these are the new Browns. Yes, the new Browns, a team with analytics as its sacred guiding light, the front office presence of a man known for his role in a baseball revolution, quarterback whisperer Hue Jackson as the new head coach and… Cody Kessler?

How much you want to believe Kessler has a legitimate shot at being the Browns’ Week 1 starting quarterback and, more importantly, their long-term pivot beyond that depends on how much you believe anything here in early May.

We’re only a few days removed from the moment when Cleveland surprisingly made Kessler, the former USC standout, their third-round pick. And we’re even less time removed from when Browns head of football operations Sashi Brown took to the podium for a post-draft press conference, then hauled out his industrial-sized air pump to overinflate Kessler’s tires.

“I do think Cody is a guy that I would not want to sleep on at all if I wanted to be the starting quarterback of the Browns,” he said, per Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Then he named-dropped Robert Griffin III, the discarded former Offensive Rookie of the Year (2012) who was signed by the Browns to a two-year deal worth $15 million, with $6.8 million guaranteed. That’s not starter money, though it’s still a whole lot of NFL couch change to be handing a potential backup quarterback.

But in these early days of the league’s silly season, it seems Kessler has a legitimate shot to win the position battle and hand Griffin that title.

“Robert has four years of NFL experience, is tremendously athletic and serious about becoming a starting quarterback in this league,” Brown added. “There’s no reason he can’t, but this is going to be a competition.”

If a frantic search for an offensive identity takes shape in Cleveland later this summer, we can look back at that comment as the springboard.

It’s one thing to encourage competition. It’s another to do it with a quarterback who avoided joining this group by a mere five draft slots, as Football Perspective’s Chase Stuart noted:

70 QBs drafted in 4th round from 1967-2015. Just four – Garrard, Ferragamo, Hipple, and Cousins – had 40+ PTDs for team that drafted them.

— Football Perspective (@fbgchase) May 2, 2016

Had Kessler even slid to the beginning of Day 3, that still would have surprised most talent evaluators. He has the fundamental tools to be effective, and maybe enough of them to be an NFL starter one day. Just not right now, and he certainly can’t be the kind of starter the Browns need.

Draft analyst Rob Rang of CBSSports.com—who wrote that Kessler “simply lacks ideal size and arm strength to fit in most NFL offenses”—projected the 6’1” and 220-pound quarterback to be either a seventh-round pick or an undrafted free agent. Then there’s NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein, who was a little more generous with his predraft prediction of a fifth- or sixth-round pick while noting that the 22-year-old “doesn’t show poise or the arm strength for deep routes.”

Those assessments don’t echo Brown’s stance that Kessler is worthy of starting consideration immediately. But there’s another important opinion at play here from a man who knows something about maximizing quarterback strengths and making weaknesses fade away.

The floor is yours then, Hue Jackson. Tell us why Kessler appealed to your sharpened quarterback eye, as captured by the Associated Press’ Hayden Grove:

Hue Jackson on why fans and media should trust his judgement when it comes to QB …

continue reading in source www.bleacherreport.com