Cleveland Browns: Where should DeShone Kizer go from here?

Hue Jackson has completely butchered the quarterback situation with the Cleveland Browns and DeShone Kizer, but it’s not too late to fix it.

Rookie quarterback DeShone Kizer has struggled in the preseason and through a quarter of the regular season. It finally came to a head on Sunday against the New York Jets when Cleveland Browns head coach Hue Jackson finally decided to bench Kizer for Kevin Hogan in the second half. Jackson has handled Kizer with all of the grace of a ham-fisted pianist, but the question now is where do the Browns go with Kizer from here?

Kizer should still be in college. He made a poor decision by choosing Notre Dame and Brian Kelly in the first place (although Notre Dame is a fantastic school, but Brian Kelly is Brian Kelly), then followed that up by making it even worse and declaring for the NFL when he wasn’t anywhere near ready. Kelly said of Kizer that he wasn’t ready for the NFL and to this point, has done nothing but validated that opinion, even if it was uncouth of Kelly to say it publicly.

The Browns knew that and picked Kizer anyway. Fine. I wouldn’t have done it, but given the sheer number of draft assets at their disposal and being unable to secure their preferred options in Mitch Trubisky or Patrick Mahomes, I understand the move.

But if you’re going to pick Kizer, you have to understand what you’re getting. Be it hubris or a misevaluation, Hue Jackson decided that, despite obvious struggles in preseason and training camp, to go ahead and start Kizer. Never mind the fact that Kizer was a mediocre quarterback in college. Disregard the fact that he reads defenses and makes decisions slowly, holds the ball too long and, while having an impressive arm, has inconsistent accuracy. He’ll go out there and miraculously get better.

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The plan at quarterback has been nothing short of amateurish so far this season. They cut Josh McCown, to whom they just lost, cut Brock Osweiler and then went ahead and played Kizer over a more prepared Kevin Hogan and even Cody Kessler. None of these quarterbacks is the answer, but they were more prepared for the here and now, which demonstrates just how badly Jackson mishandled the situation.

None of this is Kizer’s fault. He did what he’s supposed to do. Worked hard, improved his footwork a little bit and when the coach told him to go in the game, he went in and did the best he could. It just shouldn’t be remotely surprising that a kid who struggled to decipher the defenses of Army and Stanford would then have a difficult time with the New York Jets and Baltimore Ravens with almost no time in between to improve.

Five games into the season, the Browns are 0-5 and instead of talking Kizer’s development, sitting and learning, gaining more confidence in the playbook, the question is whether Kizer even has a future in Cleveland. The only saving grace is that Kizer isn’t actually injured.

Kizer isn’t done in Cleveland, but at least for the time being, he clearly doesn’t belong on an NFL field. It’s not benefiting Kizer at this point and it’s holding the rest of the organization back.

The Browns should do now what they should’ve done from the start; let Kizer sit and learn. He has so much to improve upon in terms of his mechanics and footwork to improve his accuracy. Kizer has to master the playbook instead of trying to feel his way through it as he’s playing. And he also has to have some clue of what he’s looking at in terms of reading the defenses, making the proper checks at the line and putting the team in the best possible situation to succeed.

(Photo by Jason Miller /Getty Images) /

Kizer struggling and an extremely young roster that has a lot of bright spots is forced to struggle along with him, forced to live with his game losing mistakes. Much is made of Kizer’s confidence and what benching him could mean. The bigger concern is the rest of the team’s confidence in Kizer and that bleeding over into their play. In essence, they lose before they even step on the field because they don’t think they can win with him at the helm.

The job of the quarterback is to make the players around him better. Right now, Kizer is having the opposite effect. Everyone around him looks worse. With Hogan in the game, the Browns suddenly looked they had some functional weapons. Receivers made plays. And the players aren’t stupid. They can see the difference.

For the media and a fanbase so obsessed with minicamps, training camp and anything else where they can get the smallest glimpse of players (I do it too), it’s amazing how the same thing, practice, that enabled them to make grand pronouncements of Kizer’s readiness become completely irrelevant once the season starts. They still practice, but without a camera there filming it, it no longer seems to count. They still have meetings, they still watch film and they still work on their own, but none of it matters unless people can see it.

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The good news is that nothing with Kizer is a permanent problem. Yet. And the biggest thing going for Kizer is his age. He doesn’t turn 22 years old until January. If Kizer disappeared from public view for two seasons and did nothing but hone his craft, he’d still be just 24 years old with what could be a long, productive career in front of him.

Kizer has a ton of work to do and he doesn’t need to do it while grown men are trying to take his head off. Look no further than Kevin Hogan, who threw 26 passes in the 2016 season. And none of them were very good. He’s improved quite a bit over the past year, despite the notable handicap of not playing every week.

A better comparison specifically for Kizer might be Jacoby Brissett. The Indianapolis Colts quarterback played a couple games as a rookie for the New England Patriots with Tom Brady and Jimmy Garoppolo both unavailable. The offense was extremely simplified and he did okay, but they wanted him to sit and develop. The rest of the season, he did.

The Colts traded for Brissett with Andrew Luck’s lengthy recovery from shoulder surgery and while Brissett isn’t a great quarterback, he’s improved immensely from being a rookie. He’s now in a position where playing is going to benefit him.

Kizer could do the same thing and this could be a good model for Kizer to follow. The transition from draft process to NFL training camp is an incredibly difficult one for any rookie, let alone a rookie quarterback. Rather than going from the draft almost right out onto the field this year, Kizer will have close to five months off, much of which he can use to just work on becoming a better quarterback.

Instead of working on a 40-yard dash or throwing to guys he’ll never see again, he can be working on mastering an offense he’s already in and throw to receivers he’ll have in training camp and next season. He can watch tape, both his own and other quarterbacks, be it on his team or anyone else.

So much of what Kizer needs to do is speeding up his internal clock and just doing a better job of reading defenses. Those are issues that can be worked on both in the film room and practice field. He doesn’t need to drag an entire organization down while he may or may not improve at it each week of the season.

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Meanwhile, he can really work to ingrain the improved footwork he flashes at times and make it instinctive. So the next time Kizer takes the field against a live defense (hopefully next year in the preseason) he’s not thinking about his mechanics or where a receivers are going to be going on a certain play. Instead, he’s focused entirely on what the defense is doing and executes the play while being more accurate.

Hue Jackson has mangled the quarterback situation to this point. Unfortunately, the Cleveland Browns find themselves in an 0-5 hole as a result, but it’s not too late to correct the problem both for Kizer and the team as a whole. Kizer has gotten four and a half games of experience and not been injured, but let him sit, let him develop as he should have all along. He can be a productive quarterback in the NFL, but Jackson has to do something he hasn’t done so far in Kizer’s young career; put him in position to succeed.

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