Cleveland Browns: 5 Players to sign in second wave of free agency

1. Jadeveon Clowney, EDGE

The biggest fish left in the sea of free agency, it’s both shocking and completely explicable why Jadeveon Clowney remains available roughly a month since the legal tampering got underway. For as athletically gifted and dominant as the No. 1 overall pick from the 2014 NFL Draft can be, he’s also had his share of concerns in his career.

Clowney is coming off a relatively unproductive single season with Seattle in which he registered only 3.0 sacks in 13 games for the Seahawks. Meanwhile, he’s had three knee surgeries in six NFL seasons. Not only does that make him an injury concern but the fact that teams can’t check him out medically during the COVID-19 outbreak complicates things further.

While that may all be true, Clowney has flashed great potential and you can make the argument that he’ll never have been a part of a line as talented as the Browns’. Furthermore, the fact that he remains on the market at this point means that the market for the edge rusher has softened and that Cleveland could potentially land him for several million dollars less per year than what Clowney was initially asking.

Should the Browns actually go after Clowney — more so than with Griffen — Cleveland would likely cut Olivier Vernon. But you could make the argument that the upside of Clowney and Garrett being paired together on the edge is too great to pass up and could be well worth making that type of big swing.