The Cleveland Browns might have a sliver of hope for the 2025 NFL Season if they are able to pull off the most unlikely quarterback trade.
The Browns are a dumpster fire, and that honestly might be offensive to actual dumpster fires. Their Deshaun Watson trade a few years ago seemed like a great idea at the time, but it has since turned into the worst trade in the history of pro sports.
And it's thrown the Browns down into a never-ending abyss of dysfunction. In the 2025 NFL Draft, the Browns drafted Shedeur Sanders and Dillon Gabriel, and they also signed Joe Flacco and traded for Kenny Pickett to field one of the more interesting QB rooms in the NFL.
It's clear that the team does not have a path to winning in 2025, but could they pull off this unlikely QB trade and perhaps vault back into competency?
Can (and should) the Browns trade for Kirk Cousins?
If Kirk Cousins wants to start football games in the 2025 NFL Season, it's not going to be with his current team, the Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons have handed things over to second-year passer Michael Penix Jr, who saw limited action in 2024.
The big thing that sticks out with Cousins and the Browns is that the QB and current Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski did overlap for a bit when both of them were with the Minnesota Vikings, so there is notable familiarity.
But if the Browns were to pull off this unlikely trade, they would likely have to part with one of their current QBs and perhaps get their room down to three players before the 2025 NFL Season begins. If the Browns did trade for Kirk Cousins, both Joe Flacco and Kenny Pickett would kind of be redundant, so Cleveland would have to figure out what to do with both passers.
Cleveland did acquire a first-round pick from the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 2026 NFL Draft, so some have speculated that they plan on making a huge push for a QB in next year's draft. They do currently have two first-rounders and could make a strong offer to trade up. We could unpack this a bit more and say that the Browns really, deep down, don't want to be all that competitive in 2025 to boost their own first-round pick.
So a potential trade for Kirk Cousins might not make sense, right? That could be the case, but if Kevin Stefanski and Andrew Berry are needing to field a competent team in 2025, the only path for that might be to swing a trade for the current Falcons signal-caller.