Browns beware the bust factor in draft

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton is filled with the busts of the game’s greatest players, their images preserved in bronze.

Up the road in Cleveland, there are other busts.

Cincinnati’s had a few of the latter kind, too. So have Detroit, Buffalo, Oakland, Kansas City and other NFL cities. They’re just about everywhere.

JaMarcus Russell, the No. 1 overall pick in 2007, was supposed to pull the Oakland Raiders out of their black hole. Ryan Leaf, who some thought should have been taken ahead of Peyton Manning in the 1998 draft, was selected with the No. 2 pick, flamed out in San Diego and was recently arrested twice in four days on accusations of burglary to steal prescription painkillers.

Akili Smith. Charles Rogers. Courtney Brown. Joey Harrington. Brian Bosworth. Peter Warrick. Mike Williams. Brady Quinn. Tony Mandarich.

On Thursday night, teams will begin selecting players they’ve watched for hours on film. Scouts and front-office members have spent months pouring over statistics, assessing 40-yard-dash times and vertical leaps, reviewing interviews and Wonderlic tests and doing background checks on these potential future employees.

The goal is to get it right and pick a quality player of high character who can help you win.

Get it wrong, and the consequences can be catastrophic for an organization.

“Everybody wants the 10-year Pro Bowler, which is fine, but I’ll take the two-year Pro Bowler rather than a bust,” said Browns general manager Tom Heckert, who has 13 picks at his disposal this year. “You don’t want a bust, you can’t have a bust. That’s what you are trying to avoid.”

Cleveland has had seven picks in the Top 10 of the draft since its 1999 rebirth. The Browns picked first in 1999 (Tim Couch) and 2000 (Brown), they had the No. 3 selection in 2001 (Gerard Warren), 2005 (Braylon Edwards), and 2007 (Joe Thomas), the No. 6 in 2004 (Kellen Winslow) and the No. 7 (Joe Haden) in 2010.

After taking Thomas, the Browns traded their ‘08 first-round pick to move back into the first round and select Quinn, the Notre Dame star who left all his Irish luck in college. Tabbed as the future, he played in 14 games, was traded in 2010 to Denver and is now with Kansas City.

This year, a team that has made the playoffs just once in 13 years and posted 10 seasons with at least 10 losses in that span, will pick at No. 4 and No. 22 in the first round.

Besides Thomas, who has made five straight Pro Bowls, Cleveland’s poor track record on top picks is perhaps the biggest reason the Browns are 68-140 in their orange-helmeted incarnation.

It’s somewhat unfair to label Couch a bust since he had no talent around him, and he remains the only QB to get Cleveland to the playoffs, though he missed the game in Pittsburgh with a broken leg. Brown, too, was the victim of misfortune as injuries sabotaged and shortened the pass rusher’s career.

But the Browns’ selection of Warren, a journeyman, over Richard Seymour — Cleveland coach Butch Davis insisted on Warren — and ahead of LaDainian Tomlinson altered Cleveland’s course for years.

Heckert can’t afford any errors. He needs to find playmakers for an offense that scored just 218 points last season.

“There’s a lot of pressure from media, fans, people in your building, scouts and it’s my job to say, ‘Wait a minute. It’s not the right thing to do,”’ he said. “That is the hardest thing to convey to the fans. It’s not like we don’t want those guys, we want them just as bad as they do, but we don’t want to make a mistake doing it. There is way more mistakes made than great players picked.

“We just try to do the right thing.”