The NFL draft is the ultimate IQ test for teams

The NFL affords losing franchises the opportunity to rebound quickly, thanks to free agency, the machinations of schedule-making, and most of all, the NFL draft. No fan base should have to suffer for more than a season or two; it’s the league’s most endearing quality.

The only catch is that a team has to be smart enough not to screw up the draft, which is harder than it should be.

A shared vision for what the front office wants a team to be and a gaggle of extra picks is the starting point for rebuilding a team, but it isn’t enough to turn a moribund franchise into a perennial contender.

This will be the fifth time that the Browns have had a pair of first-round picks. In the past that’s netted them franchise cornerstones like Trent Richardson, Brandon Weeden, and Johnny Manziel. You can’t paper over incompetence with more picks.

Without pulling up its Wikipedia page, I couldn’t tell you anything that happened in the year 2010 (the EU bailed out the Irish economy, I think). All I remember clearly from that year is that things were finally looking up for the St. Louis Rams.

That was the year they settled on a franchise quarterback, taking Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford with the first overall pick in the NFL draft, a pick earned thanks to a 1-15 effort the year before. The Rams already had their left tackle of the future, Baylor’s Jason Smith, whom they picked at No. 2 in 2009. Mix in a handful of up-and-coming defensive stars, and you could finally see better days ahead for the most overlooked franchise in all of professional sports.

But here’s a simple truth about life that you’ll do well to remember — whenever it looks like everything’s coming up Milhouse, some defensive end slides past Jason Smith and crushes that hope.

I hadn’t given up completely on the Rams in 2012, when the team hired head coach Jeff Fisher and his hand-picked general manager. They still had Bradford, who was OK enough to allow them to send the second overall pick to Washington in exchange for a haul of draft picks that should have been enough to pull the team out of perpetual rebuild mode and into contention.

Guided by Fisher’s 7-9 hubris, the Rams failed the draft IQ test by making more dumb picks.

In 2013, they used two first-round picks on a glorified role player, Tavon Austin, and an average outside linebacker, Alec Ogletree. A year later, they landed a bona-fide defensive superstar in Aaron Donald, but offset that by using the second overall pick on yet another left tackle draft bust, Greg Robinson, missing yet another opportunity to build a viable offensive line.

They committed the cardinal sin of overvaluing running backs. Five draft picks in four years were used on running backs, including three picks from the top 75 selections.

The result? Year and after year of 7-9 bullshit. They were good enough for just long enough to fool people into thinking they’d be winners the next year, as those draft picks developed and their next bunch of draft picks filled the holes.

In one last desperate attempt to right the ship, the Rams traded away a big part of their future for the No. 1 pick in 2016 and drafted Cal quarterback Jared Goff. This in spite of the fact that air raid quarterbacks have a dismal track record in the NFL and plenty research to suggest that trading up for Goff just wasn’t worth it.

(By the way, the outlook for this year’s quarterback class says they’re even more of a gamble.)

But they’re STILL rebuilding. The NFL draft is a franchise’s ultimate IQ test; the Rams failed miserably. They weren’t the first team to do so, and they won’t be the last.

It’s easy to see the results of a team failing that test. I’m cynical. I assume a team is going to screw it up until I’m proven wrong. But we’re not here to wallow in my own wrecked fandom — we’re here to fairly judge the work all 32 teams do in the draft.

To do that, we have to establish a minimal set of standards, a cheat sheet for how to pass this test.

Like any test, a team can prepare itself for this one. It starts with knowing how a player will fit with your team.

Loading up on young talent is the NFL’s version of Moneyball. The people who brought that revolution to baseball are now in Cleveland to keep the Browns from blowing it.

That’s the bullet-point version of it. I promised a cheat sheet, not the answer key (though we did already take a stab at what each team needs to do to ace or flunk the draft).

We won’t fully grasp the impact of this year’s draft for a couple seasons. But by the time we find out who Mr. Irrelevant is on Saturday evening, we’ll have a good sense of how each team did on its franchise version of the Wonderlic.