The Cleveland Browns selected Baker Mayfield at No. 1 overall in last week’s NFL Draft. While Browns general manager John Dorsey reportedly knew he wanted Mayfield as his first pick a month out from the draft, the rest of his front office apparently had some strong opinions on other quarterbacks as well.
A Browns exec says he doesn’t like Josh Rosen because of, uh, a volleyball coach?
Welp.
Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images
Apparently to find out more about Josh Rosen, who went to Arizona at No. 10 overall, Cleveland vice president of player personnel Alonzo Highsmith asked the UCLA women’s volleyball coach about him. This didn’t exactly go over well:
“I was at an airport,” he said. “UCLA’s volleyball team was in front of me. You heard so much about Rosen. He’s this or that. We all know how people talk.
“So I asked one of the volleyball coaches, ‘What’s Rosen like?’ He said, ‘Aaaaa, you should probably ask his girlfriend. She’s one of the players. She’s over there.’
“I’m like, ‘All right coach. That’s good enough.’
“I don’t know what all this means, but there was something about him that bothered me.”
OK, a couple initial thoughts here:
- I’m assuming Highsmith was hoping this volleyball coach would be able to tell him about Rosen, which is why he was thrown off when he told him to ask his girlfriend.
- Also, if somebody asked him that and he had an actual authority on the subject nearby, he’d probably defer too without giving it much thought.
- Why in the world would he assume a women’s volleyball coach could give adequate insight? It’s not like he played for this coach ever.
- Maybe the lesson here is don’t date volleyball players? (I’m totally kidding, please don’t hurt me, tall volleyball players.)
On Wednesday, Rosen was on the Rich Eisen Show and laughed off Highsmith’s comments:
“I thought it was interesting he didn’t talk to my girlfriend. Maybe he was scared of someone actually saying something good about me. I don’t know, I just thought it was funny.
“It’s amazing you can pull a red flag from something with literally zero information. Like he literally pulled absolutely no information from this encounter and it managed to be a red flag.”
The other thing to keep in mind here is Highsmith, while he’s high up in the organization, isn’t Dorsey, so I’d take what he says with a grain of salt.
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