Imagine you’re DeShone Kizer.
You weren’t seen as good enough to be drafted in the first round. Your consolation prize was that the Cleveland Browns might have landed a steal selecting you in Round 2, in the eyes of some draftniks around the Internet’s water cooler.
You’ve already been benched three times this year, despite the fact that your head coach, Hue Jackson, pledged to stick with you through thick and thin before the season began.
Then your team’s coaching staff reportedly gets livid it didn’t land one quarterback in a trade. After that your team attempts a trade-deadline move to make a play for another one. The trade blows up in the team’s face, and you’re still there once again the de facto option because there’s nobody else.
Imagine you’ve been through all that. Now tell me if you believe a word of what’s coming next.
“My job as a head coach is to always push for better talent on this football team,” Jackson, who coached McCarron from 2014-15 as the offensive coordinator of the Bengals, said Friday, per Nate Ulrich of Ohio.com. “I don’t care what position it is, especially being in that position.
“You’re talking about a young player in the National Football League who has had [seven] starts, compared to other players who have either played for me or players that I have seen that have done it week in and week out. I don’t think that’s a knock on DeShone.
“My job is to help build this football team and build the future of this team. I still believe [Kizer] is going to be in the future of this team. But in the meantime, if there is a way for us to get better — I know everybody keeps talking about winning, which is very important to me, very important in that locker room and very important to our fans — then it’s only fair to be always looking to become better.”
Now, I’m not suggesting that Jackson is lying about any of this. He very well may still feel Kizer is going to be the franchise quarterback in the long term for the Cleveland Browns.
But if you’re Kizer, you have to be questioning whether you’re being told the truth or whether you’re being left out in the cold. It’s not like the Browns have a history of treating their players very well, or of having any competency whatsoever when it comes to the quarterback position.
At the very least, what the Browns have done to this rookie quarterback is unconscionable. This type of back and forth, up and down treatment is exactly how you break a young quarterback.
Hopefully, Kaizer is made out of stronger stuff than some other quarterbacks who have been so casually discarded out the back door of the Factory of Sadness.