Here comes the draft...

This Saturday is, and for 10 years has been, the Cleveland Browns' version of the Super Bowl. It's the NFL draft. Each year, the good people of Cleveland pray that the guy the genius of the month selects will put an end to decades of futility. It's never happened. Rather than the Super Bowl, the draft has been more like Waterloo for the Browns. In my lifetime, the Browns have never, never been good drafting players. Never.

Sure, they've grabbed a few mediocrities and role players who've become fan favorites, but they've never drafted a true stud (with perhaps the exceptions of Ozzie Newsome, Clay Matthews and Joe Thomas). The saying is that victory is the son of many fathers, but defeat is an orphan. In the case of the Browns, it's the other way around. Disaster and incompetence had numerous architects and co-conspirators. The faces and titles have changed over the years, but the inability to select talent never has. Even during the blessed days of the Kardiac Kids and Bernie, Bernie and the Dawgs, the Browns won in spite of their drafts, not because of them.

So, what do we do with 45 years of consistent failure in preparing for this Saturday's draft? Perhaps, as the French philosophes suggested, we should ignore the past and strive for the perfectibility of man. That sounds pretty sweet, but really, Kokinis needs to pull his head out of his ass, quit jacking around with the league-wide smoke screen about the fifth pick, and take a stud.

That's easy.