GMFB Monday — Cleveland’s three quarterbacks, the cut-down calendar, Rapoport on Denzel Ward, and a crown in August

SCHRAGER: Monday, the seventeenth of August. Twenty-seven days until a game counts, and everybody here has something this morning. Jamie has the cut-down calendar and Rapoport at twenty after. Kyle is giving a crown away in the second hour, in August, which he tells me is permitted. Manti has Jacksonville, because somebody at this table should be thinking about Jacksonville. I am starting in Cleveland and staying there a while, so get comfortable.

ERDAHL: You say a while, and then it is nine o’clock and I am doing the injury report over a break.

BRANDT: The crown is permitted. I looked it up. There is no rule.

TE’O: There is no rule because nobody has ever wanted to do it. Nobody has ever sat down in August and thought, what this needs is a trophy.

SCHRAGER: It needs a trophy. Manti, you are on the Jaguars at nine forty, do not let me forget. Cleveland first.

SCHRAGER: So here is where I have been all weekend. Cleveland is twenty-seven days out. Three quarterbacks, no starter. A defensive line that is Jared Verse and a lot of hope. And the man who runs all of it took a meeting in January about the scouting department and left it running the football operation. Wrong room. Wrong job. Right guy, apparently. No coaching tree. No mentor. No twenty years on somebody’s staff. And they still did it, and then they wrote a check for a player who was not going to be there. Biggest number anyone has ever eaten on one man. They ate it in a week.

SCHRAGER: Now, January twenty-ninth is the thing people who do not watch football know about this team, and it is the only thing they know. Kyle said his piece on this show in 2022, when the number on the screen was six games. Kyle, I am going to say your name and then be quiet.

BRANDT: I said what I said in 2022 and I have not moved an inch off it, and I am not going to sit here and act like the four years since were hard on me, because they were not. They were hard on other people. Here is what I have been hearing since January, and I hear it from smart people, people I like and have dinner with. They call it a distraction. That is the word they use. A distraction is a guard holding out. A distraction is somebody’s cousin tweeting at an offensive coordinator. This is not that. And every time it comes up somebody starts shrinking the number — it was thirty, well no, it was two dozen, well no, it was five. Do you understand what that is? Arguing about the number is the whole trick. In my opinion, and I have said it in this chair with this same face, he used a job that women wanted to be near to get them into rooms they could not walk out of. Small rooms. Door shut. In my opinion. And one set of owners traded for him and guaranteed him every dollar of it, and a different set of owners let him go in a week, and the argument we are having in August of 2026 is whether that was efficient. It makes me tired. It has made me tired for four years. What I want is for the forty guys in that locker room who never met him to stop being asked about him.

SCHRAGER: Conviction. Consistency. The same answer in a week when nobody is asking as in a week when everybody is. Kyle Brandt, ladies and gentlemen. Manti, come in here, because there is a piece of this I cannot do and you can.

TE’O: People say the locker room like it is one guy with one opinion. It is fifty-three men and a third of them are new every year. Some of them had to answer for that name at a cousin’s wedding. Some of them got drafted in April and read about it on a phone.

TE’O: The coach part is separate. I played for guys who yelled and guys who did not and it never came down to volume. What a veteran finds out in August is whether you tell him the truth on a Wednesday when it costs you something. Usually somebody learns that in a special teams meeting.

SCHRAGER: Jamie. You had two questions in the meeting this morning and I did not have an answer for either one.

ERDAHL: First one. Every board he ever published is still up. Timestamped. Anybody with a phone can grade him tonight, going back years. What is that like? Nobody has ever had that job.

SCHRAGER: I do not know, and I have asked people who should know. Closest I can get is this. Every man who has taken one of these jobs walked in with a version of himself that only he controlled. Twenty years on a staff, the game he won in Buffalo, the season in the box. Nobody could check any of it. This one shows up and the record is the record. It is all up there, some of it is bad, and he left it up. I do not know what that does to a person in the middle of November.

ERDAHL: Second one, then. What does he have to show you by Jacksonville for any of this to have been the right call?

SCHRAGER: Honestly, not much. Nobody wins anything on the thirteenth of September. I want the twelve calls they installed in July to be the twelve calls they run in the fourth quarter, and I want one of those three quarterbacks to look like he knows what the third read is. That is my whole list. And on the man — passion, smarts, emotional intelligence. That is real and I have watched every interview and everybody who has been in a room with him says the same thing. And look at who he hired. Rutenberg could have walked in February with every reason in the world, and Rutenberg STAYED. Dom Capers took that job at seventy-five years old. Switzer, Tarver, Banda, Warhop, Staley, Bajakian… That is a lot of experience. Jamie, injuries.

ERDAHL: Cut to fifty-three is a week from tomorrow, which makes this the last ordinary week of a lot of careers. Cleveland: Maliek Collins has not practiced since Wednesday and stays on PUP, and if he is still on it Tuesday he misses the first four. Mason Graham was out Friday and Saturday, back yesterday in a red jersey. Mike Hall was limited.

ERDAHL: Sanders, Gabriel and Green, split six practices running. Nobody has taken it, and the radio in that town gave Friday afternoon to the coach’s age.

BRANDT: You know who else was twenty-eight? Everybody, once.

TE’O: The split is what I would ask about. At some point a quarterback needs a week with the same five linemen in front of him, and there are not many Wednesdays left.

ERDAHL: Elsewhere: Green Bay put a tackle on IR with a designation to return, and the Titans released a veteran safety this morning who will be claimed by lunch.

SCHRAGER: He will be claimed by lunch. Somebody has already called his agent.

ERDAHL: Rap, good morning. Two things on Cleveland — start wherever you want.

RAPOPORT: Good morning. I will start with the quarterback, because that is the one everybody wants. My understanding is that the plan going into next week is not a plan to name anybody. They have gone three ways with the work since the twenty-eighth of July, and I am told the split does not change this week. Whether it survives the cut to fifty-three, I could not tell you, and I do not believe anybody in that building has been given a date. Second thing: Denzel Ward. Teams have called. Teams have been calling since March. Cleveland has not engaged, and the phrasing I got twice yesterday was that they are not looking to move him. November tenth is the deadline, and every front office I talk to has this team circled for it.

ERDAHL: Not looking to move him. Is that a football answer or is that a price answer?

RAPOPORT: Price. I think it is price. A second-round pick in October is a different conversation than a second-round pick on August seventeenth, and that is true of every team with a good corner on a big contract. What I would watch for is his snap count in September. If a healthy Denzel Ward is playing fifty snaps a game instead of sixty-five, that will tell you more than anything I can tell you.

SCHRAGER: Rap, thank you, we will see you tonight. He has been up since four and he sounds better than I do.

ERDAHL: Madden Trivia. No phones. Kyle buzzed early last week and we agreed it counted against him.

BRANDT: We did not agree. My hand moved on its own. Hands do that.

ERDAHL: Question. The Madden 12 cover went to a fan vote, thirty-two players, single elimination. Who won the bracket?

BRANDT: Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Locking it in, and I am right.

TE’O: That is Peyton Hillis. Browns running back, beat Michael Vick in the final, and Ohio voted every day for a month. My uncle voted. He did not own the game.

SCHRAGER: Peyton Hillis, and let the record show Manti did not take one second to think about it. Eleven hundred and seventy-seven yards in 2010 and a fan base that treated an internet poll like an election.

BRANDT: My nine-year-old plays with the throwback rosters and he asked me last week whether Peyton Hillis was a real person.

TE’O: My rookie card is in a drawer at my mother’s house. My niece found it in June and asked why I was dressed like that. I said it is a uniform. She said it looks like a costume.

ERDAHL: Second question is about a punter and I am saving it for tomorrow.

Break. Hour 2 opens at 9:00 with a highlight package from four camps and the Top 10.

ERDAHL: Camp Questions. Manti, Jacksonville. Cleveland is there on the thirteenth, one o’clock local, and it is going to be ninety-one degrees.

TE’O: Ninety-one in the shade and there is no shade on that sideline until the second half. That is a real thing for a road team. Coen is in year two, so Trevor Lawrence has had the same system two seasons running for the first time since he got there.

SCHRAGER: And Travis Hunter is still playing both ways for them, which nobody has solved and everybody has an opinion about.

TE’O: They have solved it for August. Nobody has solved it for Thanksgiving. If you are getting ready for that team you spend Tuesday on where he lines up, and Cleveland is spending Tuesday on a quarterback they have not named.

ERDAHL: Is a road opener in that heat a bad first assignment for a young quarterback, or is it the same as any other Sunday?

TE’O: It is worse, and it is not the noise. You stand on that sideline cooking for twenty minutes at a time and you still have to come back in and remember the checks.

SCHRAGER: Angry Runs. It is the seventeenth of August. He is doing it anyway.

BRANDT: There are no games. I understand that there are no games. I watched forty-one camp clips this weekend, which is a sentence about my life that I would like read back to me in a courtroom someday, and I found one. Cleveland put Thursday’s practice up on the team app. Goal line, live period, ones on ones. Quinshon Judkins takes it on the left hash and he does not bounce it and he does not dance. He puts his hat on a linebacker he eats lunch with and he moves him about a yard and a half into the end zone, in a helmet and shorts. NO PADS. There is one rule at this table and the rule is that anger does not require pads. Now here is the part I liked better than the run. He gets up and he does not celebrate, he does not look at the sideline. He hands the ball to the official, and at a practice the official is an intern holding a garbage can, and he jogs back to the huddle. He is twenty-two and he already knows somebody is filming. So the crown goes to Cleveland, Ohio, in August, in shorts, and I would like it noted that the crown has been in my bag since Thursday.

TE’O: The handing-it-to-the-intern part is what linemen notice. Nobody in that huddle says a word about it and all of them saw it.

ERDAHL: You brought a crown to work and nobody plays anybody for another month.

BRANDT: The crown lives in the bag. The bag comes to work.

SCHRAGER: Kurt Warner is with us. Hall of Famer, obviously. Nobody more generous with his time. Nobody better at explaining a read to somebody who never played it. And the perspective of a man who has been there and done that, all of it, the hard way. Jamie, he is yours.

ERDAHL: Kurt, they have three and they have not picked one, and it is twenty-seven days. If you are Cleveland, do you name somebody this week or leave it alone?

WARNER: You let it run, and I know that is the unpopular answer because everybody wants a name on a graphic. A young quarterback does not need a title right now. He needs snaps against a defense that is trying to humiliate him, and all three of them are getting those snaps today. The morning you name one, the other two go to the side field and the guy you named is throwing against air on Thursdays. Now, what I am watching for. Third down, middle of the field. I do not care about the deep ball, everybody throws a beautiful deep ball in August. I want to see him come off the first man. I hit the back foot, the safety opens his hips to the field, I am gone underneath, that is a layup, that is a completion you cannot miss. If he needs an extra half second to see that in August he needs a full second in September with a three-technique on his ankle. And nobody hired me either. I stocked shelves and everybody forgets that part.

SCHRAGER: Kurt, you played for a coach who called it himself. What is different about a quarterback’s Wednesday when the head coach is also the play caller and there is nobody standing between the two of you?

WARNER: Everything is different and it cuts both directions. The good part is there is no telephone game. When I asked why we were running something, the answer came from the man who decided to run it, and I could argue with him about it standing right there. That is worth a lot on a Wednesday. The hard part is that if one man draws it and calls it and decides who plays, there is nowhere for a quarterback to go and be honest about it. In St. Louis I could stop a position coach in the hall and say I hate this concept against two-high, and he carried it upstairs for me and nobody’s feelings were in it. In Cleveland the quarterbacks coach can carry it, but everybody knows where it ends up. So he has to make it easy to be told he is wrong, and keep making it easy in November when he is not sleeping.

ERDAHL: Does it help a young quarterback or hurt him that the man grading him also drew it?

WARNER: It helps him if the grade is about the read and not about the result, and you cannot know which one you are getting until about Week 6. The reason a competition drags on is usually that the coach cannot tell the difference between a guy who threw an interception and a guy who made the wrong decision, so he waits for the numbers to decide it for him. I sat through a lot of Arena League film for a lot of years, and the people who could separate those two were rare and they were not always the ones with the résumés. So twenty-seven days is not long. Everybody decided it was a crisis because there are three names instead of one.

SCHRAGER: Into The Booth before we get out, and it is the same practice Kyle was watching. No crowd, nothing at stake, a hundred and eight degrees on that turf, and Andrew Siciliano called a two-hour walkthrough like it was January. Named every rookie. Had the numbers right on guys who get cut next Tuesday. Warmth. Preparation. No cynicism about any of it. Nobody had to do a minute of that for a walkthrough.

ERDAHL: He also said the words “team period” forty times and I counted.

SCHRAGER: Tomorrow, Jamie has Cincinnati, Kyle is not giving away another crown, and Manti is bringing the rookie card in.