GMFB Thursday — Why DeAndre Hopkins picked Cleveland, the last thread on the Ward trade, Throwdown on a 1 p.m. kickoff, and a crown for a fullback

SCHRAGER: Thursday. Three days. Nobody at this table is sleeping Saturday night and I say that every year and every year it is true. Jamie has availability at twenty past and Rap right after her. Kyle is opening the season w/ a crown, which he has been threatening since June. Manti has Jacksonville. I am starting w/ a receiver who is thirty-four and made a decision in July that I have not stopped turning over.

ERDAHL: You have been thinking about it out loud. In the meeting. For six days.

BRANDT: He sent me a text about it at eleven at night and it was four paragraphs and it had a semicolon in it.

TE’O: He sends those to me too. I open them in the morning.

SCHRAGER: You are all going to want a semicolon someday and I will not be there. Hopkins first.

SCHRAGER: Résumé first. Thirteen years. 1,059 catches. Five Pro Bowls, three first-team All-Pros, a ring. QBs he has caught passes from: Schaub, Fitzpatrick, Hoyer, Osweiler, Savage, Watson, Murray, Tannehill, Mahomes, Jackson... a decade of somebody else’s bad Tuesdays and he was great through all of it. Hands. Timing. Body control at thirty-four that guys have at twenty-six. He had other offers. He had a contender. And on the third of September he signed w/ a club that eleven of twelve people on this network have going 4 and 13.

SCHRAGER: Hopkins CHOOSES. He has been like that since Houston. Things do not happen to him. He picked the room. Not the record -- the room. Somebody told me he asked one question on that call and the question was who is throwing it and what does he see on third down. Jamie, come in on this one, because you had it in the meeting and I did not.

ERDAHL: The question everybody watching has is simple. Is he there to catch passes or is he there to raise a twenty-four-year-old quarterback?

SCHRAGER: He is there to catch passes. Everyone reaches for the mentor thing w/ a veteran receiver and I think it is lazy and I think in this case it is wrong. He is the starting X. He is going to run eleven-hundred routes.

ERDAHL: Then follow it up for me. Who told you that? The club, or him?

SCHRAGER: Two people who were on the call. And one of them said Hopkins asked how many balls, got a number, and the number was low, and he signed anyway. That is a real answer and it is a better one than anything I could write.

ERDAHL: That is a good detail. I would have led with it.

SCHRAGER: You would have led w/ it and you would have been right and I am the host so I am going to keep going. Manti.

TE’O: A locker room reads a signing like that in forty-eight hours. They know his tape already. They are watching whether he does the walkthrough at full speed on a Thursday when it does not count. That is the audition. A guy over there tells me it went fine.

TE’O: And that room lost two starters in eleven days. Ward on a Thursday, Jeudy the Tuesday after. Guys with lockers. Their kids were at family day. I have sat in that room. Not one word gets said out loud and every man in there is doing math about himself.

SCHRAGER: And on the head coach. Because you cannot do this segment and skip him, and I will not.

SCHRAGER: Emotional intelligence. Communication. Those two are real, I have watched every podium minute since January, and I will say it out loud on national television. And then look at who he went and hired. Rutenberg out of Atlanta. George Warhop. Duce Staley. Mike Bajakian. Jason Tarver. Brandon Lynch. Ephraim Banda. Travis Switzer, who took a coordinator job knowing he does not call the plays... and Dom Capers, seventy-five, two-time head coach, in that room every morning at six. You do not get that group to say yes for nothing.

BRANDT: Capers is the one that gets me. That man built the Panthers and the Texans out of nothing and he is sitting in a room being told what the third-down plan is by a guy who was in high school when Capers won a playoff game.

SCHRAGER: And he took the job.

BRANDT: And he took the job. That is the only evidence anybody in this argument has ever produced, and I would not hang much weight on it, because a man taking a job in February is a man taking a job in February.

SCHRAGER: Sunday, one o’clock, Jacksonville. Nine and a half. Cleveland is starting five rookies, including the center and the right tackle, against a defence that finished first against the run. I do not think they win. I want to watch every snap of it. I have been holding those two sentences at the same time since January and I have stopped apologising for it. Jamie, the league.

ERDAHL: Week 1 availability, and Thursday is the day the lies stop. Cleveland: Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah’s season is over before it started, neck, reserve/PUP. Maliek Collins is on the roster and has not been in a team period in six weeks. That leaves four edge rushers on a 53.

ERDAHL: Jacksonville: Patrick Mekari is being managed at right guard and has practiced in full twice this week. Walker Little missed Tuesday. Jack Kiser is week-to-week at linebacker and that weak-side job was still open on Monday.

TE’O: Same problem, two clubs. Neither one can get to a quarterback. Thirty-two sacks with those two names on the edge is a strange sentence.

ERDAHL: Elsewhere: Cincinnati listed a starting guard as limited three straight days, Denver ruled out a corner, and the Rams put a tight end on IR with a designation to return.

BRANDT: A tight end on IR in the first week of September is the saddest phone call in professional sports. Six months of work and you watch the opener on a couch in a boot while your mother texts you about staying positive.

SCHRAGER: Rap is up. Jamie.

ERDAHL: Rap, good morning. Start on Cleveland.

RAPOPORT: Good morning. Two things. One, on Hopkins: there were three offers and Cleveland was not the largest of them. A team in the AFC South was, by a little over a million dollars, and there was a playoff team that offered a similar structure with more guaranteed. I am told the Browns went to five and a quarter with three and a half guaranteed and did not move off it. Two, on the Ward trade, and this is the last thread on it: the second club that was in on Denzel Ward and got told the same number was Detroit. They offered a first and a swap and they were turned down twice in nine days.

ERDAHL: So Cleveland had a first in hand from a non-division team and said no to it. Whose call was that, in the end?

RAPOPORT: The head coach’s, and everyone I talk to says the same thing about how he handled it, which is that he took the number to the room and let two people argue him out of the Detroit deal and then went back to Pittsburgh a week later. The people who like him tell me that story as proof he listens. The people who do not like him tell me the exact same story and it means something else to them. It is the same story either way and I find that fascinating about this whole thing.

SCHRAGER: Rap, thank you, go back to bed. He has been up since three-thirty and he sounds better than any of us.

ERDAHL: Kyle is for. Manti is against. Ninety seconds each and I am keeping time and I am not being generous with it.

BRANDT: September 16, 2018. New England at Jacksonville. Ninety-seven degrees at kickoff. Heat index of a hundred and seven on the field. Twenty-two people went to the hospital. Eighty-four were treated by paramedics. That happened. At an NFL game. And we all said, well, that is Florida. And here is what makes me insane. The structure they are building over that stadium right now, this year, with the cranes on it, is a canopy to cool the place down. They know. They have a blueprint. It opens in 2028. So the answer exists and it is late, and Sunday forty-two thousand people sit in a bowl with the upper deck removed and cook for three hours because a television network wanted a one o’clock window. Move it to four twenty-five. Move it four hours.

TE’O: I played in it. That is my argument. You go in at halftime and you sit down and somebody hands you a cold towel and puts it on the back of your neck and for about eleven seconds it is the best you have ever felt, and then you go back out. And it is the same for both teams. Cleveland moved four practices to the hottest hour of the day last week on purpose. Whoever handles it better wins, and that is a football thing, same as rain.

BRANDT: Eighty-four people, Manti.

TE’O: In the stands. Not on the field.

BRANDT: Oh, so the fans do not count.

TE’O: That is not what I said and you know that is not what I said.

ERDAHL: Time. Kyle on points, and Manti was right.

TE’O: Thirteen and four. AFC South champions. Eight straight to end the year, then out in the wild card at home. Coen in year two with the same three coordinators, which almost nobody has. From Week 13 through January, Lawrence graded out ahead of every quarterback in the sport.

TE’O: Status with Travis Hunter: complicated, and I mean that as the answer. Both ways again, and he is their best corner faster than anyone planned. Somebody decides every week how many snaps a human being gets.

ERDAHL: And the stadium. Forty-two thousand five hundred and seven, upper deck gone, two home games in London this year and the whole 2027 season in Orlando.

TE’O: So Sunday is one of a handful of real home Sundays that city gets all year. Everybody in that lower bowl paid for it and they are stacked right on top of the field. I would not walk in expecting quiet because the number is small.

TE’O: Forty-two thousand people who all had to want it.

SCHRAGER: Duval. That city has been told it is losing that team for twenty years and it is still standing there. Never doubt Jacksonville -- their own slogan, painted on a wall they are about to knock down.

SCHRAGER: Angry Runs. Week 1. Nobody has run anywhere.

BRANDT: Nobody has run anywhere and I am giving the crown away regardless, and I want to explain the ruling. Cleveland put fourteen minutes of the Buffalo joint practice on the team app. Nobody watched it. I watched it twice. Inside run period, third clip, and there is a fullback in there. A real one. Michael Burton, thirty-four years old, twelfth year, and he goes through a Buffalo linebacker so completely that the linebacker’s helmet turns around and Burton keeps going and gets a second guy. Two guys. On one play. In August. In a practice.

ERDAHL: He never touched the football.

BRANDT: He never touched the football and I do not care. Angry Runs is about the emotional content of a run and that was a run, he was simply not carrying it. And then I got curious about him. Twelve years. Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City, Denver, now here. Nine hundred and something career snaps at a position the league keeps announcing is dead. So I emailed his high school.

TE’O: You emailed a high school.

ERDAHL: In New Jersey.

BRANDT: I emailed the athletic department in New Jersey and said, hi, I am from a television show, do you have anything on Michael Burton, and a woman named Carol wrote back in nineteen minutes and put me on the phone with the man who coached his JV team in 2007. Fifty-one minutes, that call. Burton was a linebacker who asked to move to fullback. Asked. As a sophomore. And I now have a laminated photograph of a fifteen-year-old Michael Burton on my desk and I have not told my producer where it came from.

SCHRAGER: Kyle Brandt, everybody. Effort. Curiosity. Fifty-one minutes on the phone w/ a JV coach in September. That is the show.

TE’O: A fullback who volunteered is the most fullback sentence I have ever heard in my life.

SCHRAGER: Into The Booth before we get out. CBS put Jason Ross Jr. on the Cleveland at Jacksonville sideline this week as a fill-in and he filed ninety seconds from EverBank on Tuesday about the construction. He got the capacity right, he got the year in Orlando right, and he ended it by naming the two men running the crane. Named them. Preparation. Warmth. Zero cynicism on a story he had two days for... he will be doing this in thirty years.

ERDAHL: Tomorrow we have picks, which means Kyle is going to be wrong out loud for an hour.

BRANDT: I am bringing the photograph.

SCHRAGER: Do not bring the photograph.

Good Morning Football, NFL Network, Thursday, September 10, 2026, 8:00–10:00 a.m. ET. Transcribed from the broadcast. Highlight packages, sponsor billboards, breaks and the 9:05 fantasy block are not included.