USA Today Ranks the Browns as Having the 25th Best Offseason

We've seen media outlets rank how well NFL teams did in free agency or the draft, but the USA Today has compiled rankings of how the teams did collectively in the entire offseason. The Jacksonville Jaguars' offseason is ranked all the way at the top, while the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos are at the bottom. Where did the Cleveland Browns rank? Author Chris Davis has them with the 25th best offseason:

25. Cleveland Browns: Until they’ve finished painting the bigger picture with their analytics brush years from now, it’s hard to make a fair evaluation. Aside from signing QB Robert Griffin III, the Browns were panned for their inactivity during free agency. However $40 million-plus in cap space gets pushed into the future, and several good compensatory picks will be forthcoming next year as a result. The draft brought highly-productive college players (WRs Corey Coleman and Jordan Payton and DEs Emmanuel Ogbah and Carl Nassib among them) but, more importantly, the front office’s manipulation of the board netted future first- and second-round selections.

This sounds very much like a "cautiously optimistic" ranking for the Browns; they can see the vision the team is implementing and it seems to make sense, but can a regime finally succeed in Cleveland after all these years? If so, they are very much on the youth-building path that Jacksonville's been on, and will have the cap space in a couple of years to sign some bigger names in free agency if they so desire to.