Larry Ogunjobi among ESPN’s Top 50 NFL free agents in 2021

Sadly, the Cleveland Browns’ season came to an end last week, and that means we’ll start looking forward to decisions the team will face in free agency and then the draft. This past week, Kevin Seifert of ESPN wrote about the Top 50 free agents in the NFL for the 2021 offseason.

Cleveland has a long list of free agents, which we will begin our annual review on soon. But as far as Top 50 among the entire NFL, Seifert only sees one of those players coming from the Browns: DT Larry Ogunjobi, who was ranked at No. 37.

Seifert: “A three-year starter, Ogunjobi has been a force at times in the interior line. He might be better suited to playing the 3-technique in a 4-3 defense, rather than the nose tackle, but he has plenty of tape doing both.”

Ogunjobi was a workhorse at the position this year and deserves credit for that, but the thing that will hurt his free agent value is that he has not proven to be a dominant everydown player. I still believe that he is at his best as a rotational player — i.e. playing 40% of the snaps per week instead of 70% of the snaps. He was ranked below average by Pro Football Focus this season.

I thought Ogunjobi’s contract year started off well in the first week or two before his production faded again. However, he did have one memorable play in a key moment: pushing Steelers C Maurkice Pouncey backward to help force a key stop in the first playoff game this year. We’ll see how other teams view Ogunjobi on the free agent market.