CLEVELAND, Ohio (TheOBR.com) – Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
THE DAILY BLOVIATION
It’s Saturday morning before tomorrow’s first game of the season, and I’m thinking about opportunities. Chances. How rarely they come around, how to take advantage of them.
It’s top of mind because we’re seeing it happen on the Cleveland Browns offensive line, right here, right now.
Teven Jenkins, ostensibly the Browns’ starting right guard (Monken said a week ago he was leaning his way), was limited Wednesday and did not participate Thursday. He was nowhere to be seen Friday during the window open to media. That afternoon, Todd Monken made it official and ruled Jenkins out for the opener, with rookie Austin Barber taking over at right guard.
Despite Monken’s “lean” a week ago, the Browns were probably getting here anyway. Eventually. But now it’s official and a rapidly developing opportunity for Austin Barber.
Monken refused to name Jenkins the starter all week, and he was oddly transparent about why. “I’d give Teven the lean, but I don’t think it’s done yet,” he said last Saturday. That is not how a coach talks about a veteran who owns the job. So Jenkins’ back did the coaching staff a favor. It let them land on the answer the tape was already giving them without anybody having to write a story about a rookie taking a starter’s job in Week 1.
And what an answer it is. Barber is 6-7 and 320 pounds. He played tackle in high school, played tackle at Florida, and until four weeks ago, his entire career at guard was three reps in a one-on-one drill as a freshman for the Gators.
Three.
He moved inside a month ago and immediately started pushing a starter for his job. Now he goes home. First NFL game, first NFL start, EverBank Stadium, a building he already played in four times in college, in front of a family he says is turning out in numbers “more than I can count.”He gets to do all that against the defense that finished first in the NFL against the run last season at 85.6 yards a game, with Josh Hines-Allen and Travon Walker coming off the edges and Arik Armstead and DaVon Hamilton parked inside. The schedule offers no soft landing. Welcome to work, kid.
Huge challenge. Huge opportunity. Huge risk.
It’s all up to him. Failing to take advantage could mean time back on the bench and a rocky start to his pro career. Success could mean the start of a fast ascent.
Everything depends on execution.
This is on my mind for good reason. We’ll talk about that early next week.
FOUR ROOKIES, ONE OFFENSE: Fred Greetham has the wider picture, and it is something: four rookies will start on offense Sunday, with Spencer Fano at left tackle, Barber at right guard, and KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston at receiver. Andrew Siciliano dug out the detail that will either thrill you or send you looking for your blood pressure medication: this is the first time since 1990 that the Browns open a season with a completely new offensive line. Nineteen ninety. Bud Carson started that season as head coach and did not finish it. Monken’s framing is at least the right one: “Would it be ideal to have 11 rookies starting? Of course not. But ultimately our job is to put the best 11 out there.”FIVE LINEMEN AND TWO TIGHT ENDS WALK INTO BEREA: The Browns worked out seven offensive players Friday, five of them offensive linemen. You can call that routine roster housekeeping, and you’d probably be right most of the time. You can also call it a team that just lost its starting right guard doing some quiet arithmetic about what happens if one more thing goes wrong up front. I’m reading it the second way.I REALLY LIKE WHERE HE’S AT: That’s Monken on Deshaun Watson, who makes his first start in nearly two years on Sunday. Monken pointed to reps. Once the competition closed, Watson took all of them for two straight weeks, and Monken says you could see him settle into the concepts.
I would love to tell you that settles something. It settles nothing. This gets settled around four o’clock Sunday afternoon.
MYLES, IN ABSENTIA: Our old friend posted a stat line of absolutely nothing in his Rams debut, then explained that he was “a little more focused on myself and trying to stay healthy than what they were doing.” Florio finds that alarming. So does the Watercooler, where somebody has already started a Los Angeles Rams L Tracker, which might be the most Cleveland thing I have witnessed since 1998. Jared Verse lines up for us in two days.Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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THE LIFT
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Norah Kimathi is 22 years old and runs a company called ZeroBionic out of a small lab in Nairobi, where she builds robotic hands that translate a teacher’s spoken words into sign language. Kenya has roughly 300,000 deaf and hearing-impaired children and no standardized sign language, which means a kid who cannot hear frequently cannot be taught math by a teacher who cannot sign. The hands are 3D-printed from recycled plastic litter, sell for $350, run for three years without maintenance, and hit 92 percent accuracy converting speech to sign. No African sign language dataset existed to build from, so her team recorded deaf teachers wearing an imported electrode-lined bodysuit and built one from scratch. Seventy-eight units sold so far. A 22-year-old working out of a tiny lab with a 3D printer and a pile of garbage is shipping more useful technology than most of the companies I used to consult for.
WRAPPING UP
When not looking forward four days, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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