The Browns are among the teams who are skipping out on OTAs, at least on one side of the ball.
As explained by Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com, quarterback Baker Mayfield will host some of his offensive teammates in Austin, Texas this week, in lieu of participating in organized team activities.
Mayfield and teammates previously got together in Florida in April, and they plan to return to Florida in July.
The Browns’ offensive players have largely been staying away from in-person voluntary workouts, given the efforts of the NFL Players Association to encourage players to boycott those activities. The fact that Browns center JC Tretter serves as the president of the union surely makes it harder for other Browns players to defy the union’s wishes.
Still, Cabot reports that “many” of the team’s defensive players will be there, after concluding that it made sense for them to gather for OTAs given the number of new players on defense. Garrett, per Cabot, has said that “there are no hard feelings” on Tretter’s part over the decision of the defensive players to attend.
There are the beginnings of hard feelings among some Browns fans over the failure of the offensive players to be present. With the team on the verge of becoming an elite franchise for the first time in decades, fans who have seen Murphy’s Law play out annually for most if not all of their lifetimes are bracing for the shoe to drop. As they see that the teams with which the Browns will be competing this year (starting with the Chiefs) all-in on OTAs, it becomes a legitimate basis for fretting.
However it all plays out, it will be interesting to see whether there’s a correlation of any kind between the teams that fully participated in OTAs and those that didn’t. That’s something all teams surely will be paying attention to.
Baker Mayfield and some other Browns offensive players will get together in Texas this week originally appeared on Pro Football Talk