Bobby Bones on Dillon Gabriel’s Uncertain Cleveland Browns Future

The score does not matter in a preseason game, but Dillon Gabriel went 12 for 15 for 186 yards and three touchdowns as Cleveland beat New England 37-13, and Bobby Bones thinks that performance belongs to a conversation nobody is having.

Everyone in Cleveland is arguing about Deshaun Watson and Shedeur Sanders. Lost in it is that Gabriel was drafted before Sanders, started games last season, and is now headed for QB3.

"I like Dillon Gabriel," Bones said, while conceding these are empty stats because it is August.

His actual question is about opportunity. Between this game and the flashes from a limited rookie season, has Gabriel played his way into something better somewhere else?

Bones would not even settle for calling him serviceable. He thinks Gabriel could be a genuinely good backup, and the reason is age. This is only his second year. Nobody has a fifteen-year book on him that says we know what this is and it is not for us.

So the choice for Cleveland is real. Keep him at three for depth in a situation that is obviously unsettled, or use the tape he just produced as an asset and trade him somewhere he might actually factor in.

TJ connected it to something he had already posted, which was that Sanders should get out of Cleveland.

His reasoning was blunt and hard to argue with.

"How many success stories, respectfully, come out of Cleveland at the quarterback position?"

Having said that about Sanders, TJ found himself applying it to Gabriel. Is he better off staying at three, or getting a chance to spread his wings in another system?

The desk then arrived, inevitably, at the week's running joke.

"Possibly even LSU."

Bones pointed out the mechanism is now genuinely available. All you need is a judge. One single judge, one gavel hit, and Dillon Gabriel is playing for LSU, whatever the NCAA is trying to do about it.

Gabriel himself, asked about other opportunities, gave the answer of someone who has learned not to answer.

"I'm just worried about today, and the rest will figure itself out."

Asked whether it feels uncertain, he allowed that it does, and that this is the league for you.

"I know what I'm about and I just got a good head on my shoulders. I take pride in that."

Bones then disclosed his bias, which involves a trip to Eugene a couple of years back where he spent real time with Gabriel.

He also disclosed the listed height, 5-11, and then quietly undercut it. Bones is 6-1, has a photograph, and would not say three inches.

"It's tough to be a small quarterback," he said. What he likes about the recent wave of shorter quarterbacks succeeding is that it opens the door for the next ones.

"But that dude is a dog."

That trip produced the segment's better story, because Bones did not know Dan Lanning before it. He reached out, said he wanted to come to Eugene, and Lanning told him to name the date.

Getting there was its own ordeal, which Bones described as sailing the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María through wind and rain.

What he found was a facility he ranks second among all the ones he has toured, including a Marcus Mariota room that Bones believes Mariota financed, full of jewelry and photographs. Phil Knight money is visible everywhere.

He sat with Lanning for about an hour and came away with a read that does not match the television version.

Lanning is involved in causes he cares about, and the two worked out a deal where Bones donated $10,000 to one of them. In exchange, for the last three games of that season, Oregon held up an enormous cutout of Bones' head in goal line and red zone situations, under the personnel package name Big Bones.

Lanning signed it and mailed it to him. It hangs in his office.

He also texts. Not about football strategy, but about Arkansas.

"Hang in there with Arkansas, man."

Lanning knows, Bones said, that he is going through a dark period.

TJ, whose entire brand is adding teams rather than suffering with one, offered the obvious solution.

Bones declined, and made his case for the suffering. He was a Cubs fan his whole life, waited, and finally got one, which was all he needed. As a football fan he has never even been close.

Well, there was Bobby Petrino. And then there was more suffering.