The Cleveland Browns will enter the season with two rookie quarterbacks.
Joe Flacco will get the nod to start at the beginning, but there are no guarantees about his job security.
However, he’s the best option for the organization at the moment, and the first-year pros still need to do a lot of learning.
With that in mind, NFL legend Drew Brees urged them to soak in as much information from Flacco as they possibly can, even though he’s not necessarily there to mentor them.
Talking on the Jim Rome show, the former Super Bowl champion shared his thoughts on the matter:
“The best thing for those guys is to sit behind someone like Joe Flacco for a while—a guy who’s played a ton of football and has a lot of knowledge and wisdom about the game. Hopefully, that can teach them a lot. That’s not necessarily his job; his job is to win football games. But what these guys can absorb just by watching—learning how to prepare, how to be a pro, and how to be a great teammate—will help them. They just need experience. Having both of them there together also creates more competition, and at the end of the day, competition should bring out the best in everybody,” Brees said.
"The best thing for those guys is to sit behind a guy like Joe Flacco for a while."@drewbrees on the Cleveland backup QB battle between Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders. pic.twitter.com/Cz13Ud4oAV
— Jim Rome (@jimrome) August 28, 2025
It wouldn’t be surprising to see Gabriel or maybe even Sanders take the field at one point in the season.
Still, the Browns are going to face one of the toughest schedules in the first third of the season, so they’re doing the right thing by putting the ball in the hands of the veteran.
We’ve seen many young quarterbacks ruined because they were thrown into the fire when they clearly weren’t ready to embrace a big role.
Even so, the Browns need to figure out whether they can count on any of these youngsters to carry the load in the future.
They have two first-round picks in next year’s NFL Draft, and if they’re still not sold on either of them, they will most likely target another signal-caller in 2026.
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