The Wrong Stuff

A FEW DAYS before the 1999 NFL draft, the first for the reborn Browns, owner Al Lerner called his three top football guys into his office, one after the other. He asked each of them to name the college player the Browns should take with the No. 1 pick. The answers from coach Chris Palmer, player personnel director Joe Collins and vice president of football operations Dwight Clark were the same: "Tim Couch."

The Cleveland brain trust dismissed Syracuse scrambler Donovan McNabb, believing he didn't have a strong enough deep arm or adequate foundation in the passing game. They scratched Central Florida's Daunte Culpepper in part because they doubted that a quarterback who played against lightweight competition could become an NFL franchise cornerstone. They considered taking Texas running back Ricky Williams until a predraft trade with the Bills for quarterback Rob Johnson failed to materialize. So the pick came down to Couch, the prolific Kentucky passer, or Akili Smith, the strong-armed but inexperienced quarterback from Oregon--which now sounds crazy, because neither has started in the NFL since 2003. (Drafted third by the Bengals, Smith has played only 22 games.)

"None of the guys we were considering appeared to be the Second Coming," says former Browns president Carmen Policy. "But that's how it is with quarterbacks: Everyone in the NFL is afraid of passing on the guy who might be the next great one." In this case McNabb, picked second by the Eagles, would go on to play in a Super Bowl, and Culpepper, selected 11th by the Vikings, would make three Pro Bowls.

There were warning signs that Couch wasn't No. 1 material: Despite being 6'4", 227, he didn't have the arm to throw into the winds off Lake Erie. In his last college season 74% of his 553 attempts went for 10 yards or less, and his ball fluttered in a predraft workout. Also, Couch was viewed as shy and immature by at least one club that interviewed him ( Philadelphia).

Cleveland originally planned to work Couch into the offense gradually, but after just a game with veteran Ty Detmer at quarterback, Palmer made Couch the starter. "I love Chris," says Policy, "but when he threw him in after the first game I thought it was a mistake." Not surprising for a start-up team, the other skill-position players and the pass protection were suspect. In his fourth year, feeling the pressure of being booed and beaten up, Couch nearly broke down in a postgame interview. "He lost the locker room after that," says one former front-office staffer. Couch was also getting hurt--a broken finger, a torn shoulder muscle, an elbow strain. The Browns cut him in 2004; the Packers gave him a look in training camp that year but he didn't make the roster. In the past 12 months he has worked out for numerous NFL teams, but has never caught on. Said one coach who has seen him in the last year, "He's just not an NFL thrower right now."