06/02/2026
The Uncomfortable Truth of the Myles Garrett trade.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about Myles Garrett that nobody in Cleveland really wants to say out loud: he was the best defensive player in football and the Browns still couldn’t win. Three games in 2024. Five games in 2025. All while Garrett was racking up sacks and Defensive Player of the Year awards at a historic pace. So when the Browns shipped him to Los Angeles, the real question wasn’t whether the pass rush would suffer. The real question and the only question that’s ever mattered, is whether Cleveland can finally figure out the quarterback position.
Here’s the truth of the matter,” Mary Kay Cabot said. “In my opinion, the quarterback play is what is going to make or break you. That is what is going to make the difference in this football team. It’s not going to be somebody who can get 23 sacks because if that was the case, then they would not have only won three games two years ago and five games last year.”
That’s the reality of modern NFL football and it’s one the Browns have learned the hard way. Garrett’s production has been nothing short of extraordinary. Two Defensive Player of the Year awards. A single-season sack record. He is, by most accounts, the most disruptive defensive player in the league. And yet, none of it was enough to consistently put Cleveland in the win column when the quarterback play crumbled around him.
Dan Labbe reinforced that point when discussing the 2026 outlook for Cleveland post-trade.
“I still think this team can accomplish what they want to, what they wanted to accomplish this year,” Labbe said. “And if the quarterbacks are terrible, it’s not going to matter.”
That’s not pessimism, it’s honesty. The Browns have never been a bad team because they lacked a pass rusher. They’ve been a struggling franchise because finding and developing a reliable quarterback has been one of the great organizational failures in recent NFL history. Trading Garrett doesn’t fix that problem. Neither does keeping him. The variable that changes everything is the one lined up under center.
What the trade does do, however, is force Cleveland to evolve defensively and that might actually be a good thing. Cabot pointed out on her podcast that the Browns will now need to diversify their pass rush rather than relying almost entirely on one transcendent talent. Edge rushers like Alex Wright and Isaiah McGuire will need to step up. Interior linemen may see more opportunities. Linebackers could be asked to blitz more. Defensive backs might be called on to generate pressure in creative packages.
“You’re going to have to come up with sacks and pressures in more creative ways,” Cabot said. “You don’t need, it’s obvious, a 23 sacker to get to the playoffs. You don’t need that and you don’t need that to win a Super Bowl. You need to play really, really good team defense and you need to get those pressures.”
She even invoked the 2025 Seattle Seahawks as proof, a team that won a Super Bowl without a double-digit sacker by playing suffocating, systemic team defense. It’s not a blueprint that requires one unstoppable force. It requires 11 guys on the same page, night in and night out.
Jared Verse, the centerpiece of the trade, gives Cleveland a legitimate building block for that kind of defense. He’s a proven pressure generator at 25 years old who fits naturally into what defensive coordinator Mike Rutenberg is trying to build. He won’t replicate Garrett’s numbers. But that’s not the expectation. The expectation is that he contributes to a broader defensive ecosystem while the Browns get their footing at the most important position in sports.
The Browns’ front office knows all of this. They’ve been transparent about possibly targeting the quarterback market in the coming offseason. The 2027 first-round pick acquired in the Garrett trade could even be packaged in a move up the board to land a franchise signal-caller.
But until that question is answered, everything else is secondary. Sacks, picks, trades, none of it moves the needle like a capable quarterback. The Browns have known this for years. Now, finally, everything they’re building seems to acknowledge it.
