The Philadelphia Eagles and Cleveland Browns cross paths every now and then. They don’t see each other on the field much as they’ve only played 51 times since their first meeting in 1950. There are ties that bind them when one digs a little deeper.
Andrew Berry is Cleveland’s general manager and executive vice president of football operations. He has served in that role since 2020 after being plucked from Philly’s front office. He was the Birds’ vice president of football operations in 2019.
Then, there are those occasional moments through history when the guys in green got the best of the now snakebitten franchise.
Philly didn’t have to do much to do so in 1999.
The Eagles history of outsmarting the Browns, and they may have done so again with the new NFL year approaching.
Picture it… It’s the 1999 NFL Draft. The Browns own the first overall selection. They take Tim Couch. Philly selected Donovan McNabb one spot later at the second-overall selection. Everyone in Philly AND Cleveland knows how that ended.
Advantage Birds.
Fast forward to 2017, and the Eagles outsmarted Cleveland again.
Cleveland traded the second pick and a conditional fifth-round selection to the Eagles in 2017, one that was later upgraded to a compensatory fourth-round selection. The Browns received Philly’s first-round, third-round, and fourth-round selections in this 2017 (the 8th, 77th, and 100th) AND Philly’s second-round selection in the 2018 NFL Draft.
It seemed like the Browns had won the day, but the Birds acquired Carson Wentz and the best players Cleveland got out of the deal was Corey Coleman and Emmanuel Ogbah. Again… Advantage Philly.
Here we go again. The first day of legal tampering in 2025 again brought a trade involving the Birds and Browns. Per NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, Philly gets Dorian Thompson-Robinson and a fifth-round draft choice. The Browns get Kenny Pickett.
Can we be frank? Philly would have won this trade simply by acquiring the fifth-round draft choice. DTR is just a bonus, but then again… Are we sure he isn’t just as good as Pickett?
No, we’re being serious. How do we know Pickett isn’t almost as good as Pickett with a higher ceiling? We don’t know the answer to that, do we?
Sure, DTR was all kinds of bad with the Browns, but tons of players have been bad with the Browns. Heck, Jeff Garcia almost vanished in Cleveland. He arrived in Philly, took over for an injured Donovan McNabb, and from day one, just simply looked better.
Philly has a new QB coach, Scot Loeffler. We’ll see how he does and if he can bring DTR along, but he isn’t needed immediately. This is Jalen Hurts’ team, and Tanner McKee will now take over as QB2.
That should make a lot of Birds fans happy as some saw McKee as a better QB than Kenny Pickett was last season.