The Big 10’s decision to cancel football will impact draft for Cleveland Browns

The Big 10 had decided to formally cancel their season, a domino effect that will be felt far and wide.

There’s a strong debate to cancel the NCAA’s fall sports, mostly due to the fact that the NCAA had since February to put a plan in place, and here is August and they’ve yet to put a plan in place. The lack of leadership is astounding. So the Big 10 decided to take the decision out of the NCAA’s hands and cancel their football season themselves. The original article states that it’s not just football that’s canceled but all fall sports within the Big 10.

Hopefully, the NCAA and colleges find a way to make sure that players can get that year of eligibility back but until that’s all hashed out, the players, schools, and fans will have to wait. As the Big 10 and MAC, arguably the two biggest northern conferences in the NCAA, have canceled sports for the fall, it’ll be interesting to see if the rest of the NCAA follows suite.

There were already rumors that the power five conferences (Big 10, SEC, ACC, Pac 12 and the Big 12) were leaning to not playing, or were at the very least having those discussions. The Pac 12 has apparently opted to not play as well. If all five conferences all sit out, then it’s very likely that the rest of the NCAA will too. If there’s no college football, then there are no players to scout. If there are no players to scout, then that means the entire NFL draft process gets thrown for a loop. This will make things particularly interesting for the Cleveland Browns come NFL Draft season.

Players stock who could go up won’t and breakout picks are now stuck with hoping for a strong combine effort. That’s if they’re invited. Players will be elevated on what they did nearly two years before to determine what they’ll be able to do in 2021 and beyond.

Everything that we know about how talent is evaluated would have to change, and more time would have to be given to guys that maybe don’t have a lot of tape in the can already. This may mean the process of truly evaluating talent will happen earlier in the process, and it may also mean that with no certainty about the 2022 season, that more draft-eligible players declare for the draft than ever before.

If you thought the 2020 NFL Draft was weird, we haven’t seen anything yet.