Gettin' drafty in here

We're now just a day from my alltime favorite Not Really An Event But ESPN Says It Is, So It Must Be An Event -- also known as the NFL Draft.

Also known as, Watch Mel Kiper And Todd McShay Hop Around Like A Couple Of Kids On Christmas Morning.

Also known as, Watch Mel And Todd Yammer On And On And On About Some O-Lineman Normal People Have Never Heard Of.

Also known as ...

Well. You get it.

Me?

Why, I'm so giddy I can barely contain myself.

OK. so I'm not.

Actually, the TV show that is the NFL Draft is an immense waste of airtime as far as I'm concerned, because everything you can learn from watching it you can learn from a million other places That's the wonder of the internet: Keeping up with who your team just picked ("Oh, look! We just got that O-lineman Mel and Todd keep yammering about!") without having to actually watch all the filler talk that surrounds it.

I got my fill of all that yesterday, heading east through Ohio on my periodic Civil War nerd excursion to Gettysburg. Everyone in Cleveland is all excited about which No. 1 pick the Browns are going to ruin this time. And it's a measure of what a contrarian I am about all this that none of them think the Browns should do what I think they should do.

I think they should take the best player in the draft with the No. 1 pick. Which would be Penn State running back Saquon Barkley.

Yes, I know, you're not supposed to take a running back early, because RBs are as plentiful as ants at a picnic. You can pick one up pretty much the way you pick up a gallon of milk on the way home from work.

That's the conventional wisdom. Or, rather, it was.

Here's an exercise for you: Go find Dak Prescott and ask him if Ezekiel Elliott is no more valuable than a gallon of milk. Ask him how Elliott, by giving the Cowboys a reliable run game, made Prescott's job yea easier. Then ask him how much harder the game got when Elliott had to sit out those games last year.

After that, you can go ask the New Orleans Saints what Alvin Kamara did for them last year.

And so here we have the Browns, who need a lot of things, clearly. One of those is a reliable run game. And here we have a handful of quarterbacks predicted to go in the top 10 -- including Sam Darnold of USC, the money bet to go to the Browns with the first pick.

Thing is, no one has yet compared Sam Darnold to, say, Andrew Luck. Or Peyton Manning. Or John Elway, or Dan Marino, or any other franchise quarterback you can think of.

Same goes for Josh Allen. And Josh Rosen. And Baker Mayfield.

Those are the other three QBs projected to go early, and none of them stands head and shoulders above the others. They've all got upside. They've all got downside. You can pretty much throw them all in a hat and draw one out.

This should matter if you're the Browns, because they have not just the first pick but the fourth. Which means they could pick Barkley at 1 and lock down their run game, then go get one of the QBs with the fourth pick. Again, it doesn't matter all that much which of the four it is. And no matter who they pick, his transition would be made exponentially easier because waiting there for him would be Saquon Barkley.

Again, ask Dak Prescott how valuable a stud RB can be.

So, there you go. My draft strategy.

And you didn't even have to turn on your TV to get it.