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Daniel Oyefusi, ESPNDec 17, 2024, 06:00 AM ET
- Daniel Oyefusi covers the Cleveland Browns for ESPN. Prior to ESPN, he covered the Miami Dolphins for the Miami Herald, as well as the Baltimore Ravens for The Baltimore Sun.
The Cleveland Browns‘ postgame locker room in Denver on Dec. 2 was muted in the aftermath of a 41-32 loss to the Denver Broncos that dashed any faint playoff hopes the team harbored. But there was a silver lining in the back-and-forth, high-scoring affair.
Wide receiver Jerry Jeudy, playing against his former team for the first time, recorded a career-high 235 yards on nine catches. Fellow wideout Elijah Moore finished with 111 receiving yards — his most in more than three years.
The Monday night game at Empower Field was the type of performance once dreamed of by the two longtime friends and South Florida natives. And it marked a rare bright spot for a Browns team bereft of them this season.
Over the past two months, Jeudy, a Deerfield Beach native, has been one of the most productive receivers in the NFL. Jeudy, the No. 15 pick in the 2020 draft, ranks fifth in receiving yards (1,052) and recorded his first 1,000-yard receiving season in Sunday’s loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. The 480 receiving yards amassed by Moore, who is from Fort Lauderdale, ranks second on the team, and he’s on pace to record a career high in receptions.
The duo’s success has come in large part due to a defining trait — route running — that they and other South Florida natives say was developed training and playing games in the competitive environment unique to the talent-rich area, and by studying local legends such as former Cincinnati Bengals wideout Chad Johnson.
“It’s that flair down there. I guess South Florida has got the blueprint to great receivers,” said Pat Surtain II, a Denver Broncos All-Pro cornerback and fellow South Floridian. “Everything is precise, the routes, and they have the speed, the hands.”
Moore shared the same sentiment when asked what he thought made him and his fellow South Florida receivers unique.
“We’re all different in our own way,” Moore told ESPN, “but we’re going to route some s— up.”
SOUTH FLORIDA, WHICH consists largely of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, has been synonymous with NFL talent for years. In Week 1, players from the area were the most represented in the NFL. Seventeen players from Miami high schools were on an active roster to begin the year, which led the league. Another 12 players on NFL teams came from nearby Plantation in Broward County.
Even with the area being home to some of the league’s brightest stars, from Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson to Surtain, the Browns stand out. When rosters were cut to 53 players on Aug. 27, there were 10 wide receivers from South Florida on teams, according to ESPN Research. The Browns were the only team with more than one. They began the season with three — Moore, Jeudy and Amari Cooper — but traded Cooper to the Buffalo Bills in mid-October amid a 1-5 start to the season.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that,” said Moore, who is in his second season in Cleveland. “Since I was in college, I’ve never been in a room [where] the guys that we brought in are all from Florida and at that, almost the same part. I think it’s exciting. We get to learn from each other.”
When the Browns traded with the Broncos for Jeudy in March, it marked the third straight year the team acquired a wide receiver in a trade — and one from South Florida. The team got Moore in a deal with the New York Jets before the start of the 2023 season. Cooper came from the Dallas Cowboys during the 2022 offseason.
Jeudy, 25, and Moore, 24, already had a connection. Growing up about 30 minutes from each other, they were teammates on the same 7-on-7 squad — Florida Fire in Broward County — and the two faced each other in high school.
“I grew up with him, footballwise,” Moore said of Jeudy.
Just as the history of great NFL players from South Florida spans generations, so does the region’s legend of great route runners.
“Saucy, fast and finesse,” Baltimore Ravens receiver Zay Flowers said to describe South Florida wideouts. Flowers, a Fort Lauderdale native, is on the verge of his first 1,000-yard season and ranks 13th in yards (916). “We all move, and we do stuff that other states can’t do. If you see Jerry Jeudy run routes and how he drops and shifts his weight — how I shift my weight, that’s how we move.”
Ken Dorsey, the Browns’ first-year offensive coordinator and playcaller, won the 2001 national championship as the starting quarterback at the University of Miami, throwing to several receivers from South Florida, including Pro Football Hall of Famer Andre Johnson and eight-year NFL veteran Roscoe Parrish.
Two decades after his college career ended, Dorsey now sees shades of his former teammates in the receivers he’s coaching.
“Jerry’s got the wiggle … like Roscoe, he’s got that type of wiggle to him and explosiveness,” Dorsey told ESPN
Growing up, Jeudy said he studied the “Ocho tapes” — cutups of Chad Johnson, who briefly went by the name Chad Ochocinco, effortlessly separating from defensive backs. Johnson was a six-time Pro Bowl selection and two-time All-Pro during his 11-year career.
Moore said he watched former Pittsburgh Steelers and Liberty City native Antonio Brown, whose elusiveness made him one of the toughest wide receivers to cover during the 2010s. Brown’s 84.2 receiving yards per game are the fourth most in NFL history among players with at least 50 games played.
Cooper, who has 481 receiving yards and three touchdowns in 12 games this season, was a blue-chip recruit out of Northwestern High when he committed to the University of Alabama. He won the Fred Biletnikoff Award, given to the top college wide receiver, in 2014. Jeudy, also a former Alabama star, won the award in 2018.
“Coop’s a big inspiration for Florida. He set the pavement for a lot of us,” Moore said.
JERRY JEUDY 70-YARD TD IN HIS RETURN TO DENVER 🔥 pic.twitter.com/1J2KX1oAY3
— ESPN (@espn) December 3, 2024
THE ROUTE-RUNNING skills were forged when they were kids on the streets and parks of South Florida. From there, the skills transferred to Pop Warner, high school and 7-on-7, and spread across the country for those talented enough to play in college.
“South Florida, if I’m being honest with you, is just a whole different mecca,” Surtain told ESPN. “The competitive atmosphere, you’ve got grown adults talking about how they bet on youth football games. It’s a different type of competitive structure down there, and I think one of the positions where you see that a lot is at receiver.”
Jeudy says he ran ladder drills — training on a flat, plastic ladder to improve footwork — as early as he can remember. Moore went to weekly football camps that focused on skill training and one-on-ones. And then there were the spontaneous acts of slipperiness born from impromptu games of streetball, a free-for-all contest.
“It starts when you’re on the park,” said Teddy Bridgewater, a former NFL quarterback and Cooper’s high school teammate. “And everyone calls it something different. Some call it ‘throw-up tackle,’ ‘throwback tackle,’ ‘kill a man with the football,’ whatever it is. But I think that’s where all the shiftiness begins, on the parks when you already played your football game, and after your game, you’re playing throwback tackle, and you’re making 15, 20, people miss all at the same time. And as you grow older, you start applying some of those moves that you were using when you were 9, 10, 11, 12, and it becomes a part of your bag.”
Bridgewater, who is now the head football coach at his and Cooper’s alma mater, Northwestern, said he can spot a wide receiver from South Florida without much effort.
“It’s the knee bend, the way he cuts, the indicators he gives before he runs, before he cuts on the route,” Bridgewater, who led Northwestern to a 3A state title over the weekend, told ESPN. “That’ll tell you a lot about a guy, especially if you know a guy who’s from South Florida. Everybody has that little something that they put on their routes that just lets you know, ‘Yeah, he’s from the crib.'”
THE BROWNS SAY trading for multiple wide receivers who grew up in the same area happened by chance. However, there was a clear attribute that the organization openly coveted: the ability to separate from a defender.
Since 2020, Moore and Jeudy rank 19th and 27th out of 99 qualifying wide receivers in separation, defined as the yards from the nearest defender at a pass’ arrival.
The Browns’ new-look offense failed to take off with quarterback Deshaun Watson under center. But since Jameis Winston took over in Week 8 for Watson, who sustained a season-ending right Achilles tendon tear, Jeudy’s and Moore’s skill sets have shined more with the team’s dropback concepts, particularly option/choice routes. These choice routes give pass catchers the freedom to break their route in a given direction depending on the leverage of the defense.
“Ultimately, especially at that position, the skill positions on offense, you want guys that can get open,” Glenn Cook, the Browns’ assistant general manager and VP of pIayer personnel, said in August. “I think ultimately those guys are pretty talented route runners and understand how to get open in different ways from different positions.”
After winning 11 games and making the playoffs in 2023, the Browns have had a disappointing year, registering their 18th 10-loss season since returning to Cleveland in 1999. With Watson’s struggles and his latest injury, the quarterback position is likely to be in the spotlight again this offseason for a franchise that has started 39 different quarterbacks since 1999, the most in the league.
However, the development of Jeudy and Moore, the latter of whom is an unrestricted free agent after the season, could be a franchise building block and provide valuable targets for whoever is under center in 2025.
“We’re all kind of cut from the same cloth,” Cooper said in July. “We’re all South Florida guys. We’re all really good route runners. We all have been playing football since a very young age, have been running routes from a very young age. So, you kind of have a natural feel for the position.”
ESPN reporters Jamison Hensley and Jeff Legwold contributed to this report.
