The Cleveland Browns may have lost the NFL’s most dominant pass rusher, but the player they got back in the June 1 trade is drawing a different kind of attention.
Jared Verse, the centerpiece of the deal that sent Myles Garrett to the Los Angeles Rams, was not among ESPN’s top 10 pass rushers in Jeremy Fowler’s latest anonymous poll of league scouts and executives. He had been on the list in 2025, but this time he landed as the top honorable mention after being bumped by Denver Broncos edge Nik Bonitto.
That might look like a step back on paper. The scouting note Fowler surfaced says otherwise.
“Love Verse, but some of the other rushers higher than him have more variety, whereas Verse is all power at times,” an AFC exec said, via Fowler. “But he's only going to get better and have a great career. He's a beast.”
That’s the part Browns fans should probably focus on. Verse is already a proven NFL player, with NFL Rookie of the Year honors and two Pro Bowls in his first two seasons, but he’s still only 25 and still working through the rookie contract stage of his career. The league sees the upside clearly: a young edge rusher with room to grow into something even more complete.
For Cleveland, that matters because the Garrett trade was never about replacing a finished product with another finished product. It was about betting on the future.
If the Browns truly believed they were in a championship window, Garrett would have stayed. Instead, they chose to leverage his value, and the return had to be substantial enough to justify moving on from a player who was No. 1 on Fowler’s list and sat atop every ballot.
Garrett’s contract only sharpened that reality. In a market where pass rushers keep getting more expensive, he remained on a team-friendly deal and still looked like the rarest kind of player. Trading him without a centerpiece like Verse coming back would have been impossible to defend.
That’s why the early read on the deal has held up better than plenty of Browns fans might have expected when the move happened. Cleveland now has a roster loaded with youth - 54 players aged 25 and under on its 90-man training camp roster - and Verse fits the timeline.
Garrett was the known commodity. Verse represents what comes next.
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