NFL Insider Tom Pelissero Talks Brendan Sorsby, Vikings & Browns with Rich

Tom Pelissero rolled through the Rich Eisen Show this week with the NFL calendar at its quietest stretch, the moment after minicamps when, as he put it, half the league starts trickling out on vacation before everyone files back into the office a week or so after the Fourth of July. But quiet does not mean empty. Pelissero ran through the loose ends still hanging over the league, and the biggest one still belongs to Brendan Sorsby.

Rich teed it up by noting that Jay Bilas had been on the show arguing the NCAA's loss gets overturned on appeal, that this is the dawn of a new lawless era in college sports. Pelissero brought it back to the calendar. The deadline to apply for the NFL supplemental draft is June 22nd, ten days out, and the appeal is not scheduled to be heard until after the college football season. Unless someone expedites it in the next ten days, none of the legal wrangling changes whether Sorsby can be taken this summer. Todd Monken said publicly the Browns would not go down that road. But that is not the league-wide read.

"The prevailing feeling among all the people that I have talked to is that if he were in the supplemental draft right now, if that were held today, Sorsby would be a very high if not a first round pick," Pelissero said. The talent is there, and taking him would free up what teams could do with their 2027 picks in what is supposed to be a deep and quarterback-rich class. Bring a player in, give him a redshirt year, train him to roll in 2027. As Pelissero framed it, there are not a lot of value propositions out there like that.

He pushed back hard on the idea that Sorsby is getting off clean. By Pelissero's accounting the punishment has already landed: millions lost in ad revenue, millions spent in legal fees, and the whole thing attached to him for life, not to mention what the weight of it, plus chants from opposing crowds and social media, might do to his season. The NCAA had its chance at a negotiated settlement and chose court instead, and it has lost these cases over and over. With Sorsby now most likely headed to the 2027 draft, Pelissero does not anticipate much impact on where he goes if he plays like himself this fall.

In Minnesota, the quarterback split between Kyler Murray and JJ McCarthy is genuinely 50/50. Pelissero was at Tuesday's minicamp practice and watched Kevin O'Connell deliberately alternate who went first, who ran with the ones, who closed. He believes the staff already has a lean, even if they will not let anything slip, and his own guess is Murray, while crediting McCarthy for doing everything right this offseason save one of ten quotes in a press conference. McCarthy looks clean mechanically; the question is whether things hold up when the pocket gets messy, which OTAs do not test.

Cleveland is the murkier picture. Andrew Berry would not rule out Deshaun Watson as the quarterback of the future, but Pelissero called it one of the more shocking developments imaginable if Watson, who has played roughly 21 games over five seasons through suspension and injury, parlays 2026 into a new deal. With two 2027 first-rounders, Shedeur Sanders entering year two, and a strong incoming quarterback class, the natural progression, Pelissero said, is for the Browns to use this season under Monken to play everybody and find out if there is anything worth carrying forward.