Much like Hue Jackson, John Dorsey had a moment of clarity at the end of the team's private workout with Baker Mayfield in late March.
The Browns general manager knew he'd found his No. 1 pick.
"I knew in my gut that was going to be the guy," Dorsey said Wednesday on NFL Network's "Good Morning Football."
Dorsey, though, kept that feeling to himself. The process, he said, needed to play itself out, and he didn't want to cloud the judgment of those around him who would be backing the decision.
"When you make a decision this large you want to have unanimous consent in the building," Dorsey said. "You don't want to set the stage or alter anything. You want to hear unbiased opinion on everybody before you make this decision. That's why I kept it as pure as I possibly could."
And that's exactly what happened, mirroring the process Dorsey went through one year earlier as Kansas City's general manager, when the Chiefs traded up in the first round to nab Texas Tech quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Dorsey took in one of Mayfield's games in the months before he took over as Cleveland's general manager, and the Browns, as a whole, first met with the Heisman Trophy winner at the Senior Bowl. They touched base at the NFL Combine before bringing him to Berea for a full-day, pre-draft visit.
Even with Mayfield's Pro Day conflicting with the start of free agency, the Browns had more than enough time and opportunities to dig further and further into Mayfield's makeup. At every step in the process, more and more people in the organization came to the same realization Dorsey did.
"It's a combination of things when you truly meet Baker," Dorsey said. "I've always been of the mindset I want to meet you face to face and find out intuitively from my lens who you are as a man, who you are as a player. When I sit and talk to players like this, I sit in the mindset of the former player who says 'what is this guy going to be like in the locker room?' I kind of go that way when I go talk to these people.
"The more I was around him, the more I could feel his presence. I could feel his deep intellect. He had broad range of thinking on different subject matter. Then when you put him on the board with the Xs and Os with the coaching staff, he knocked it out of the park there.
"As this process went along, everybody really loved the person moving forward. We're very happy to have him on the team."
