Josh Rosen adds twist to bizarre story of Browns exec who met UCLA's volleyball team

One of the most bizarre stories that came out after the NFL Draft came last week when Browns executive Alonzo Highsmith was asked about the top quarterbacks in the draft. 

During an interview with the Canton Repository, Highsmith had some very reasonable explanations for why he liked certain quarterbacks and why he didn’t really care for a few other ones. For instance, Highsmith was high on Baker Mayfield because the former Oklahoma quarterback lost two receivers in 2017 and was still productive. That makes sense. 

Highsmith also admitted that he wasn’t a big fan of Josh Allen due to the quarterback’s inaccuracy. Since completing passes is 75 percent of a quarterback’s job, it makes sense that Highsmith didn’t want the Browns to take Allen. 

And now, here’s where things bizarre. 

When the topic of Josh Rosen came up, Highsmith hinted that Rosen dropped on his board because of a strange encounter that the Browns executive had with the UCLA volleyball team.  

“I was at an airport,” Highsmith said. “UCLA’s volleyball team was in front of me. You heard so much about Rosen. He’s this or that. We all know how people talk. So I asked one of the volleyball coaches, ‘What’s Rosen like?’ He said, ‘Aaaaa, you should probably ask his girlfriend. She’s one of the players. She’s over there.’ I’m like, ‘All right coach. That’s good enough.'”

At that point, the story abruptly ends with Highsmith making a bizarre observation about Rosen completely based on his encounter with the UCLA coach.  

“I don’t know what all this means, but there was something about him that bothered me,” Highsmith said. 

So what exactly happened at the airport? 

Well, for one, we now know that Highsmith didn’t take the volleyball coach’s advice and speak to Rosen’s girlfriend. During an interview on The Rich Eisen Show this week, Rosen revealed a twist to the story: Highsmith didn’t try to get a single detail about Rosen from the quarterback’s significant other. 

“I thought it was interesting that he didn’t talk to my girlfriend,” Rosen said. “Maybe he was scared of someone actually saying something good about me? I don’t know, I thought it was funny.”

Also, Rosen was just as befuddled as everyone else by the entire situation. 

“It’s amazing that you can pull a red flag from something with literally zero information,” Rosen said. “Like, he literally pulled absolutely no information from his encounter and it managed to be a red flag.”

With that last quote, Rosen might have just described the entire NFL Draft process in a nutshell: No one knows anything and something that means nothing can be a red flag. If a chance meeting with a college volleyball team at an airport can hurt a player’s stock, then anything can. 

The good news for Rosen is that things actually ended up working out pretty well for him in the draft. After the Browns, Jets and Bills all passed on him, the Cardinals traded up to grab him with the 10th overall pick.