The Odell Beckham Jr. trade was hard to take in for many, but now, there’s no doubt about it. Beckham is a Cleveland Brown rather than a New York Giant, and that point was driven home by Beckham being introduced to the media yesterday for the first time with the Browns. The deal went down more than a week ago, but seeing Beckham in Browns colors helps to finally cement that it’s a real thing that happened.
And of course, Beckham spoke about his departure from the Giants wile meeting with the media alongside quarterback Baker Mayfield and former college teammate Jarvis Landry.
“It’s such a sudden change. You build relationships with your teammates and those other guys on that team and that’s really the hardest thing. Like seeing Saquon and Shep the other night and like we were all like, ‘Damn, it’s just different.’ It’s really the guys in the locker room, the people you go to war with and you wake up in training camp and go through all those things with,” said Beckham, while praising the opportunity to make new friends on a new team.
“I don’t know how else to describe it. It just was a lot of emotions and a lot of thoughts that run through your mind. They’re all life-changing. They’re all the same, in theory, but it’s changing,” Beckham also said, while speaking about finding out about the trade via phone call from Dave Gettleman.
This is yet another reminder of what could have been, for the Giants. Before last season, the team was praised not just by fans but by analysts in the media for having offensive depth. It was believed that the combination of Beckham, Barkley, and Sterling Shepard could dominate early on and drag the Giants to a better season than the one that led to them drafting Barkley in the first place.
Instead, the team was mediocre at best and the Giants are once again picking in the top ten. The ideas of a one-two punch in the passing and running game with Beckham in Barkley will never be realized, and it remains to be seen how much of Beckham’s production can be replaced by Golden Tate.
Ideal or not, though, it’s the situation the Giants have to live with. Seeing Beckham at a Browns press conference in the flesh just helps to hammer home the point. The Beckham era with the Giants is over. And now, we can see it with our own eyes.