Browns giving once-jailed Mcdowell his second chance
BEREA — Cleveland Browns fans, and the team's general managers, have been snowed before.
Johnny Manziel, Antonio Callaway and the receiver with seemingly nine NFL lives, Josh Gordon, at times all seemed worthy of believing in, worthy of second chances. Gordon, especially, said all the right things when he spoke to the Cleveland media, but couldn't be trusted from the moment he set foot outside 76 Lou Groza Blvd.
Since 1999, high character hasn't always been the defining trait in putting together the team. Were John Dorsey still the Browns general manager, he would have collected four or five players with bad choices in their pasts by now.
Until Tuesday, the second-year partnership of General Manager Andrew Berry and coach Kevin Stefanski had one — running back Kareem Hunt, a Dorsey pickup who Berry signed to a two-year, $12 million contract extension last September.
Now there are two. Standing beside the 6-foot-6, 295pound defensive tackle Malik Mcdowell on Tuesday after he made the Browns' 53-man roster, it wasn't just his size that was striking.
Mcdowell sounded humble. There wasn't a subject that he shied away from, including the 11-month jail sentence he received in Michigan on charges stemming from two incidents. In February 2019, he got into an altercation with police and was charged with assault, resisting arrest and operating a vehicle while intoxicated. That April, police found a stolen car in Mcdowell's possession.
And that's not even all of it.
The 35th overall pick of the Seattle Seahawks four years ago, Mcdowell is 25 and hasn't played football since the 2016 season at Michigan State. He said suffering a head injury in a 2017 ATV accident before the start of Seahawks training camp contributed to a litany of legal issues that followed.
“A lot of stuff drove me to what I had going on,” Mcdowell said. “The accident was the biggest part. … That's where I lost my faith, and I shouldn't have ever lost my faith."
His offenses also included a DUI charge not long after the accident, then an arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct in December 2017.
Mcdowell said his mother, Joya Crowe, who lives in Detroit, never gave up on him. He said what hurt him the most was the phone calls he made asking her to bail him out of jail.
“I disappointed myself a lot, but hurting her, she was the only one that stuck by my side and I put her through some unnecessary pain. That was the biggest letdown for me, just letting her down,” he said. “When I didn't believe in myself, she was still there for me. Every day she told me, ‘You're going to play football one day again,' even though I didn't believe her. … She saw past everything I was going through. She was my real driving force.”
Mcdowell's time behind bars helped him regain his hunger to play football.
“[It] gave me a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do in life and where my life was heading. So that really gave me the motivation to push to try to fight back to get back what I lost,” he said. “I know what my life could be without football and the stuff I fell into without playing football. I just wanted to get some more structure back in my life."
Stefanski made it clear that Mcdowell knows he's walking a fine line.