Here is Peter King's story on how Blake became a Brown:
A week in the corona-wracked season of the Cleveland Browns begins, actually, on the Saturday before the week started. This was the day before the Cleveland-Pittsburgh regular-season finale, and GM Andrew Berry was worried. Cleveland’s two offensive line coaches, Bill Callahan and Scott Peters, tested positive for COVID-19, and the Browns couldn’t take the chance that the virus would bubble up Sunday and take a player or players off the offensive line.
Berry phoned Jets GM Joe Douglas, a friend, in New Jersey at 9:38 a.m. Berry didn’t want to blindside Douglas by pillaging one of his practice-squad players without telling him. So Berry explained about the line coaches, and his fear that there might be a spread, and he needed an insurance tackle, and he liked second-year practice-squadder
Blake Hance of the Jets. The Jets were going to Foxboro that day, and Berry wanted to make sure he could sign Hance before the Jets left for Massachusetts. Douglas understood. In fact, he had Jets personnel coordinator Christina Wedding print Hance’s Jets termination letter and his agreement with Cleveland, so Hance could sign them and they could be filed with the league.
Now for the COVID issue. It’s good that Berry liked Hance—the Browns were going to try to sign him for 2021 camp anyway—because Cleveland needed a player who was within driving distance of Cleveland and had been in a regular team testing program.
Huh? If a player flies to a new city, he must test negative for five days while quarantining because of the risk of COVID-contact in an airport or airplane. If Berry had been the Seattle GM, with the nearest NFL city 15 hours away by car (Niners), it would have been totally impractical to get a player. But there are 11 NFL teams within a seven-hour drive of Cleveland. Hance was on one of them, six-and-a-half hours and 443 miles away by car, and he had tested negative that morning in Florham Park, N.J., home of the Jets. He had a car. After signing the contracts, Hance packed his things, hopped on I-80, and was at the Browns’ Intercontinental Hotel by 7 p.m., ready for virtual meetings with his new team.
In an elevator at the hotel, masked, he saw someone he recognized. Hance was a training-camp cut of Washington in 2019, blocking in camp for quarterback
Case Keenum. Now he saw Keenum, the backup to Baker Mayfield.
“I know you, right?” Keenum said, trying to place the face—hard to do, when the face is masked.
“Case, it’s Blake—Blake Hance,” he said.
Whoa. Keenum wondered what this masked man from his past was doing in the Browns hotel the night before the biggest game of the year.
“I’m on the team now,” Hance said.
Blake Hance is going to have a great story to tell his grandchildren one day. Said Berry, who started the wheels turning: “It’s very much a 2020 story.