And if you’re not secretly fearing that Brian Hoyer will
break an ankle, that Josh Gordon was flunk his return to work drug screen or
that Jordan Cameron will find retirement a better option than another
concussion, then you’re not a real Browns fan.
Nothing breeds paranoia in the hearts and minds of real
Cleveland Browns fans like unexpected success.
So today, entering a weekend where the Browns have already played and
won handily on the road against the team leading the division at the time, unexpected
success is exactly the conundrum real Browns are wrestling with.
It’s all the big questions now because when your team sits
at 6-3 and most of the rest of the games on the schedule look reasonably
winnable, that’s all that’s left to ponder.
So let’s just go ahead and wonder whether this Browns team, the one with
the least impressive set of “skill” players at its disposal, is playoff
worthy. It’s no longer too early to
consider it let alone too early to say it out loud. No longer do you look like a member of the
Tin Foil Hat Society for even considering it.
But let’s also keep perspective before we start
extrapolating what this team can still accomplish based on what it’s done so
far without Gordon or Cameron in the lineup.
The last time this team won 10 games in a season, a number which at this
point tilts more toward realistic than delusional, it didn’t make the
playoffs. That’s actually a difficult
task to accomplish in the NFL, winning 10 games and still sitting at home in
January. But accomplish that task the
Browns did and that naturally is the antecedent to the deep-seated paranoia
that is so understandable.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the big
winner in all this of course is Jimmy Haslam, the team’s owner. One or two more wins and the NFL will allow
him to send out playoff ticket information to season ticket holders. It’s an owner-friendly policy that allows the
team to charge each season ticket holder an exorbitant price for each potential
home playoff game. If the games don’t
materialize, the money is held by the team, for its account and probably in
some sort of short term high yield investment fund, and credited to the season
ticket holders’ accounts for next season.
The NFL is like Hyman Roth. It
knows how to make money for its partners.
This really has been an improbable season thus far for the
Browns with Thursday’s win, not so much the result but the how, being the most
prominent example. The Browns hadn’t won
on the road in the division since before Bill Clinton met Paula Jones. The
Browns had just come off a 3-game stretch against opponents who had a combined 1
win between them and managed two wins in somewhat unspectacular fashion. Their running game had stalled out the last
several weeks, their best receiver, indeed one of the league’s top receivers,
was still sitting out a drug suspension, their second best receiver was trying
to recover from his third concussion in three years, and their third best
receiver was inactive with a leg injury.
And the defense, as usual, was showing itself to be far less than the
sum of its parts.
The Bengals were leading the division. Their victories were achieved with a bit more
dominance and their quarterback looked to be perhaps finally taking that long
step from a good regular season quarterback to a good playoff quarterback.
In other words, while the game didn’t stack up as a mismatch
neither did it appear to be much reason to believe that on this particular
night the Browns would shed the shackles of seasons’ worth of struggles to
establish relevance.
But perhaps what made it all so improbable was the rather
simple fact that it was November and the Browns were on national television in
a game of relevance. All systems, all
planets were seemingly aligned for a bitter reminder of why the attention of
most Browns fans by this point is on Ohio State.
Nothing ever goes as planned, does it? Andy Dalton was not just bad, he was
historically bad. The Browns’ defense,
rightfully maligned and whose poster child for all its holes was the lightly
talented Buster Skrine, played like the 1985 Chicago Bears. Dalton was hurried. He was harassed. A.J. Green couldn’t permanently shake loose
of Joe Haden and Skrine had two interceptions.
The defense didn’t merely walk through a looking glass. It played as if it were living and working in
Bizarro Cincinnati.
Meanwhile Brian Hoyer has turned into the second coming of
Brian Sipe. There’s nothing particularly
pretty about how he goes about his business.
And yet far more often than not in his Cleveland rebirth the results
have been good enough. At the same time
and perhaps not coincidentally the running game returned. Offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan hasn’t
been able to land on a primary back to this point so he keeps running out all
3, Ben Tate, Terrence West and Isaiah Crowell, and like just about everything
else this season it improbably works.
And what to make of the available receivers on the
roster? Show of hands for all of you who
had tight end Gary Barnidge on your fantasy team this week. Barnidge had two catches for 46 yards and the
ancient Miles Austin had 5 catches for 48 yards. Usually when those are a team’s leading
receivers for the evening the team is looking at the business end of a 30-point
loss. But because the running game was
effective, because the defense was creating turnovers, Hoyer didn’t need to
throw the ball around like he has the past few weeks.
As for Bengals players, coaches, front office staff, ticket
takers and ushers, they likely are all questioning their parentage and
relevance. The ass-whipping they
experienced was that complete. Dalton
ended the evening with a historically bad quarterback rating of 2.0 and that’s
not a typo. What keeps it from being the
statistically worst game in history is, naturally, the performance of a former
member of the Browns, Jeff Garcia, who while toiling for Butch Davis’ version, compiled
a 0.0 rating in a September, 2004 game against Dallas. Ah, good times.
The best part of all this?
The Browns and their fans get to savor it a few extra days.
A few weeks ago I wrote that the Browns had turned a corner
and indeed they have. Even if they lose
out, which they’ve done for several seasons anyway, they’ll still end up with
50% more victories than usual and in context that qualifies as an abject
success. It probably qualifies head
coach Mike Pettine for a raise. But if
past is prologue and Haslam has a proportional reaction akin to what he had
last season with Rob Chudzinski, then Pettine won’t just get a raise but an
extension which, also true to form, Haslam will end up having to eat a few
years down the road.
The reality of this season is still in the early
stages. The remaining schedule isn’t as
unfavorable as the weather likely will be, but this is still a young team whose
progress is upward but uneven. That
means zags when zigs are required, losses where victories seemed assured. I guess what I’m saying is that for all the
reasons that might exist to get one’s hopes up, that’s never the right course
in Cleveland. But I really didn’t need
to tell you that, did I?
