How do we turn the Browns into a Super Bowl contender?
Plus, improbable playoff scenarios and TNF picks
Cleveland is better than it has been in decades. How can the Browns make their next leap?
The Browns looked like paper tigers early in the season. Over the past two weeks, they’ve proven themselves a worthy playoff team.
Cleveland slashed through a soft schedule en route to an 8-3 start, but that record did little to answer lingering questions about their ability to compete for even a divisional crown. Then, the team that labored to single-score wins over the Bengals, Texans, and Eagles made their statement. The Browns took a 38-7 halftime lead over the AFC South-leading Titans in a Week 13 victory. Eight days later, they fell one 55-yard field goal from overtime against the Ravens.
In the process, Kevin Stefanski’s team flipped from “team you’ll love to bet against in the Wild Card Round” to “darkhorse AFC championship squad.” Cleveland has its share of flaws, but its recent record shows the team that was run off the field by Baltimore and Pittsburgh in the first half of the season has been replaced by a more competent group. The Browns suddenly look like they can hang with almost anyone in the conference (Chiefs and Bills pending) and have an easy path to their first 11-win season since Bill Belichick was at the helm.
While there’s no doubt this is Cleveland’s most talented team in a long, long time, there are several flaws that stand in its way. The Browns have a defense that’s given up more points than all but five other teams in the NFL. Starting quarterback Baker Mayfield has two games with at least four touchdown passes and three with zero. The offense has all the consistency of a Tunica casino buffet spread.
2020 probably won’t be the year the Browns earn a conference or NFL title, but 2021 could be. A young foundation has set the stage for a new era of success in northeast Ohio. What’s the next step for a rising team with big aspirations? Here’s where Cleveland should focus their efforts next offseason.
1. Find linebacker help
Cleveland has one of the league’s most powerful defensive lines thanks to the presence of Pro Bowler Myles Garrett, revitalized veterans Sheldon Richardson and Olivier Vernon, and the oft-underrated Larry Ogunjobi. The secondary, while a work in progress, features a young All-Pro candidate in Denzel Ward. There’s a lot to like about this defense!
But there are also several holes that need to be filled. On Monday, Lamar Jackson exploited the Browns’ lack of speed in the second level en route to a season-high 124 rushing yards and two touchdowns. He only needed nine carries to get there. As a team, the Ravens averaged more than seven yards per carry in a 47-42 win.
There’s no shame in getting roasted by the reigning MVP — even on a night where he may or may not have missed multiple drives due to bubble guts — but it is a definite problem for a roster that will face Baltimore at least twice annually and likely face mobile quarterbacks like Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes in the playoffs. Opponents have run for 5.4 yards per carry and 2.5 touchdowns per game in Cleveland’s four losses this fall. In the team’s nine wins, those numbers drop to 3.7 yards per rush and .67 rushing TDs each week.
Some of the run stopping struggles can be blamed on Ogunjobi suffering through a down season, though third-round pick Jordan Elliott has been solid in rotational work behind him. The bigger issue comes from the linebacker crew that plays behind them. Cleveland lacks speed in the “3” of their 4-3 defense. This not only leaves this crew unable to track down electric runners but also saps energy from their pass rush packages. B.J. Goodson and Malcolm Smith, for example, have 56 recorded blitzes total but only six pressures and 1.5 sacks between them through 13 games.
There hasn’t been an easy fix for this in recent years. The NFL’s inside linebacker market has been thin. The limited supply left players like former Brown Joe Schobert to collect nearly $54 million in free agency by signing elsewhere. Even the cost of adding a reclamation project like former Cardinals first-round pick Haason Reddick has gone way up. Although Cleveland is set for an estimated $26 million in salary cap space for 2021, it also has free agent decisions to make on Vernon, Ogunjobi, and rising wideout Rashard Higgins before considering extensions for other essential players. Plugging this hole is a priority, but so is getting value at a position where there’s little to be found.
Proposed fix: Throw a mid-level contract at Vikings LB Eric Wilson and look at draft targets like Nick Bolton or Jaycee Horn. Wilson is having the best year of his young career and has been useful in both limited pass rushing attempts and in coverage (three interceptions, a 74.3 passer rating against in 55 targets). He won’t come cheap, but he’d immediately upgrade the speed and versatility of Cleveland’s linebacking corps. Bolton and Horn could each be Day 2 targets who could bring more athleticism and range to that limited group.
Also, keep Sione Takitaki around. That dude’s mean.
2. Find safety help
Andrew Sendejo has started all 13 of the Browns’ games this season. Anyone familiar with the veteran safety is well aware how troubling this is.
Sendejo is an emergency broadcast system siren come to life, a loud burst of noise that gains your attention briefly before being summarily dismissed. He’s allowed 11.1 yards per target and a 150.8 passer rating when he’s the closest defensive back in coverage this season. His nine missed tackles are by far the most on the Cleveland roster. The only other player with more than five? That would be Sendejo’s running mate Karl Joseph, with six in 45 attempts.
This lack of help — both near the line of scrimmage against the run or as centerfielders swatting down long passes — has been a major deficiency for the league’s 29th-rated defense. While Ward can survive on an island (two interceptions, 15 passes defensed in 10 games this season), the rest of the team’s corners usually cannot.
Sendejo and Joseph are both free agents in 2021, which should lead to a total overhaul at the position. The question is who will take over for them. Second-round rookie Grant Delpit is the most obvious answer, but he has yet to make his NFL debut due to a ruptured Achilles. 2019 fourth-rounder Sheldrick Redwine hasn’t been able to force his way into the lineup and has played only 23 percent of the team’s defensive snaps despite a glaring need for DB help. The club acquired former third-round pick Ronnie Harrison from the Jaguars before the 2020 season began, but he’s struggled to fill that void as well.
Next year’s top free agent safeties — Justin Simmons, Marcus Maye, and Anthony Harris — may not make it to the open market and are likely too expensive for the Browns to begin with. The 2021 NFL Draft doesn’t have any rock solid Day 1 candidates either — Jevon Holland, Hamsah Nasirildeen, and Trevon Moehrig look like the top guys at the moment — though that could all change in the pre-draft process.
Proposed fix: Buy low on Keanu Neal, draft a safety before Day 3, and hope for the best with Delpit’s recovery. Neal was a Pro Bowler in 2017, but injuries have chipped away at his level of play in the years since. He wouldn’t be much of an upgrade over Cleveland’s current safety group, but a change of scenery — even from one cursed franchise to another — and a clean bill of health could make him a bargain addition with some veteran gravitas. Bringing in another rookie as Delpit insurance (maybe Pitt’s Paris Ford?) would also address the problem while building much-needed depth.
3. Extend Baker Mayfield
Mayfield has been his typical trick-or-treat self, but his upside remains too promising to ignore. With quarterback guru Kevin Stefanski at head coach, the former Heisman Trophy winner has recorded career highs in passer rating and touchdown rate along with a career low in interception rate despite a handful of bad performances (some due to weather, others due to the Baker Mayfield of it all).
The third-year quarterback is nearing the point where many first-round passers sign big-money contract extensions. Doing so now would lock the Browns into the long-term risk Mayfield regresses to his 2019 form. It would also limit the cost of his future salaries down the road.
The former Red Raider/Sooner is due a big contract, but unlikely to command anything near the $500 million Mahomes squeezed from the Chiefs. While there’s no doubt he believes in his own abilities, there’s a chance Cleveland can bargain down his annual payday with a long-term contract that gives him a large chunk of guaranteed money and insulates him from any on-field downturn.
While the club would like to lock him into something similar to the Jaguars’ three-year, $54 million deal with Blake Bortles after Jacksonville’s AFC title game appearance, that’s unlikely to happen while Mayfield remains on his rookie deal. Securing him for something like $180 million over five years this offseason would guarantee the young QB a big paycheck even in the face of a COVID-slashed salary cap. It could also prevent the Browns from having to shell out something like $45 million annually if Mayfield continues to raise his value while playing out his rookie deal.
Would Mayfield do that deal? It would make him the third-highest salaried QB in league history, behind only Mahomes ($50m) and Deshaun Watson ($39m). That probably wouldn’t sit well with his agent, but Mahomes is a Super Bowl champion and Watson, nearing the final year of his rookie deal amidst the raging dumpster fire that was Bill O’Brien’s Texans, had more leverage than the Browns’ QB.
Mayfield could wait and hope for a deal similar to Watson’s, but may expose him to another market-shrinking downturn. Would he be willing to bet on himself in search of a $200 million deal? Or is merely “a whole lot of money” enough to keep him in Ohio? It’s tough to say right now, but that’s the conversation Cleveland has to start this offseason.
Proposed fix: Offer Mayfield five years and $180 million with $110 of that guaranteed. Settle for a five year, $190m deal with $115m in guarantees. That’s so much money for a player who ranked 31st among starting quarterbacks in passer rating in 2019, but the Browns need someone — anyone — who can provide stability behind center after decades of wandering through the desert. Mayfield and Stefanski appear to be a winning combination, though their ceiling may be limited. Cleveland would be thrilled with five more years of playoff contention, even if that means trashing the franchise’s oft-ample salary cap space in the process.
Oh, and make sure some of that remaining cap space goes to Nick Chubb, too. — CD
Improbable playoff scenarios
There’s a lot that needs to be sorted in the playoff picture with just three weeks left in the season. Only four teams (Chiefs, Steelers, Packers, Saints) have clinched a spot in the postseason; only six teams (Jets, Bengals, Jaguars, Texans, Chargers, Falcons) are eliminated. Several others are all but officially in or out. According to FiveThirtyEight, the Bills, Rams, and Seahawks all have a 99 percent chance or better of making the playoffs, while the Panthers, Lions, and Cowboys are sitting at 1 percent or worse.
But it’s still 2020, so anything is possible. After playing around with both FiveThirtyEight’s Choose-Your-Own Adventure results and ESPN’s playoff machine, I found a few unlikely playoff scenarios that could technically still happen:
The Bills miss the playoffs
Step one: The Bills lose out (at Broncos, at Patriots, vs. Dolphins).
Step two: The Dolphins win out (vs. Patriots, at Raiders, at Bills) and claim the AFC East title.
Step three: The Ravens, Browns, and Colts/Titans take the three wild card spots. Due to different tiebreakers, the Ravens, Browns, and Colts would need to get to 11 wins, while the Titans could finish 10-6 and beat the Bills on a head-to-head tiebreaker.
The 11-5 Browns are left out of the playoffs
Not that I’d expect it to happen, but it’d be pretty Browns-y:
The Panthers make the playoffs
Step one: The Panthers win out (at Packers, at Washington, vs. Saints)
Step two: The Rams/Seahawks and Bucs secure two of the three wild card berths.
Step three: The Cardinals lose out.
Step four: No team except the division winners and Rams/Seahawks/Bucs end up with more than seven wins. The Panthers would almost assuredly be in at least a three-way tie in this case (with the Cardinals and Vikings or Bears, for example), and they’d also win most tiebreakers due to a superior conference record.
Of course, none of these are going to transpire, but until it’s official, we can all channel Lloyd Christmas:
— SH
Thursday Night Football picks
You may know this week’s guest picker for his pitch-perfect delivery of lines like “hah, that nerd’s ‘vorcin you,” “gimme that money, turkey dick,” and my personal favorite “great fart, Paul! Real poopy!” Todd Robert Anderson has spent more than two decades on our televisions, but his masterpiece was bringing You’re The Worst’s Vernon Barbara to life. Vern was the intersection of pitiable and enviable, a character too stupid to hate and to dense to properly love. He evolved beyond a one-note tertiary joke to become one of the most memorable characters in the best comedy of the 2010s.
Anderson’s performance was vital to fleshing out the endless fountain of loneliness that saturated born-dead Dr. Barbara while making him someone worthy of a happy ending despite himself. He was gracious enough to drop in and help us before Week 15. Though he originally demurred because he doesn’t “know anything about football,” he got back on board when I explained NFL knowledge has at no point been a prerequisite for writing this newsletter.
Aside from providing the control group to our latest experiment over whether or not we’re trustable (hypothesis: sorta!), Anderson co-hosts the weekly My Favorite Shtty Movie over on Facebook and brings that film knowledge and appreciation of cinema both staid and shit to The Film Pigs podcast, which he co-hosts with YTW creator Stephen Falk and writer Stephen J. Skelton. You can find him on Twitter @tonnslingdog, where he is similarly delightful.
We’re unanimous in our choice here, and it’s really odd that in any given week four people would all pick the Raiders to win outright. The Raiders have lost three of their last four, and the game that they did win in that stretch was thanks to last minute Hail Mary against the Jets who may or may not have been rolling with a Gregg Williams fuck-all-y’all 8-man blitz call on that play.
The Chargers, meanwhile, are positively rolling right now, hot off a comeback win over the Falcons, a team that beat these Raiders 43-6 just three short weeks ago. Vegas hasn’t been kind to Jon Gruden’s team either; they’re 2-4 at home this season (3-3 against the spread in that spaceship ass looking sink they call home).
But the Chargers are a pretty sad sack bunch. It’s apparent that Anthony Lynn learned clock management from the fourth or fifth result of a Google search. They key here, for me anyway, is that the Raiders fired Paul Guenther and made Rod Marinelli their defensive coordinator. And if anyone get a better defensive performance out of this team, it’s Marinelli. All they really have to do is keep it close and wait for the Chargers to implode. — RVB