No team entered the 2019 season with more hype than the Cleveland Browns. They were supposed to be at the center of the football universe, and entered the year with six games scheduled for primetime, one shy of the maximum. This was the year they would finally break through after years of failure – and America would be watching.
And then the football was played. Now, sat at 1-2 – their sole win was against an awful New York Jets team – with an injury-riddled roster, a trip to a resurgent Baltimore on the horizon and a rookie head coach showing all the tell-tale signs of being a, well, rookie head coach, the Browns’ season of promise is in trouble. They have been distinctly average. In the normal course of things in Cleveland, that would be great. But relative to the hype and preseason expectations, they have been a borderline disaster.
No one has been as disappointing as second-year quarterback Baker Mayfield. It was Mayfield who changed the whole tenor of the organization, the city. Cleveland’s brand shifted; it was now cool and young and brash and relevant. Whatever went before was gone. This would be a team of style and substance, who spoke big then backed it up.
Mayfield stole the city in his rookie year. His play, like most rookies, was promising but inconsistent. And yet the team, with Mayfield on board, immediately leaped several rungs on the NFL ladder. From laughing stock to a bonafide playoff contender in the blink of a Tyrod Taylor injury.
The offseason served to solidify the Browns’ new-found status. Dysfunction and disorder were out. These were the new Browns, headed by the bluster and bravado of Mayfield and Freddie Kitchens, the team’s new head coach, and the cunning of John Dorsey, the team’s top decision-maker and a front-office lifer. Dorsey nabbed Odell Beckham, one of the league’s top pass-catchers, in one of the great trade swindles of the decade.
The years of doom and gloom were about to pay off. Cleveland had their star quarterback, a roster full of high draft picks, and a smattering of impact veterans who would elevate the team towards a championship.
And so far, it’s been a dud. Cleveland’s offense is stuck at 28th in DVOA, a measure of a team’s non-garbage time efficiency. The passing game has been less efficient than the run-game. They have converted just 11 third downs all season.
The way the team plays looks different, too. Gone are the motions and shifts and fun and games of last year. Kitchens, who aced his audition as offensive play-caller last year, is bombing in his first leading role.
“If you’re looking to blame somebody,” Kitchens said of Cleveland’s early-season struggles. “Blame me. Don’t blame any of our players, don’t blame any of our coaches.” They were the words of a man who had spent the offseason gobbling up books with titles such as “Fault Lines: how to take ownership and succeed” and “Not I or Me: It’s We” and other such generic garbage.
Transparent bids at taking accountability ring hollow in locker rooms. Cleveland’s starting tackles are not good enough and the offense has lacked the kind of imagination that sparked 2018’s late-season surge. The players know it. Kitchen’s time and energy have been shifted towards everything in the building, not solely what the Browns will do on first down. The difference is drastic.
And yet it’s Mayfield who remains the biggest concern. He sits 31st in DVOA among 37 qualified starters. If you rule out the two starters from the Dolphins, a team intentionally trying to lose, Mayfield would rank as the fifth-worst quarterback in the league by down-to-down efficiency, behind the likes of Jameis Winston and Andy Dalton. Things are even worse in terms of total value (DYAR). There, Mayfield is 34th sitting at minus-118, ahead of only Kyler Murray and the Miami twins. That’s 29 spots below Lamar Jackson, another quarterback in his second year in the league – but one who attracted significantly less hype than Mayfield.
Stick on any of Cleveland’s first three games and you notice a worrying trend: Mayfield bailing on plays early. He has happy feet in the pocket and is anticipating and expecting pressure without an iota of trust in his protection.
In fairness to Mayfield, that lack of trust has been earned. Mayfield has been pressured by defenders on around a third of his dropbacks in 2019, the eighth-worst mark in the league. The Browns finished with the 11th best pressure rate in the NFL a year ago, three whole percentage points better off per game. Give a quarterback that many more plays unencumbered per season and they will feast.
There are other, more nuanced issues. One is the inclusion of Beckham in the offense. Such a star demands defensive attention – which should liberate others to make plays – but he also demands touches. The Browns haven’t figured out how to incorporate him properly into their offense yet, and Mayfield has struggled as a result.
A quarterback unable to play his natural game helps no one. When quarterbacks start forcing the ball to their top target and predetermine throws prior to the snap, the rest of the offense sags. That is no knock on Beckham. He has played to his typically great levels. But the way he has been used has been ham-fisted and amateur – a quick screen here, a bubble pass there. When he has broken plays within the structure of the system, Mayfield has looked elsewhere:
Ollie Connolly
(@OllieConnolly)Mayfield/The Browns O has been odd this year. They spent the first part of Sunday night scheming ways to get OBJ the ball — quick hitch, slant RPO, bubble. Then when a chance to hit him on a shot came, Baker passed it up. pic.twitter.com/L7hEOX0Y0D
The other issues: injuries and penalties. The Browns are far-and-away the leaders in penalties this season, with 35 of them, totaling 327 yards – that’s about a game’s worth of offense. Penalties are an amalgamation of bad coaching, a lack of talent and bad luck. Cleveland best hope the calls that have gone against them lean towards the latter, despite evidence pointing to the other two. The injuries are all fluke. Nine starters have missed at least one game this season due to injury or suspension. Few teams could stand that level of talent decay.
There remains hope – and, of course, we are only three games into the season. Cleveland’s defense has been Good with a capital G. It is currently eighth in defensive efficiency. The Browns have the potential to have the best unit in the league, and should finish in the top-five once everybody is healthy. And while the defense hasn’t risen to its potential yet, it has provided a good enough platform for the offense to win games.
Cleveland face the fifth-easiest remaining schedule, according to the analytics nerds at Football Outsiders. 9-7 may be enough to get them into the playoffs in the AFC, and playoffs are a must. Cleveland or not, the expectations remain high. The pressure is on Mayfield to prove his rookie season was not another false dawn.