Your 2026 Browns Season Preview

 

In most NFL cities the approach of the season opener brings a sense of cautious optimism.  "Maybe the team will be really good this year!  You know, those guys they got in the draft looked pretty good in preseason!"  This is not the case in places like New York, Nashville, Las Vegas and Phoenix but nowhere more so than in Cleveland.  Since the acquisition of sex deviant and bad quarterback DeShaun Watson in 2022, each home opener seems more depressing than the last.  At least in 2022 Browns fans had to ability to have cautious optimism as they wrestled with the conundrum of the moral implications of hoping for Watson's success on the field to benefit the team.  This is counterbalanced by the moral drag of supporting a sociopath.  When the Browns limped along waiting to see if the deal with the devil they made for Watson would pan out, at least in 2022 the myth of future success was still alive.  That is clearly not happening.  Now as the Browns stubbornly jam Watson onto the starting lineup to see if they can milk anything out of him, Browns fans have to weigh if their collective hatred of Watson as a person or the certainty of his upcoming failure as being more distasteful.  Watson is the gift that has kept on giving.  

You'd have to be delusional to think that the 2026 Browns are going to win many games.  There aren't many teams that are focused on winning now that trade the single season sack record holding edge rusher and also make no effort to acquire a potential starting QB.  The Browns front office has done everything to communicate with fans to say, "We don't care about 2026.  We only want to be good when the Grift Dome opens.".  I think it can honestly be said that when they traded Joe Flacco in division last season the team had fully committed to the seemingly never ending "rebuild" they have been on for almost a quarter century.  With all the cap money tied to the Watson debacle, it is impossible to get out from under it unless they somehow got lucky with the Gabriel/Sanders draft picks.  They didn't.  Both Gabriel and Sanders are going to top out as potential backup quarterbacks, and if I'd have to lay down a bet right now, my guess is Gabriel is in the league longer than Sanders.  The team went 5-12 last year.  Is there any reason to think they will be better this year?  Allow me to walk you through a few scenarios...

Doomed Scenario 1:  "This is a highly talented roster."  I don't think Browns fans are more myopic than most other teams fans, but I'm honestly not positive.  It's hard to wrap your head around the fact that despite year after year of failure, there is a large portion of the fanbase that is convinced that the team will somehow succeed THIS year.  The key to that belief is that the Browns players, due to familiarity I suppose, are well known to them and therefore excellent players.  Add into this equation that the fanbase thinks that the Browns are the only team that has upgraded through the draft, and you've got this idea that the roster is LOADED.  A quick reality check will point out that the team won 5 games last year and all-in-all didn't make a massive bunch of overhauls.  Yes, there are new players for the offensive line, but this doesn't mean they are good players.  If the Texans and Chargers let offensive linemen walk, that's not a great sign.  Losing Myles and replacing him with Verse isn't an equal trade off.  Myles is a Hall of Famer still in his prime.  That offensive lineman required to double team him can now go block someone else.  The roster isn't that good.  The rookie wide receivers aren't as good as you think.  One will probably be a bust. The roster is that of a 5-12 team.

Doomed Scenario #2:  "If we can get decent QB play from either Watson or Sanders, this team could compete."  Now, this statement on its own is valid.  If you could get decent QB play from ANYBODY the team could compete.  The problem is there is no reason to think that you will.  The fact that the front office refused to bring in a veteran option and instead just allowed Watson to trot out there one more time points to the idea that the Browns DON'T WANT TO WIN.  The team fully expects backup to "Holy shit is this guy terrible" level of play so they can nestle into that top 3 in the draft to bring in Arch Manning regardless of how poorly or well he plays in college this year.  The Browns believe if they can cobble together the key parts of a good roster now, they can instantly become a relevant franchise once again with the arrival of Franchise Savior QB#7 (see Tim Couch, Brady Quinn, Brandon Weedon, Baker Mayfield, Deshaun Watson, and John Football as reference points on how that plan works out typically for Cleveland).  Listen, if they thought Sanders was the answer, they never would have traded Myles.  They know Sanders is a backup at best, and the rest of the league knows it too.  That's wby no one has traded for him.  The team has no QB.  You cannot win without a decent QB.  Closely related to this line of thinking is "If the offense improves, the defense is so good that they'll win way more games!".   Defense is rarely static, and this one just lost the best pass rusher in football.  On top of that, they were healthy on the defensive side of the ball.  They've already taken two big injuries on the D-line, and the chances of Ward being healthy all year are remote at best.  They are two injuries away from being closer to the Colts defense than the Texans.  

Doomed Scenario #3:  "The Ravens, Bengals and Steelers are all down this year.  The Browns can sneak in and win the division."  No, they can't.  Lamar and Burrow are two of the top 5 quarterbacks in the league.  Even if the rest of their team sucks, those guys can keep a team in the game.  Those are both "win because of" not "win with" quarterbacks.  Rodgers is a "win with" guy at this point.  Watson/Sanders are nestled into that undesirable "win in spite of" category normally reserved for Blake Bortles and Tua.  The win totals for those teams are Ravens 11.5, Bengals 10.5 and Steelers 8.5.  The Browns are a full three games behind at 5.5 wins.  I recognize that there are Browns fans that think these third party experts that assess projected results are wrong, but are you going to trust people that work in that massive hotel with a lake in the desert or Jim from Berea on this topic?  They haven't won the division in 30 years.  Why would they do that now? 

Doomed Scenario #4:  "Last year's draft was great, so this year's guys will all hit too."  The Browns did have a good draft last year, but let's not forget they spent two picks on QBs that will likely not be on the roster next year and who clearly didn't deliver.  There is no reason to assume the team will have a 100% hit rate with this year's draft, especially with two receivers taken so early.  Or perhaps you've forgotten Corey Coleman, Quincy Morgan, Greg Little, etc etc etc.  If they get lucky, one of those two receivers will turn into a moderately decent starter.  The other guy will linger around for a couple years in special receiver sets where they almost never throw him the ball.  Fannon is fine.  Judkins is fine.  These guys aren't championship building blocks.  They are legit NFL players, but the team needs about 7-9 more to worry about winning the division.  

I think the best analysis of the Browns 2026 season came from a woman I know that zeroed right in on the facts.  "The over under on the Browns is 5.5 games?  Oh, UNDER for sure!  It's the Browns!  They aren't winning six games."  That's it in a nutshell, isn't it?  We all can see this coming because we have been here so many times before.  They will play 3 or 4 quarterbacks, all of who give them almost no chance to win.  The defense will regress without Schwartz and play some nonsensical scheme.  And so we continue the futility that has stripped most of the fanbase of all hope, and leaving the few that somehow have talked themselves into believing in the franchise exposed as fools.  The season kicks off next week, and they'll be out of it by Halloween if history serves correct.  If nothing else, the 2026 Browns look EXACTLY like something we have seen before, and that something is one of the worst teams in the league.   

Go Browns.