Browns beat Ravens?

 

I have watched a lot of NFL football games.  I saw Roman Gabriel, Roger Staubach and Billy Kilmer play in person for God's sake.  I saw O.J. Simpson before he ran into a bit of... ummm... domestic trouble.  I've seen Brandon Fucking Weedon live and in the flesh.  However, I cannot ever recall a team winning a game where they seemed less likely or performed as poorly on offense like the Browns did yesterday and still somehow win the game.  This was like a baseball team getting no-hit through 8 innings and cobbling together a couple runs in the 9th as the other team trudges off the field wondering what the hell happened.  The Ravens had to be sitting on that plane with a glazed expression on their faces while raw dogging it on that flight back to Baltimore.  "How did we lose that game?" 

The Browns looked about as incapable on offense in the first half as any team you will ever be forced to watch.  They had three first downs for fuck's sake.  Watson cannot pull the trigger fast enough on his initial read, holds onto it while sort of dancing around, and then fires it into the turf as the receiver slides across the field hoping for a chance to get it.  Over and over and over.  I thought Watson was going to get the hook in the third quarter as it not only looked like the Browns might never get a first down again, but Watson looked like he never played football before.  The Browns line has to be tired of blocking for him in those scenarios.  "Dude, I'm not that good and you are making me have to try to wrestle off Calais Campbell for 20 minutes every single time you drop back to pass."  It's not like it was some weird outlier event either.  This was essentially a continuation of that shit game Watson played in New York I was also forced to endure.  Monken must have been close to joining the rest of us in the "Anybody has to be better than Watson" camp that we have all been firmly ensconced in since 2023.

I would much rather follow a team like the Buffalo Bills.  The Bills have exciting play after exciting play, can't stop anyone on defense, and if they get the ball last their superhuman QB will find a way to win the game or lose it in spectacular fashion.  The current experience of being a Browns fan is to get pummeled with ads telling you that some woman that chopped her tits off in Texas was Sherrod Brown's fault, Amy Acton is hooked on dangerous narcotics, Vivek Ramamswany manipulates stocks, and Jon Husted is some criminal genius that masterminded data centers coming to Ohio to ruin your life.  And you also get some football in between that where Watson fires the ball into the dirt.  At no point between 1pm and 330pm was this an enjoyable experience.  It was more of an endurance test.

Let's take a moment to note that the Browns defense continues to shine after that Jacksonville debacle.  Baltimore had that opening drive that gave the early foreboding of one of those afternoons where the Browns get their dicks pounded into the dirt and the telecast spends half the time showing us the various sad sacks of shit in the dawg pound looking demonstrably sad while pounding 24oz cans of Raspberry Blast seltzers.  After this initial drive, the Ravens couldn't do shit either.  There seems to be this idea that Snoop Huntley is just a slightly lesser version of Lamar, but every time I watch that guy he sort of fucking sucks.  If he was our QB here, we would hate him.  Then again, no one is better equipped to hate their starting QB like Cleveland fans who have such a rich history of having to absorb late career Jake Delhomme in action.  Huntley is actually comparable to Watson as both of these guys spent the early afternoon dancing around while hoping not to get sacked.  The Browns defense shut down the Ravens about as thoroughly as the Ravens had shut down the Browns. 

Now that Myles is gone, maybe the focus should go where it belongs over to Schwesinger as opposed to Verse.  Carson Schwesinger is the best player the Browns have selected out of the first round since they re-booted the franchise in 1999.  That dude flies around out there, and even when stuck on Flowers on a coverage mismatch, he still ran the guy down and made the tackle.  He's going to start getting the overblown Luke Kuechly comparsions because as we know, you can only compare players based on their appearance as we have seen with Lamar=Huntley thus Schwesinger=Kuechly.  Let's stay in our shoes, as he isn't the Generational Linebacker just quite yet, but he is a beast.  He made 13 tackles and forced a Derrick Henry fumble that turned the game around all while playing on one good leg.  That kid is really fucking good.  

It looks like the popular narrative is going to go something like "Deshaun Watson is a 4th quarter comeback king.  Watson might look shaky early, but when the game is on the line he just comes to life."  That is going to be a convenient way to allow recency bias to overcome the fact that Watson hasn't been very good overall and the Browns defense allowed the unlikely Watson-to-Jeudy combination to put Shitzmick in position to make the game winner.  (I will admit to being a little crestfallen that I wasn't going to be able to write about the first kick being blocked. That Ravens player was absurdly offsides.).  Watson is the 25th ranked QB on QBR, just below Malik Willis and Bucs undrafted rookie Jalon Daniels, so it's not like this team is rock solid.  It's the same old problem but since the Browns are 4-2, we don't have to talk about it.  I'm good with that.  We can circle back on that later.  

It's amazing that the Browns are 4-2 because if you have watched the team at all you know they aren't very good.  All four teams in the AFC North have winning records, and this is without question the worst collection of AFC North teams I have ever seen.  I would reflexively say that having the Browns sitting in first place on Oct 19th is going to be the high point of the season, but they have Tennessee/Pittsburgh/Saints coming up next and they could win all three of those games.  Of course, they could also lose all three of those games too.  This appears to be one of those NFL seasons where there are going to be two AFC teams that are universally acknowledged to be good (Kansas City and Buffalo) and everyone else is some sort of weird shade of gray.  My thought is "Why not the Browns?".  It's not like any of the other AFC North teams are juggernauts.  This team, with this kind of defensive play, can win enough games to make the playoffs and on the right day even beat a fellow "sorta crappy" playoff team that sneaks in like Denver or Pittsburgh.  After the political attack ads stop, it might even become enjoyable.  

Go Browns.