LANDOVER, Md. — It was fair to wonder if the Cleveland Browns might have to rely on their defense early in the season. It was perfectly fair to expect quarterback Deshaun Watson and play caller Kevin Stefanski to need a few weeks to push the right buttons for several reasons, a list that certainly starts with the fact that they’ve never been a stylistic match. But it doesn’t stop there.
Cleveland has had offensive line issues — both personnel and performance — and even good O-lines need a few games to get in sync. The Browns overhauled their offensive coaching staff in the offseason, and Watson was limited until late July while recovering from shoulder surgery. Watson’s health, a shortage of offensive linemen and approaching training camp like a summer camp for overprivileged kids led to Watson not taking one preseason snap.
I could go on, and I could further straddle the line between excuse-making and reality. But reality has now slapped the Browns in the face. This is not a slow start. This is not one slip here and one strange circumstance there changing the shape of games, and this is not the occasional miss or mistake derailing a promising drive. This is worse than I thought, and it’s worse than even the most concerned citizen externally or paranoid coach internally could have imagined.
On Sunday, the Washington Commanders sacked Watson seven times en route to a 34-13 victory. Other times, Watson missed open receivers with errant passes and sometimes by not throwing the ball at all. He’s not giving the Browns a chance on some plays, and at other times his passes are being dropped or caught behind the line with the defense waiting. It appears Cleveland wants to start with some sort of quick game and misdirection and let that open lanes further downfield, but the result has been so bad that it’s currently hard to even diagnose what the intent might be not just on a down-to-down basis, but week to week.
After the Browns got run out of the stadium by the Commanders to slip to 1-4, a five-game sample is enough to fairly say the team with the highest payroll in NFL history has the league’s worst offense. And though the lack of discipline in other phases has shown up in the results during this losing streak that’s reached three, it’s the offense’s lack of production that’s putting every other area of the team in a bad spot.
At 3.8 yards per play, the Browns have the least potent offense through five games of any NFL team since the 2018 Buffalo Bills, per Stathead. It was on its way to being the worst in 25 years until backup quarterback Jameis Winston and D’Onta Foreman connected for 16 yards with 1:22 to go.
That was the Browns’ first and only third-down conversion of the day. They finished 1-of-13 on third down and will remain last in the league in that all-important and often telling category. They converted third downs in September at a rate of just under 21 percent.
On the first Sunday in October, they went backward. The numbers. The offense. The whole franchise, really. The Commanders in September had the No. 30 pass defense by defense-adjusted value over average, and they ranked at or near the bottom in multiple major defensive categories. Washington had won three straight because of its offense. For what should have been a desperate Cleveland team, this was a chance to crack 20 points for the first time this season and potentially try to win at least a bit of a shootout.
The Browns only brought rubber bullets. There was no shootout and there wasn’t even a contested game, despite the Commanders punting nearly as many times in the first quarter (two) as they did in Weeks 2 through 4 combined (one).
Eventually, the Commanders made big plays and pieced drives together. The Browns would have punted on seven straight drives in the first half had they not stumbled upon a field goal early in the second quarter after starting at Washington’s 43-yard line.
The Browns forced a fumble on the first play of the second half, and that felt like a necessary jump-start to the kind of wild rally from 24-3 down that it would take to get back in the game. But instead of getting a touchdown and building some momentum, they got to the Washington 2-yard line then had a false start, used a timeout, took a sack, saw Jerry Jeudy drop a touchdown pass, and then not only settled for a field goal but had their fourth-down attempt turn into a delay of game. The Browns didn’t have the right amount of players on the field and didn’t want to use a second timeout in a span of about 90 seconds with more than 27 minutes left in the game, which actually was understandable in the moment.
But you can’t take those timeouts home, or to the top five of the draft in April. The season has slipped away. Yes, it’s still early October. There’s nowhere to go but up. But in Watson’s third season as the quarterback, Stefanski’s fifth calling the plays and general manager Andrew Berry’s fifth in having the final call on the roster, the Browns have cooked up a big nothing burger.
From the drops to the lack of a run game to Watson’s league-high 26 sacks taken, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But there’s been no fix, either, and after getting points on their first possession in each of the first four weeks, the Browns failed on downs on the opening drive Sunday. On their second possession, they threw a screen for a loss of seven, allowed an untouched edge rusher in the backfield on second down before Elijah Moore dropped a pass, and Watson threw the ball away on third down. It became the first of their six three-and-outs in the game’s first 40 minutes.
Numbers don’t always tell a full story. The Browns being the worst early-October offense in six years definitely does tell one, just not one Stefanski will one day share with his grandchildren. But numbers can blur a full story, and they actually do here. The Browns went above 3.6 yards per play on a late, meaningless completion. They scored with 7:02 left to make it 34-13. The Commanders had already removed their quarterback by then.
The Browns also got a garbage-time touchdown against the Dallas Cowboys in Week 1. Their first score versus the Giants came on their first snap; a fumble had set them up at New York’s 24-yard line. So for as bad as the numbers are, this offense has probably actually been worse than the numbers show. In a nutshell, the final three minutes last week in Las Vegas were this team’s chance to validate everything, steal a win and at least provide a sliver of hope that this expensive and exhausting Watson experiment might still have a chance to work.
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They failed then. They were worse here in what needed to be a redemption game. Stefanski was adamant afterward that he’s not changing quarterbacks, and maybe he’s not allowed to, given the team’s investment in Watson and awkward dedication to continuing to prop him up. Maybe he’ll give up the play calling to new coordinator Ken Dorsey. Maybe he’ll shake up the staff instead. But the time has arrived for the Browns to not just do something differently, but do a lot of things differently.
This is beyond a nightmare. The nightmare was dropping a home game to the previously winless Giants two weeks ago ahead of a three-game road trip. That felt like one that not only exposed some warts but one that might come back to haunt the Browns later. Instead, the haunting time has come nearly four weeks before Halloween. In many ways, this franchise was all-in on this season given Watson’s contract, the money spent across the roster and the age of many of the Browns’ best players. Yet, they have to see it’s all gone for nothing.
This, by the numbers, is the worst Browns offense since 2009 and only slightly ahead of the expansion-year 1999 Browns. This, by the eye test, says something resembling another expansion-era approach might be the only way this thing can go. The reality is right in front of us.
(Photo: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
